See you soon... India!

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I came back from the mountains, after 3 weeks of trekking... What a great adventure that was. The trek around Manaslu was amazing. I know I live in a remote place in Canada but this was a different remote... When you are walking days away from a road, from stores, from Internet... It was remote in all these ways, so much, that it was literally like traveling through time. Like we were in medieval age. And I am not kidding. It was like going to Tibet as well. Houses made of rocks, cold weather, the most basic food you can imagine (not us, we had an amazing cook and our own food), and no technology whatsoever. Almost stone age in some places with super basic tools to build houses, monastries, praying wheels, etc. It was fascinating in the 21th century to see how certain people just haven't been much in contact with the outside world. Sure, they have "modern" shoes, and the odd packaged cookies or noodle soups, but other than that, it is really like hundreds of years ago.
I remembered Nepal, I remembered hiking the Annapurna, and thank God I did many years ago, as now it is almost disastrous with the road being built on the old trail, but this trek was very different, very wild, very easy in a lot of ways, but thanks to a good organized company that had an amazing local team to support us. OK, I know, I said "amazing"and "fascinating" already too many times,but it just shows how...hum.... great it was! ANd it was an experience to "guide" a group of people, to leave my habits of solo traveling. The clients were a lot of fun and I found myself laughing to tears more than once!
The Himalayas are incredible and the trek was very well planned so that we could spend a lot of time in beautiful places, rarely visited by Westerners. We visited many monastries, shared tea with laughing nuns, were invited for a puja with a bunch of monks from the monastries around the valley who were together for some special gathering, and listened and watched dozens of avalanches from a distance. We had good trails and bad trails, good bridges and really bad bridges, we met friendly dogs and some that never ever stopped barking (I am not kidding, they must still be barking), and at the end we enjoyed an evening of singing and dancing with the porters, cooks and sirdars that were part of our team before we went back to Baktapur for the Nepalese New Year festival. That was crazy.
I can't possibly describe 3 weeks of trekking and another week of staying in Kathmandu in a short blog, but all I can say is the whole trip, from the first few days of January until now has been extraordinary, unforgettable and fun. I have the feeling that I will find myself on the road very soon again!
And so yesterday I said goodbye to Babu, the local contact in Nepal, he took me to the airport early in the morning, and then I waited for the plane. And waited. And waited. "Bad visibility in Kathmandu" was the initial excuse, but somehow, all the other planes were flying without any problems,except for ours... Maybe our pilot had eye problems, who knows, but 5 hours (and a really bad complimentary breakfast) later, we finally flew to Delhi. As usual I expected trouble with the taxi driver, but as usual, all went well, except that it was so hot in Delhi that sitting in the cab, it felt like someone was pointing a huge air blower into my face... But I landed in a very nice hotel, and spent the rest of the evening relaxing and thinking "I can't believe this is my last night in India. And this morning, I had my last banana porridge for a while and walked in Pahargang, where there is many tourists, many shops and it must be too hot for the shop keepers to harass tourists now... All feels strangely relaxed, or maybe after 4 months iI got used to it and forget how different INdia is from other countries. But I still enjoy the friendliness and the way of speaking of the Indians, in other words, I like their "Indian-ness". Great people, great country.
So tomorrow morning I will wake up in Paris, where I will spend a few days until my mother joins me for the last leg of this trip. Spain and Morocco are the destinations.

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