Annapurna II

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17-22 August

After a week on the trail I’m firmly in some upper, cooler climates and it’s time to slow down and relax with side trips and just walking around. One village I stopped in was Pisang (3200 meters; 10761 feet); with a full rest day and a side trip to the neighboring village of Gharyu. When I got to Gharyu (3670 m; ~12000 ft) I caught the villagers in the second day of a two-day “meeting”. I somehow got myself invited to the party (probably because the whole village of 80 people was there and it was easier to take care of this lost foreigner at the party than in the village). Now perhaps it’s just a question of semantics, but over these four hours I saw plenty of eating, drinking, dancing and gambling, but no actual “meeting”. Not that it mattered, because everybody was having a great time and the food was good. Almost the entire time they were playing music either on a jambox or with live instruments and everybody would take turns dancing. After a while it came to be my turn. Now anybody that knows me knows that I can’t dance to save my life, but I figured out here nobody is going to know if I’m dancing correctly or not, so I threw everything I had at them - The Funky Chicken, The Watersprinkler, I even tried my version of John Travolta’s moves in the Jackrabbit Slim Twist Contest from the movie Pulp Fiction. It didn’t matter what I did, I got the same reaction I get everywhere - fingerpointing and outright laughter. Towards the end of the party I even got a marriage proposal. A fairly young woman (definitely marrying age up in them hills) started saying “I like you”, and soon some of the men there asked if I wanted to marry her. I’m sure that if I had said “yes” there would have been a ceremony that evening and the first of probably eight kids would have come into the world nine months later. So I said “no” since the sun was going down and I needed to go down too, but I’m sure there are far worse things than being married to a pretty, young Nepali woman up high in a beautiful mountain valley with a litter of kids running through your legs.

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