Try Something New: ABC

I don’t have much time to write. Travel plans are getting crazy. Tomorrow I fly to Lukla to trek to Gokyo, over the Cho La Pass and up to Everest Base Camp. I return to Kathmandu and fly to Bangkok on the 24^th for a week, then back to Kathmandu for two days, followed shortly by HOME.

Tracy and I trekked to Annapurna Base Camp (ABC) with two porters and our guide Milan. (See Mountain pictures below.) It took 7 days to get to base camp, walking about 4 hours per day. The sky was usually clear in the mornings until it warmed up and the clouds rolled in, revealing the mountains from time to time. The trekking itself was beautiful and hilly, but generally not too exciting. I like the routine of getting up every morning, moving my body, thinking, and watching as the scenery changes around me. We got to our guesthouse early most days and I read through three books. (For the Everest trek I bought World Without End, 1200 pages, so hopefully I won’t finish it too fast.) It was great to spend so much time with Tracy. We ate biscuits together in the afternoon and talked about baseball and travel. I got to know Tracy a lot better and our conversations improved with the trip.

Machhapuchhre Base Camp (MBC) was the stop before ABC. The canyon up to camp was only as wide as the river at the bottom and the views downstream were the best non-mountain views of the trip. Views from base camp were spectacular. Machhapuchhre (Fishtail) has never been summited and its triangular face rises more than 3 kilometers above the base camp to a double peak that resembles a fish’s tail from Pokhara. The other side looks a little different, as most mountains do. Milan asked us if the mountain still looked like Fishtail, to which we would say yep. But he would say Noooo…it looks like blahblah mountain in the Everest region (a mountain Tracy knew but I did not). He thought it was sooo funny. So it because a running joke between Tracy and me: Does it look like Fishtail today?

Annapurna Base Camp at 4100 meters was outrageous. The guesthouses are perched on a big moraine made by an old glacier much larger than the current one. Walk 50 meters and you’re looking over a crumbly cliff down to the current glacier. Every few minutes we heard rocks falling down the moraine and sometimes a big boom meant the glacier was shifting, but the amphitheatre reverberates sounds well so we rarely saw something move. It was exciting though!

Hium Chuli rises directly above the camp to 6441 meters. Annapurna South is nearby at 7219 meters. Annapurna 1, the tenth highest mountain in the world at 8091 meters rises almost 4 kilometers above the glacier below like a 13,000 foot cliff. And Fishtail is directly opposite Annapurna South. The scale doesn’t compute with what I know about mountains.

We stayed two nights at ABC. The first day we explored along the edge of the moraine and looked at the names of dozens of people who have died on the mountains. The second day we scrambled part way up Hium Chuli to get a better look at the mountains and the piles of rock on the glacier below. I could have stayed up there all day basking on a rock if the clouds hadn’t rolled in. It would have been nice to take a helicopter back when we had accomplished our mission, but, unfortunately, we didn’t. Took us 3 days to get back to Pokhara where we had our final meal. Tracy and I parted ways the next morning and I caught a bus back to Kathmandu.

Last night I met up with Blaze, the New Yorker that I will be trekking with for the next two weeks. We drank local liquor and ate at least 20 momos with his friends…a good first night excellent night. Today I ate donuts and drank espresso with a dreaded German guy. I bought tickets to Bangkok and got my trekking permits, generally wading through the masses to run errands. I met up with my cousin Nick for the first time I can remember away from Uncle Jim and Aunt Wendy’s house and finally met his girlfriend Olivia. I ate 20 more buff momos. I cannot think of a better way to spend $1.25.

Well, all is set for tomorrow. I’ll be back in a few weeks. Wish me luck!