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Rich writes...
Leaving Africa was a bit of a milestone for the trip; we are now 1/3 of the way through and have made it to Asia. The first stop (really just a stopover) was Mumbai for a few days, before we headed to Nepal for a month.
We were looking forward to India for two particular reasons. One was our awesome hotel which turned out to be everything we had hoped for (not many backpackers on our budget get an afternoon turndown service), so thanks Manu. The other was the Amazon order that was waiting for us. It is strange how, in the UK, you get used to being able to buy basically anything in the world to be delivered in a couple of days. While in Africa the keyboard for our tablet broke. Not exactly a tragedy, but typing anything longer than a text message became a bit of a pain. We quickly got bored of looking round South African malls for a small, thin, rechargeable, bluetooth keyboard, compatible with windows and ideally dead cheap. So, thanks to the joys of soulless consumerist globalisation, we were able to get exactly that delivered to our room in Mumbai on our arrival day, along with a few memory cards and chargers.
Mumbai was fun, we did all the usual tourist stuff, except a few things that we left for Monday. Unfortunately, everything is shut on Monday, so we stayed in the lovely air conditioned hotel and enjoyed a bit of time in the pool! Compared to Africa, the humidity in Mumbai came as a shock - whilst much cooler than Africa had been, it felt miles more uncomfortable to be outside. Also, in comparison to most African cities that we visited, Mumbai is surprisingly lush (probably thanks to the climate). Trees seemingly spring from concrete and there are some nice parks, each hosting about 50 concurrent games of cricket. I have been to India before (mostly hated it while I was there but decided I loved it as soon as I left) and I'm sure we will be back again one day. The main reason being that as far as I know, no other place in the world has as much stuff going on within any given square kilometre. Every crossroad, balcony, and market will attack every one of your senses, for better or worse, and it never seems to stop being interesting. It can get rather tiring though, and not the best thing for your health...
The flight from Mumbai to Kathmandu was certainly one of the less enjoyable ones. On the morning of the flight I woke up at 3am to be violently ill, and for the rest of the day my main concern was to remain upright and be aware of where the nearest bathroom was. Nic did an amazing job of looking after me and ensuring that we still got our flight, and I managed not to cause too much disgrace or embarrassment.
Once we made it to Nepal, and I had spent some time in bed to recover, we set about organising a trek into the Himalayas. This involved the slightly strange process of meeting up with a few guides to choose who we wanted to go with - the trek would be for 10 days, so it is worth making sure that we will get along! In the end we chose a guy called Roshan who turned out to be great.
Our trek took us into the Annapurna region of the Himalayas. A day-by-day account would get a little boring, so I will summarise:
- It gets very cold at night.
- The scenery is amazing, it felt like the Alps but stretched upwards so that everything was 5x taller, steeper and bigger.
- It's very hilly (obviously). On one day we climbed up almost 1,000m only to sleep 200m lower than the previous night!
- Despite both of us having long term problems with our respective right feet, we mostly managed fine.
- We had a porter, who was carrying Nic's rucksack. We felt a little bad about this (partly because it is pink), but that faded away when we saw the loads that some other porters carried. We got overtaken up hills by porters in flip-flops with colossal baskets on their backs, held by a single strap round their foreheads. The baskets contained all sorts of stuff, since there are no roads in the region, and the few mules that can negotiate the steps are in high demand. We saw baskets full of gas cylinders, cabbages, ceramic toilets (building site?), chickens (in neat multi-storey cages), and beer. Our porter, with just one, very comfortable, fairly lightweight trekking rucksack was having a holiday compared to these guys.
- We made it up to Annapurna Base Camp (about 4,100m), which is at the top of a twisting valley, so once inside the "sanctuary" we were completely enclosed by high snowy peaks, some reaching over 8000m high.
- The food gets a bit samey. All the tea houses in the region have agreed a set menu and reasonable prices, to prevent a downward price war. This is not a bad idea but the same menu to choose from for 10 days does get a little old! Even worse, beyond a certain point, meat is not allowed (resulting in me having to eat half a packet of my treasured, contraband South Africa biltong in about 2 minutes by the side of the trail!)
- I managed to make a single bag of Haribo last for more than a week, which was probably my greatest achievement of the trip so far.
We are now back in Pokhara, treating ourselves to one of the nicer hotels in town (for the princely sum of £8 per night). Yesterday, once back from the trek we each got massages, had a hot shower, and I had a shave (apparently I looked a little like a Yeti from a distance). Today, it is almost midday and we are still in bed. Tomorrow we might actually do something.
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