Homage to the Himalayas: The Jomosom Trek

with Bhuwan my guide, Poon Hill
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I have just returned from ten days trekking through the Himalayan mountains. Did the Jomosom trek, started at Nayapul, then to Tikehdungha, Ghorepani, Sikha, Tatopani, Ghasa, Larjung, Marpha, Kagbeni, and instead of flying back as planned we ended up walking and jeeping it back to Beni and then onto Pokhara. The reason we didn't fly back to Pokhara from jomosom was because there hadn't been flights for 6 days due to snow and wind! So that ruined that plan. Bhuwan (with Himalayan Outdoor club in Kathmandu), my local Nepali guide did a fantastic job of showing me through some awesome locations, and of preparing my nightly hot water bottles.

While Bhuwan filled me in on local customs, culture, the political situation, gossip about the royal family and how to eat Dhal Bhat properly, I strolled along oggling the landscape. We started out slogging up thousands of slate stairs, through rhododendron and moss-laden rainforests with crystal clear streams and waterfalls. At the end of day two we had reached Ghorepani at an altitude of 2,800m (I think Australia's highest mountain is about 2,000) and it was freezing. We sat around a fire, surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains listening to Nepali hip hop and rap (an experience in and of itself). The following morning at sunrise we hiked up to Poon Hill, one of the best viewpoints of the Himalayan mountains. With my lungs ready to cave in we climbed in the dark, to finally come out above the clouds (3100m) to the most spectacular scene. Spread out in front of us, looking glorious, were some of the highest mountains in the world. I was pretty awestruck!

....then it snowed!

The next few days were spent traversing yet more hand-laid stone steps and snapping shots of terraced fields and distant snowcapped peaks. Villages along the way and their inhabitants captured my attention as much as the mountains. In one village we came across a 92 year old woman, her actual fingers worn down from disease and overwork, with eyesight fading, sitting upright and weaving a carpet. On the way to Ghara, a lovely village with houses painted red for fertility, we stopped to rest beside an obviously puffed and tired elderly, bare-footed woman, her head bent to the right, filthy with dirt in the creases of her face. She was carrying a heavy load of personal belongings including a ripped blanket. She told us (Bhuwan translating), all the while smiling, that she had been travelling the mountains for weeks visiting holy sites to pray and sleeping wherever she could. She was headed home where she lived alone. We asked how old she was but she didn't know whether she was in her sixties or seventies. I was so moved by this woman who obviously had so little, but had accepted her lot in life, that I cried for a while afterwards.

Ever present throughout the trip was the constant parade of free roaming animals - buffalo, jogpa (cross between yak and cow), horses, chickens, dogs, goats (a little one tried to make a meal out of our shoelaces in a local lodge), oxen and mules that hauled heavy loads up and down the mountains (tip number one: don't get caught behind a mule with gas). As well as women in colourful saris, snot-nosed, beaming children, people carrying massive amounts of heavy produce via a strap across their foreheads, people weaving, washing clothes in flowing rivers and streams, tending to fields, and picking lice out of each other's hair! Meanwhile I took masses of photos (I will never take the piss out of Japanese tourists again), and enjoyed the serenity and peace....and then on day six we awoke to snow. Something I was told was unlikely to happen and was completely unprepared for, and it was faaarrrrking cold! So there I was trekking in a pair of sneakers, minus thermals with only a down jacket for warmth, but having only seen snow twice in my life, it was fantastic! I was looking pretty glam with plastic bags over my socks, and all I felt was big, soggy lumps of joy.

We crunched through ice and snow for the better part of two days before the sun melted most of it. The local apple brandy managed to give me some warmth (you didn't think that I'd stay off the sauce just because I couldn't get my hands on red wine did you?), and the last few days in Tibetan-influenced Mustang, with its ancient stone villages, monasteries, prayer flags blowing in the breeze and the Himalayas right there in your face, were brilliant. I can't find enough adjectives to describe my trek adequately. I'm hoping to return here one day and do Everest Base Camp and the mystical and secretive Upper Mustang....cross fingers.