Mountains, part six (Dhampus to Phedi to Pokhara, and Kathmandu...thank god.

I say thank god because of our plane ride, which I'll get to.

The owner of the hotel got a phone call at 4am letting him know that there was no strike on for that day, so luckily we would not have to walk the 8 or so miles back to Pokhara and could just catch a ride on a local bus.  That also meant that we only had about an hour to the bottom, which was exciting.  It doesn't sound like much, but when it's a super steep descent along a rocky path, with two black-and-blue toes, it's a lonnnnnng hour down.

We came across a grassy knoll that screamed "Sound of Music," so we instinctively broke in to song and dance.

 

On the way down we saw some local kids, one of whom ran up to me with his(?) cell phone and asked if he could take a photo, and since i'm used to that happening all the time in the U.S., i politely agreed.

The one part that wasn't that exciting as we climbed down the last set of steep stone steps was the honking of buses that we could hear.  It was so nice to get away from that for a few days!

Once we made it back to Pokhara we relaxed over some delicious veggie curry, mango lassi, and fresh mangos.

The plane ride home.  Wow.
Guna Airlines is supposedly a new company, but the planes are about 40 years old.  They hold about 14 people at a time, so you know you're going to feel every gust of wind.  There was a missing bolt on the wing, which thankfully Max pointed out to me after we landed.  It didn't help when everyone on the plane was visibly terrified as the plane took a nose dive toward the Kathmandu airport, including a French guy next to me who does paragliding for a living, he said he feels safer in his paraglide than on these airplanes.  Then there was the typical Nepali landing where you fishtail on the runway and everyone looks to one another with a desperately scared look in their eyes.  It almost makes the roads seem like a better option, until you talk to people who have done overland travel and would prefer to put themselves in the planes.

mountains, part cinqo (Landruk to Dhampus, 6ish hours)

We started out the day intending to make it all the way own to Phedi and take the bus to Pokhara (there aren't any places to stay in Phedi).  Unfortunately we got word from locals that there was a big protest that had shut down all the roads in Pokhara, so we decided to stay the night in Dhampus (the town before Phedi), and head to Phedi first thing the next morning, with the likelihood that we'd have to end up walking the 8 miles back to Pokhara if no taxis were running.

The day started out with a treacherous descent, river crossing, and steep ascent - basically crossing from the top of one hillside to a facing one.  It was an intense start to the day and took us about 2 hours with lots of breaks.  We passed some kids in their school uniforms on their way up to school, who put us all to shame since they do that walk everyday...  Granted we had been pushing it the last few days and were carrying bigger backpacks than they were darnit!

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The woman in purple was the cook at our lunch stop.  She's making another really traditional Nepali dish - Momos - which is a dumpling filled with either veggies, buffalo, or other options.  Her daughter, in the photo below, served the food and was so sweet.  Her son was a bit of a wild child but i managed to catch him in a quiet moment after he helped a farmer herd some cattle through the village (and by helped, I mean that he smacked the cows as hard as he could with an empty water bottle, while yelling at them to move).

 

This is the lodge we stayed at on our last night, in Dhampus.  There were two girls who lived there and go to school in town, who had picked these gorgeous vibrantly colored roses and put them in their hair. The taller one came up and held my hand and asked me all kind of questions in English about where I was from, and told me about her schooling as best she could.

 

mmmmmm, ginger tea!  With nice big chunks of ginger in it...

  

My feet are the smaller ones at the bottom of the frame, and you can almost see how purple my toes were, from repeatedly stubbing them, and after a few hours of toe-crushing steep downhill descent.  I got some pretty gnarly blood blisters under each big toe and haven't been able to wear close-toed shoes since the end of the trek!

Mountains, part quattro (Poon Hill to Landruk, 8 hrs)

After the sunrise walk to Poon Hill, then back down to Gorepani to get our bags, we set out for the most challenging day thus far.  Most people go from Gorepani to Ghandruk and stop there, but we decided to truck on to Landruk since the walk from Ghandruk to Landruk is intense and we wanted to get over that hump and rest in Landruk.  Gandruk is also a bigger village and we wanted the slightly less traveled path.  Here's us having breakfast at Super View Hotel in Gorepani after getting back from watching the sunrise up at Poon Hill, with the Annapurnas in the backdrop.  Max is sporting his Indiana Jones hat here.  For breakfast I had some really yummy tangy homemade yogurt with museli.  Max had his usual egg and veggie fried rice, and Ryan saw how amazing my yogurt and museli was (i had it for lunch the day before when we arrived in Gorepani as well) so he got the same.

It was so moving to see the mountain tops poking through the clouds from different angles along the trek, and experience the drastic changes in scenery we walked through.  We were hoping to be immersed a blanket of bright colors in the rhododendron forests, but we must have caught the tail end of the bloom, so most of the flowers were peppering the ground with splashes of red and pink, but occasionally we saw a glimpse of some still in the trees.

Lunch and dinner in the mountains in Nepal consists of Daal Baht (rice and lentils - see the photo 2nd up), which Ryan ate at every meal, but Max and I mixed it up a little with veggie fried rice (also pretty much guaranteed to not upset your stomach).  It's customary to eat Dall Baht with your right hand, there's a whole technique to scooping it and pushing it in to your mouth in an orderly fashion, something I wasn't really able to master without making a large mess.  After lunch and a nap on the lunch table benches, we started to make our way through the jungle.  This jungle looked like a scene out of lord of the rings or some other movie, with dim lighting but rich, vivid green hues, a jungle that would be pretty scary at night with all the hanging vines and chirping insects and squirming leeches.  

We stayed at the Annapurna lodge where we had awesome views of.... the Annapurnas!  After our incredibly long day we decided to splurge on a beer and pose for some highly sophisticated artistic photos.