Lakeside, North Lakeside

I know, I know... it's been too long but I am not tied down to you, you do not own me...:) Too busy? Sometimes; Too far back in time? Before for sure; Just a little bit too lazy? Ok, i admit. But its so nice here :) :)
Where to start to get where I've been. Well there's no easy way to say this: I, Leo FW Romyn-Fabbri, walked for 14 days (gasp) - I have no idea why i chose to walk for a fortnight but i daren't regret it. It was fantastic! I wish I had the map with me so I could go every tiny minute little detail, I know how much you'd all looove that - but I don't so you're off the hook. What is necessary to mention is still numerous so I'll try and dilute it a tad.
3 weeks ago, a friend of mine (Dana) and I took the crowded micro out of town for the first time in, well ever, too Besi Sehar sitting at 1400 feet, the front porch of the mighty Mountain God region, an area still every day pushing up further and further into the sky. The first sightings of the crystal, glazed peaks, unseemingly high above this little town was a reminder of how far we have to travel and a good idea of how cold it was going to get. I still stuck by my naive (yet actually right) opinion not to gear up for the trip. This meant that I owned absolutely nothing North Face (A shock to everyone who has been to this country) but stuck with a woolen jacket, woolen gloves and jeans and city boots all the freaking way.
But this wasn't an early issue, the forementioned all wieghing down my backpack at the still humid temperatures of Besi Sehar. So we walked, and we walked, we walked some more then stopped for lunch, this continued with more walking and after that some walking for good measure. They call it teahouse treking as since the 80's the Manang trail is littered with guesthouses, tea shops and in colder, darker places; bakeries and one cinema :) The first day was hard, my shoulders were crying out "for the love of God! Why?" And i disliked this, but when i came out of my room to realise just quite where we had found the pain, for the rest of the trip, subsided. We were in a beautiful valley, but it wasn't a valley as a valley is just on two sides of you - it was a bowl. A bowl and we were on the rim on one little east facing side, barely low enough to touch the milk. We could see the next set of foothills over the opposite side as the mountains are now, for now, hidden from view. The fact that we were on the top of bowl and we had to get to the top of the otherside of the bowl meant that we would have to walk down, cancel our day's gain in altitude only to walk up again to the very same hight. This did become recurrant all the way through the trip - each day with just slightly steeper ups than downs - I think that if I were to only count the amount I walked up on this trek and not the down I would pass the summit of Everest... Its funny that Im not even kidding.
For four days after our stay in the Bahandanda bowl we remained below snow level and out of sight of the Anurpurna range, the giagantious mound of scar-tissue in the earth's skin 50 million years old caused by the collision of the Asian and Oceanic plates. This range would stay on our left all the way to Jomsom, our end point - 140 or so miles away, and on our 5th or 6th day the first glimpse into the Himalayas (Himal -snow, Alaya - Home) as Annurpurna IV said 'hello'. I can tell you all about the pleasure of sighting the roof of the world, the feeling that things are finite, nothing ultimate, nothing impossible. But a much better feeling is watching these incredibly high peaks turn into smaller, almost more impressive. They almost become animated - the details changing with the angle of the sun, dark textures rushing quickly across them, the clouds are low here, so low sometimes your in them!
By Manang and 8 days into the walk we were exhausted. Manang is the end of the donkey trail and is officially where cheap supplies run out (not that the previous restaurants took any notice of this obvious fact when writing their menus - it got very expensive). It is also the largest town I had seen since the start and where it is suggested to take a two night rest period to allow your body to catch up in its red-blood cell production to handle air almost half as thin as sea-level at a huge 11,000 feet, anyway we took three nights. Here I ate a lot of food, spent evenings in the local cinema met an old friend from Kathmandu (random but awesome) and attended an AMS lecture from volunteer doctors at the local clinic. AMS (Or accute mountain sickness) is a nasty, nasty thing and everybody, young or old, fit or healthy, nepali or whitey has the chance of suffering from it at any altitude above 10,000 feet or so. The mild symptoms will always come first, a cracking headache, nausia, gradual dizziness, and a loss of apetite blare out the body's incredibly convenient warning signal of "hey man, this is too high, too fast and fluid is starting to leak into my brain". It's nasty and two friends of mine said that someone died of it a few days ahead of them on the Everest basecamp trek. Bu fortuantely you have to do a lot wrong to die of this - you have to physically ignore the messages your body is sending and would have been sending out for hours. Walk high, sleep low and if you can help it never ascend more than 1,200 feet in one day.
After Manang, the world once again changed... we left behind the strikingly beautiful entourage of The Anuurpurnas II, III & IV to head in, further north towards Thorong Phedi, our highest point of our trip and only 4 days away. Two days after leaving Manange I noticed that the settlements and people were shifting into an almost entirely Tibetan vibe... Prayer wheels dominated the paths, and prayer flags the forests - Namaste was even, on occasion, replaced by tashi delek. Huge boulders with colourful inscriptions of verses past including of course, Om Mani Pedme Hum. This is a mantra particularly associated with the four-armed Shadakshari form of Avalokiteshvara. Mani means the jewel and Padma the lotus. It is the six syllabled mantra of the bodhisattva of compassion and I think its lovely... 'Om' of course has no lingustic meaning, it is a legend in itself that it is the sound, or rather vibration of all being. The phrase also has the honour as being the only lyrics in most songs pumped out of Nepali souveneer and trinket shops!
It was a joy to be out in the crisp air again, and already I have forgotton the summer happening under 100 miles south. My breathing was great, the rest days did their job and now, we could head to the top. It took us two days after we rose above the tree line, a line that in winter signifies that every inch of skin should be covered to preven frost bite. The last two days were hard, the first because of the bitter wind and prevailing cold, the last becuase it was the last and it led us for 7 hours through the snow after departing at 4:30 am in the dark to reach The Thorong La Pass. And made it we did, the day before we attempted it we walked passed many people who had attempted and turned around because of cold and icy conditions, many friends had we saw heading in the opposite direction of when we met them. Luckily for us the morning brought more snow, and more snow meant more grip so after many many hours of climbing up and down rock formations and large hills I saw the first glimpse of the paryer flags littered endlessly around the stone that marks the Pass, standing at 18,000 feet high - for those metrics thats 5,400 metres above the sea. If I may illustrate just how high this is for purposes of ease and arrogance (!) Mount Blanc stands at 4,900 metres... I was half a kilometer above Mount Blanc, and I felt it. The AMS had kicked it 3 hours before i got to the top and I had persisted, headaches worsening and loosing balance. But you have to carry on on the last day, going over the pass brings you down to an old part of Tibet, Muktinath of the Legendary Mustang Province. Muktinath sits at just 12,000 feet and takes 4 hours to get there from the pass, so strictly speaking it was a quicker descent to go over the pass then head down than to turn back... and this is what I did.
Now I am in laid-back Pokhara, where i have a room in the north of Lakeside, further away than many, from the strangely Cambodian tourist area, littered with nightlife and con artists. Here I am spending next to nothing, 200rps a night for a room with a fan (I find it crazy to need one after the trek) and the best bakery IN THE WORLD opposite my turning selling apple strudles for 25rps. I have to walk over paddies to reach my hidden guesthouse, which although hidded from the road and the bass, isn't hidden from the Phewa Lake, and the Peace Pagoda stares at us on the opposite bank, a 40 minute hike up. I am also glad that i have met very good friends here, from South Africa, Canada and New Zealand. The last few days have been spent with them doing macromi, a renting boats to swim in the crystal (this time of year) waters in the centre. Two days ago we left the shore at 5am to reach the Peace Pagoda by sunrise, at 6.15 the ether-lit peaks that have been my challenge the last couple of weeks bent low to let the sunshine first hit their glacia, solarized and shimmering in the dawnlight, pink and clean - served as my reward, a realisation that mountains are more beautiful from afar, but that is not why one goes up to them ;)