The first few days were hard for me. I am always thinking about why I came here. It’s a cold, dusty Rocky Mountain road. I must wake up every day at 6 am in this chilly weather and walk 10-14 km on the mountain road. But I wanted to see the end. I didn’t want to go back. It’s just a 15-day tracking and ten more days to go.
I can already feel the environmental change after five days. It’s colder here, and there are fewer people. The trees are much shorter. Sometimes, we walk miles upon miles just between mountains. These mountains have been here for millions of years. They saw the time and the change of this world by standing on the world’s roof. Here, lots of places are still untouched. Humans never placed footprints.
After a week, I started to fall in love with this place. We walked almost 80km last week. We elevated around 3250 meters to the place called “Lower Pisang.” Now, we will walk less than before every day because of the cold weather and altitude.
I saw endless waterfalls on the way, creating a beautiful crystal-clear river.
Some of them are frozen
I walked through the empty Valley in the morning and saw the sunrise. Trust me, it’s not the same sunrise I see every day. It has something magical. The sun here came out from the mountain.
People are amiable and helpful in this region. If you ask anyone for directions, they will try to help as much as possible. Sometimes, they will go to 100 or 200 meters to show you the path. But mostly, they speak Nepali and understand very little English. So it would help if you learned some Nepalese words before going there.
I saw many children playing around in the morning during this cold winter and giving a hand to their parents in their daily work.
Most people grow their food on their land, especially vegetables. Many people like to eat vegetables in their daily diet, most of which comes from their own garden. Communication here is not accessible, and they don’t get daily supplies in the winter months. In some places, they carry the goods with horses or donkeys.
Meet and Fish here is a luxury. Meet preservation is another technique. They thinly slice the meat and sun dry it. Once the moisture dries out almost 90%, they keep the meat in the kitchen above the stove. This way, the meet stays dry over the year, and no refrigerator is needed when they want to eat. Just soke the meat for 15 min in boiled water and then make a Nepali dish.
The ugliest but sweetest apple
On our way to Manang, we met a guy from a small apple farm. He offered us some apples. Those apples look very ugly but are the sweetest and juicy apples I have ever tried. I can still feel the test in my mouth. When I return to Anapurna again someday, I will try this apple.
On our 13th day of tracking, we started from Manang and reached High Camp, which is 4850 meters. For me, it was the most challenging day of trekking in the last 13 days. We climbed more than 1300 meters today, primarily Steve Hills. We stay in a tea house for the day because tomorrow we must leave early. I can’t imagine someone making a tea house here and providing food for the people. I talked with the owner, and he told me we are the last customers he has. He will close the tea house within a day or two and go to his hometown. he will open the tea house again at the beginning of the summer. Everything he brings here by human or horse. He treats us to lunch and dinner with Nepalis daal vat.
We will cross the highest point of the Anapurna circuit tomorrow and head to Muktinath and Tatopani, our Last destination in this tracking. So tomorrow it will be a big day. The plan is to start early in the morning, around 4:30 to 5:00 am, because the wind will be lower at that time. We will cross the thin, icy road, dangerous for windy weather.
I like to go slow and watch closely. On my journey, I must experience nature, culture, people, and their life. That’s why it took me almost 14 days to reach the Thorung Pass—the highest point of our journey, 5416 meters. Anyway, here I am; finally, I made it to the journey’s highest point.
We stay in the Thorung pass for around 15 min. It was already quite windy at 7:00 am, and everything was freezing. I can feel a little less oxygen at this altitude. I sat on a rock for some time and took a deep breath. I look around and feel like I am on a different planet. My surroundings are so different from the world I live in. This is what the world looked like when humans were not here. These mountains have been standing alone for 40 to 50 million years. But look at the humans; we came to earth 200 thousand years ago. We started to so-called “civilized” ourselves 3 or 4 thousand years ago and looked at the planet and what we did to it and still doing. Sometimes, I feel like humans do not deserve to live on earth.
While sitting and thinking lots of weird thoughts in my brain, Kami called me and told me we must start our journey to go down. I forgot that we had to go down for a moment, but it’s not over yet; now we had to climb down 1600 meters to Muktinath, and from there, Tatopai! I heard that climbing down is more difficult than climbing up.
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