too the Annapurna Sanctuary and Thanksgiving at sunrise on Ponn-hill

Ten days “Tea House trekking” into the heart of the Annapruna massif. A place high in the clouds, surrounded by a wall of towering mountains and one of the holiest mountains in Nepal. A trek that was very different from our previous trek to Everest base camp. But one whose geography and diversity was just as beautiful both in its land and it’s people. A place lost from the pressures of society. A people lost in time and even memory it seemed. Somewhere where you could watch the time pass and life happen all day. Only not the way it does back home. The way it did a hundred years ago. The way we all wished we could see and live. So for ten days Michelle and I walked out off the bustle of the world and became apart of something that has passed with the era. But in some places, small and tucked away it continues to live and to thrive. The telling of the two valleys and a thanksgiving that will live in my memory till age takes my legs and sets me in a rocking chair but with a smile and no regrets.
Our story began running from the shouts and horns of Katmandu till we were tucked away in a nice town called Pokhara. Pokhara is a town of many restaurants, gift shops, Tibetans (One very good looking one got more then a few dollars from me as I just smiled and shuffled my feet-But I did get a beautiful yak bone necklace…Awww my little Tibetan princess…) small grocery stores, german bakerys, and many used bookstores. (I bought the next three Robert Jordan Books) The town was very comfortable and a good respite from Katmandu, but it was just a gateway to Annapurna and Machpuchre beyond.
Most pointedly of those Himalayan mountains is Machpuchre, a holy mountain to the Tibetans and one of the few that is forbidden to climb. It is an icon all by itself and it is easy to see why the mountain is holy. It is a needle pointing to the heavens and it is unforgettable. In many ways it was because of this mountain that we were trekking the Annapurna sanctuary trek. The image of this mountain had become engrained in my head and I had to see it. It did not dissapoint. Not even after two weeks of seeing it every morning close or afar. Everything in pokhara was friendly and enjoyable. Although maybe not our Hotel manager, who was a bit of a slime ball. The on going joke was that he would sell his own grandmother if the price was right. That and where ever we were, when ever. “Mr. Bean” would slither up out of a shadow trying to sell us something or accuse us of something.(“ I sell you my grandmother and this, this is how you repay my kindnesses!”)
Soon enough though we were back out on the trails. Headed up one valley to Annapurna Base Camp “ABC” and back out through another valley to Poon-hill. A place from which we could view the mountains from where we had just been hiking. The Annapurna Massif is a chunk of mountains jutting out from the Himalayan range. It is made up of about a dozen peaks all between 20-26 thousand feet. Much like the Everest trek there are no roads, only trails and limited services. Everything is carried in and out by mule or by porters or farmers. Some places have electricity some don’t. A few have hot showers though I waited ten days to take a real shower when we returned. Though I did jump in on a hot day for a freezing swim in a glacial stream. The food is the exact same menu everywhere you go but it was much better then the Everest food. Essentially it was very similar yet very different from the last trek we were on.
The biggest difference came with us from the first day to the last. Our porter/guide Raju carried all our crap for us. Served us our meals, shared in our laughs, and handled everything and anything that was needed. A law had passed while we were on our Everest trek that it was mandatory for you to have a porter or a guide where ever when ever. So our hand was forced and we hired out a porter/guide and got a great one to boot. A young small guy even by Nepali standards. But he carried his own weight and ours with a big toothy grin that reminded me of cousin Ryan. He gave great advice, was very flexible, Taught and explained all types of endless questions, spoke great English and had girls smiling in every village we passed. I am totally against the new TRC permit requirement but we did really like Raju, even if he smelt a little funny at times. I’m sure I didn’t smell much better.
one more small check on the list of life. Hire a sherpa to guide you through the Himalayan mountains and carry your bags. How many times I have had that thought out hiking and trekking over the years, I could not count. And by carrying all my crap to Everest and back. I had nothing to prove to anyone. And yes it was much more enjoyable and easier to have a Sherpa. So we got try two different types of trekking as well.
This trek looked as different as Apples and Oranges with the exception of one day at the top in the rock, glaciers, and snow of ABC. Most of the trails were beautiful slate stone that looked like it was layed out by the Incans or the romans. I kept waiting to see the ruins of an ancient city covered in vines and trees. We walked with day packs through valleys of beautiful terraced fields of Rice, mustard seed, and maze. And we were especially lucky in that many of them were still being harvested and plowed. They cut down the rice by hand with small aged sickles (a curved knife). Then they would have water buffalos tied together side by side with a length of rope tied to a tall post in the ground. And around and around they go stomping the rice out of the stalks. Or they will lift a big handful above they’re heads and hit it onto the ground to beat the rice out. Sometimes they’ll do it both ways. Usually someone is throwing or pulling whole armfuls of it on and someone else is pulling it off after the water buffalo have stepped on it enough times. Then all the tall stalks that look just like whisky colored hay are bundled and tied in big bunches and carried to separate terraced patties where it is all stacked high and round just like a massive hay bail but more like the ones you see in Monet paintings. You see hundreds of these haystacks as the days pass.
When all the stalks are gone and cleaned out and the buffalo are taken out to the pasture. They gather the rice into heaping light brown mounds. They do this with they’re hands and with a broom. Many women work together at this part. Many hands make less work. But when they sweep they do not have a broom like we do back home. Nobody in Nepal or most of Asia I am guessing has a normal broom. They’re broom’s are also a lot of straw but three times as long, dark brown, and all bundled together at the top with cord. It looks like a huge Artist paint brush. The round type not the flat type. Except only the brush. There is no broom handel. Just the broom which is two to three feet in length. They use this to sweep up the rice and anything and everything else. The house, the fields, the trail, the pasture, the barn yard. You see it being used everywhere. All and most work of any type is done low to the ground with your back bent over and your butt in the air. A shovel with a handle, or hoe, or a rake are a luxuries. To say it is hard work would be a big understatement, but the whole family is out there working together. Each person with they’re own specialized Job from tiny and young to withered and old they work from before sunrise to twilight.
This is just an explanation Of one type of field work that we saw. One process. There were a hundred others that we saw each and every day. You were literally in the thick of the late Autumn season. Everyone gathering and storing. All kinds of food were being dried on every bare patch of ground everywhere you went. Potatoes were being dug out of the dirt or stored in deep holes together for the coming winter. Corn was husked and hanging from window sills or put in big bunches above the ground, hanging just like red chiles. There were huge baskets of Maze and rice and women with trays sifting through it all. Using the winds to carry away the outer husks, just like an old gold miner would swish water around a tray from a stream. Vegetables of Cabbage, lettuce, carrots, Onions, and some type of thick white root were cut up and set out to dry on the corrugated Metal roof tops of they’re homes and barns.
Livestock usually included two or more water buffalo. For milk (which we got fresh everyday It was actually very good as were the fresh vegetables picked right from they’re gardens at meal time) Also water buffalo are used for lots of manual labor and in a last case scenario for they’re meat. Though they don’t eat a lot of meat. It is very rare to find. But eggs are not. There are plenty of chickens. You find herds of goats and sheep and real shepherds with slings for carrying and a bamboo staff for directing. They are weathered looking, bare foot, and clothed very simply. They look great and have very intelligent eyes. You hardly see cats or pigs. A few cows, no yaks though, and mule trains now and again but only in certain areas. And that seems to make up the average backwater farm and villa. One last thing of note that I have never seen before but that we saw plenty of while we were here, was farmers out tilling they’re fields the old fashioned way. With a yoke, a plow, and two water buffalo pulling it back and fourth through the terraced fields. All this and more we hiked through for many days, we watched it over breaks, or from the very tea lodges we were staying at.
At the end of the day it was nice to Order and Eat local meals and know from where it had all come from and how? On one such night, our first actually. We asked our guide Raju what a lot of the Nepali were eating. We had seen it being harvested, sorted, and drying in the region that we had hiked all day. It was dark brown and when boiled and cooked it looked just like chocolate malt o’ meal but without the chocolate taste. It was a little thicker though. They would laddel on a huge spoonful to your plate and it would keep the exact same consistency as when it had fallen. Our guide asked the woman of the household to bring us a small plateful. She returned with just that and a small bowl filled with a spiced oil. Every Nepali in the eating area stared at us and about six more heads peeked out of the Kitchen Door to watch.
The pressure was on! So I grabbed a handful with my bare hands as I had seen, doused it in the spiced oil and shoved it in my mouth and started chewing. The whole room erupted into laughter and shaking heads. The (I can’t remember the name) stuff stuck to my teeth and the top of my mouth like a peanut butter sandwich. Apparently I had completely eaten it wrong. I had no idea that there is a food out there that you do not chew. You just put it in your mouth and swallow. So the correct way once they “ALL” taught me is to dip your hands in the oil. Grab a small amount-rolling it into a ball with your right hand. Dipping that as well into the oil once more and then popping it in your mouth and quickly swallowing without tasting a thing. As this big slimy oil covered lump of mush slides down your throat to fill your stomach.
I never thought about the fact that food isn’t always about what tastes good and having the convenience of choosing what type of taste you want and at what meal. Some foods are for something much more important then what tastes good. Some are for those who can’t have that luxury. This was food to fill and to nourish. To help someone live and help them get up for work everyday. To help raise they’re kids and keep they’re kids alive. They all ate it. Meal after meal while I ate Chicken fried rice and big spring rolls and drank cold 7-up. I ate it till I could hardly swallow the last piece. It was like swallowing the biggest medecine pills you’ve ever had. A whole plate full of them. I swallowed, smiled, and said “Dhanyabaad!”- Thank you!
We hiked through these terraced fields that disappeared to the river bottoms far below and bent up out of sight into the mountains above. When you looked at the other side of the valley opposite of you. It was bewildering to see how high up into the mountains these farm steads and family’s were and lived. But it always brought a smile to my face. We hiked through many villages most smaller and poorer then we had seen before. Small children asked for chocolate or money. I think one little girl cursed me for giving her nothing. And I felt bad, like she had a right to. It is a simple life. But a hard and unforgiving one. A few days later we would hike by a landslide that had happened just a few months previous. Killing twenty six people. Six different family’s homes and lives swept down the mountain to the river bottom far below. Homes and all in one terrifying moment. It was a somber hour hiking along side the slide and down past it. That’s how long it took to hike past it all, it was huge. Piles of rubble, timber, and what were homes stuck out at odd angles from under massive boulders and lots of mud and debris. I don’t know why, but I felt like sitting down and crying. Ijust kept hiking though, focusing on where we had to get to for the day. It was a long day.
But they’re was beauty and happiness as well. Real familys with real reasons to smile. On several nights we watched and listened as villages came together and sang and danced late into the night to drums and flutes and songs they all knew. And that we came to know. Songs we had come to hear porters and sherpas sing around wood stoves or on the trails. Lodge owners and cooks humming it to themselves in they’re kitchens or sitting on they’re front steps. The chorus line is sang and hummed over and over in every tea house you enter is translated into “My heart is fluttering like silk on the wind, - I cannot decide weather to fly or to sit on the hill top.”
We made our way up through the rice fields and entered into three days of hiking through sub tropical cloud rainforests. Huge rhodendrons and forests that were all moss and green that was overwhelming but beautiful. The valleys looked like something more out of Hawaii then of Nepal. Violet flowers, bamboo forests, and countless waterfalls passed the time. It reminded me of Fanghorn forest or some fictional place where witchs lived and trolls waited under old log bridges. Surely I would not have surprised to see a gnome run across the path or a dragon to be perched on one of the towering black mountains above. The deep woods were a place of Hansel and Greddle and even little red riding hood or the wicked witch of the west with her flying monkeys. Well we did see monkeys just not with wings. Over the ten days we ended up seeing more then we had film to shoot. Whole troops of Languar Monkeys that were as big as fifth graders, on cloud covered peaks and in the deep of the green forests that we hopped and skipped through. They were a creamy white with long tails and pitch black faces.
Jungle turned to Smaller trees of birch and pines, and then just scrub brush. And before we knew it we were climbing and trekking through a foot of snow up through the gateway to the sanctuary. The valley essentially became a funnel as the days went on. Pulling us up higher and higher into the throat of the mountains. With the opposite valley walls drawing in closer and closer. Till we were hiking through the gateway, it’s walls were sheer cliffs on both sides looming thousands of vertical feet straight above us. All day we scrambled up snow covered boulders with the peaks of those mountains beginning to appear around us. Machupuchre was right on top of us and insight were Annapurna south and Annapurna 3. Then clouds overtook us and everything was lost to sight twenty minutes before we got to base camp and got a place to hide from the cold.
To keep warm, all the lodge common rooms have one large table that everyone sits around to eat, read, talk, and keep warm. The sides of the table are drapped with a blanket and underneath is a propane cooking stove. It actually works quite well the only hard part is when you have to leave in the cold dark to go back to your unheated room at night. Which is a long night, usually ten hours. On this occasion at this lodge Michelle locked our keys in the room. Which happened to be the only ones. Half the lodge management, porters, and trekkers were out there trying to figure out how to break the padlock for the next hour. There’s really not a lot to do at high altitude. But you do what you can.
We woke early the next morning to clear skies and stars above. We hiked out to watch the sunrise over the ampitheatre of the Annapuras and the base camp to Annapurna 1. The valley below was a tangle of glaciers and rock, but on all sides of us in every direction were the Himalayas towering above. We stood up on a glacial moraine that was at steep angle on one side and a 500 ft. drop on the other, to the glacial fields far below. It’s hard to express a moment like that. High in the mountains on the edge of winter, in the freezing cold looking out on golden mountains all around you. Illuminated from the suns first light. It was a great morning but we had one that was even better three days later.
Three days later after we had hiked back out through the gateway and curved around into another valley we would finally end up in a town called Ghorapani. It been a hard three days of hiking in the rain and the clouds and we had covered a lot of ground for those three days. Yet everyone had been cloudy or wet with little visability all day. At some points visability was only twenty feet or so. But we made it to Ghorapani none the less. Hoping the clouds might break. Ghorapani is the staging point for Poon-hill. Famous for it’s view of the Himalayas and of course the Annapurna Massif. When we went to bed you could hardly even see outside the windows the clouds were so thick. So I bundled up into my sleeping bag with practically every piece of clothing I had brought with and shoved the rest into my sleeping bag so that it would be warm for the 5 am wake up call. It was a really smelly affair in that bag because nothing had been washed in 12 days. But I hunkered down for the night and prayed that those clouds would clear come the following morning.
In a land far far away, on the other side of the world. Family and cousins were getting together for thanksgiving at Mom and dads house. A favorite holiday for us all. One filled with lots of family, lots of conversation, and lots of food. During all the merriment, prayers and blessings were said over the food and the family traveling abroad. I can’t help but think that those prayers found they’re way high up into the high Himalaya. Me and Shell woke a few hours later to the dark of Night and stars shining above. Not one cloud in the sky.
We threw our smelly cloths on. Thick wool socks and boots, thermal underwear, four shirts, two pants, sweater, jacket, gloves and a hat. We met up with Raju waiting by the warm stove downstairs for us, and we headed out into the dark. The closer we got to the hill some 400 meters above us, the more headlamps began appearing. Before long it was like a big serpent of headlamps above us. Worming it’s way up the hill from side to side, And when we reached the top there were people everywhere. The whole town had emptied it seemed or at least it felt that way. We had been so secluded to the remote trails and small tea lodges that we saw and talked with only small groups of people here and there. But suddenly there were some 200 people on top of the hill to watch the sun rise with us. It was actually very exciting and nice having everyone there.
So about the same time everyone back home was eating they’re turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and gravy. We sat on a high hill covered in hoar frost. Watching the Himalayan mountains unfold out of the darkness. Mostly the Annapurna range and the Dhalagrhi range come to life over the next two hours. I had seen photos and you will to. But no photo can really paint the picture of how close those mountains are. Of how phenomenal that experience was. We thought of every one back home and wished they could see over they’re thanksgiving dinner what we were watching at that same moment. Life was vibrant, alive, and you could feel it in every breath. It was a Thanksgiving I will never forget. I can only hope that Christmas, New Years, and Easter are some where near as good as that morning. We found several Americans that we wished a happy thanks giving to and quickly descended in the warm morning Sun to a big breakfast and a letter from Beth to be opened on Thanksgiving. To say a little it was a good day, but one that we ended up descending over 6,000 ft. By the end my knee’s felt like they might just pop right out If I went down one more step.
At the very last lodge we stayed at, which was a little family run lodge surrounded by terraced rice fields. We woke on the last morning to trek out on our last day. But first we were invited to have breakfast and tea with the family of the lodge in they’re kitchen with them. We had gotten to know them somewhat over our stay. And they loved the fact that we were brother and sister. Before we left we each had a glass of tea over laughs and smiles and Raju translating everything with a big smile. They called our last cup of tea “bye bye tea.” It some how seemed very fitting. And one last blessing before leaving the Himalayas behind us.