Traveller's Tales - The Journal

Som’s house above Phedi, Nepal – God only knows what time it was when the rooster in Som’s house decided to start crowing, but the sun was nowhere neat being up. I really wanted to kill it as it was only about four feet away cock-a-doodle doing for half an hour or so. A short [...]

Pokhara, Nepal – I was going to head to Kathmandu today via mini bus, but there is a national bus strike, maybe tomorrow. I woke up late and lounged around. It was really warm today, so warm that for a minute I thought it was a Sacramento type spring day. Brought two more T-shirts and [...]

Pokhara, Nepal – I woke up, packed my bag and rode down to lakeside where I had gotten a room at the Namastay Lodge the same complex Som lives in. Met Som and he told me Ram had left early that morning to go home. I guessed his family had run out of rice and [...]

Trekking, Day 10, Jomsom, Nepal – Woke up this morning at 6 and climbed up the ladder out back up onto the roof to have a look at the runaway. An inch of new snow everywhere. Went back inside and climbed to back into bed, woke up about an hour later and sat outside our [...]

Trekking, Day 9, Jomsom, Nepal – Woke up this morning at 5:45 to get ready for our flight, but when I looked outside, it was blizzarding. The snowflakes were huge and the wind was making the move in a horizontal direction down the street. I was positive no flight was going to be flying down [...]

Jomsom, Nepal, Interview with Ram Gurung – I was speaking with Ram and he explained that the Nepalese differentiate between the terms forest and jungle. The jungle to them would be forest in our vocabulary. The uncamped wilderness with very old trees, the basic mountainous lake Tahoe environment. The forest to the Nepalese is an [...]

Trekking, Day 8, Kagbeni, Muktinath, Jomsom – Up early at 6 a.m. because I wanted to hike up to the pilgrimage point of Muktinath at 3710 meters to see the village and temples up there before hiking down to Jomsom in the late afternoon in order to get our flight the next day. We left [...]

Trekking, Day 7 , Marpha to Kagbeni – Left our lodge in Marpha at 7 a.m. and headed for Kagbeni, a village up on the Tibetan plateau. We rounded the first ridge and were rewarded with the best views of the mountain we had had in seven days plus there were tons of blooming cherry [...]

Trekking, Day 6, Kalopani to Marpha – We woke up late like 8 o’clock and sat around the lodge because it was rainy and windy outside and I did not particularly feel like walking to our next stop in the rain. After about an hour, the rain just turned to drizzle, so we decided to [...]

Trekking, Day 5, Tatopani to Kalopani – We got up and I bid Som and Maurita farewell as they were headed down the mountain while we were headed up. We walked all day and Ram kept saying that Kalopani was too far to go in one day, but I really wanted to get higher up [...]