Yeah, we were on top of the world. It's hard to describe 2+ weeks in the Himalayas in a blog post, we'll do our best, but forgive us if we rely on pictures instead of literally describing the daily grind of trekking.
Joined by honorary Acclimate, Chris Garren, professional mountain climber and ranking much higher in Alpine IQ than either of us (he also had a critical piece of equipment: a watch, so that we could wake up on time to make it to the next town...), our enlarged crew was prepared to start the 100+ mile journey.
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| Last photo before hitting the trail |
Once on the Circuit, we settled into a very nice routine: wake up with the sun (around 6:30), eat a energizing breakfast generally consisting of porridge, and Tibetan bread (super-delicious fried bread for that good-morning burst), and start hiking, most of the time up up up. An average day of hiking was about 6-7 hours not including our midday break of Snickers and Daal Baht, and regularly changing our layers (the mornings were bitter cold, then after 20 minutes of walking we were unbearably hot, and then right around 12:30-1 it would start getting extremely cold again, so yeah, we had to constantly switch up our threads).
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| FantasTrek! |
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| One of countless Trexellent suspension bridges |
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| Mid-Trekking-Action Shot |
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| What a Cute Little Furball!.. and the Puppy is Cute Too |
We walked through terrain of all kinds: from jungle and rice paddies, to lush pine forests, and eventually to the stark alpine desert well above the tree line. We rounded out the trek by spending a few days in Tatopani relaxing in a natural hot spring to soothe our weary muscles. We were lucky with the weather and had clear views of the most intimidatingly beautiful mountains in the world just about everyday. At night we would crawl into our sleeping bags, trying to fight the cold in the ever-freezing guesthouses. Our hike from Besi Sahar to the top of Thorong La pass took us from 2,000 feet of elevation to almost 18,000 (not to mention several days of climbing and climbing only to descend to our starting elevation), and we did it while making lots of new traveling friends from across the globe.
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| We Spun a Lot of Prayer Wheels |
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| Chris and the Annapurnas |
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| Enjoying Into Thin Air on Thanksgiving in Manang's most exclusive movie theater |
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| Two hungry trekkers await their daal baht lunches |
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| Partying with Russians at 17,800 feet |
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| Thorong La Pass |
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| On the way down we cleansed our bad karma in the 108 holy taps at Muktinath: That's right... we have clean slates |
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| Then we had the pleasure of hanging out with a Sadhu named Baba at his cave |
These pictures are amazing guys!! That bridge looks like a death trap. We missed you boys on Thanksgiving at Aaron's. We talked about you, but Im sure your ears were burning. Post more pictures when you can, its absolutely breath taking. Im super jealous.
ReplyDeleteMiss you boys!!