Moondance, Monsoon, Mountains, Mo-Mo's

Nothing worse than eating the same food day in and day out. Nepalese people can go out for pizza and ice cream, but then they must go home and have Dal - it's a staple food they can't live without: Lentl soup, rice and chicken curry. Hunter's staple food in Nepal was Mo-Mos, steamed dumplings, preferably with chicken, but sometimes also with vegetables. Personally, I grew tired of the food pretty quickly even though we tried to break up the routine with omelettes and spaghetti.

After Kathmandu - with the polution, noise and smells, we actually cherished going to Pokhara to begin our trek in some clean air. We flew with Yeti Air !! and the flight was only 25 minutes, but our porters took the bus and sat in traffic for 15 hours! There was a landslide which caused back-up. Good call on paying for the air travel!

Pokhara sits at 900 m and has a large beautiful lake, fed by rivers and streams from the higher Himalayas. Since we had to wait for our porters, we decided to stroll around town and buy a few hiking things (like a better poncho for the monsoon down pours) and extra socks. Next time we go trekking we'll be leaving 60% of our stuff at home. Boy we overpacked and it wasn't until the poor porters showed up to carry it, that we realized we had way too much crap. So much for consulting the internet on what you need on a trek.

Beer was served at Didi's (means sister) - everyone calls their sisters and female friends Didi...Sunil took us over to meet her. After the beer, we headed over to Moondance for lunch, played scrabble and pool. We spent the entire afternoon hanging out in the upstairs area overlooking the main street. Full and happy from a couple of Mojitos, we decided we wanted to go boating...we had heard that there was a secret waterfall you can hike to (just like a scary movie, we couldn't wait to go to a secret forbidden place :). It turned out to be a small stream with a 10 foot fall, which- while nice, didn't offer any swim opportunity. The paddling gave us a good work-out in the arms and shoulders though.

That evening we went to a Blues Bar for dinner. An early call next day when our ride was going to take us to Nayapul for our 6 day trek. Nayapul is around 1100 m and is a small village bordering the Annapurna Circuit. Once you get there, you can't get further than the New Bridge by car.

Thanks to my 1000 prayers we had blue skies and sunny warm weather for the whole day. It was the best feeling, not to know what was ahead and being surprised by different landscape and people around every bend of the trail. All we knew was that we would hike up, up, up, about 900 meters to Ghandruk (sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings) at first, relatively steady and at the end, up 3000 steps - literally a stairmaster workout. The first 2-3 hours we met so many children who take that same trek down and up to get to and from the school bus. Aric said you must be able to bounce a rupee off Nepalese women's butts, with as much as they hike up and down every day....we didn't try to bounce a coin....but I knew that I was going to get Annapurna buns of steel by the end of the trip! Truly, everyone we met had shapely and muscular legs! It was like a bootcamp trip! Even the mules and goats were sporting well built muscles.

Our first stop was lunch at "Didi's" :) - this time an old granny, with two daughters who cooked a killer meal for us. When I saw a parmesan cheese the size of a handbag sitting and maturing in the sun, I knew she had to be an old-school cook. While we rested, we watched her scoop all the sun-dried Millet into sacks. They grow Millet on the hills, it's like hops or Barley I think - used for wine and beer and bread. This old granny did everything. For the vegie dal meal they went and harvested herbs in the field....and we seriously enjoyed lunch and the view.

Tummies full we continued up the steps pass several small villages and an abundance of wild Marijuana. Well, wild and wild - the plants were well tended to and the buds were impressive (not that I have a lot of experience in that field), but all we took were pictures...since we're not into that sort of thing and certainly never inhaled!

By 5.30 we reached our tea house for the night in Ghandruk. That first cup of black tea was so welcome! And here we were, in the middle of the Himalayas, in a small tea house, and there's a Montepicello red wine on the shelf....could not believe it! Sunil taught us how to play "shithead", a card game like Uno, and we enjoyed Chianti that evening. It was to be 4 more days, before I learned that Aric had thrown out his wedding ring in our small bathroom (not on purpose), but that evening, nothing could have wiped off my tired smile as we settled into our sleeping bags and fell into a deep blissful sleep.