Mustang (not the horse or the car)

I’ve noticed that a number of people are reading my blog so I’d just like to say that the following post is, of course, completely fabricated.

This past week there were a few Hindu holidays so a friend of mine planned a nice trek up the Mustang Valley.  I jumped at the chance to go see a new place, and to take a break from life in Mallaj.  The trip was spectacular, but as usual, there were a couple times we were definitely flying using only my good luck, and maybe a little charm.

Two other volunteers and I met up in Beni on a Thursday evening and acquired some supplies and then stayed the night at one of my friend’s house.  It turns out that my friend’s husband works at a bus ticket counter so he was able to get us the non-tourist price as well as one free ticket.  We took a nice short four hour ride to get 20 km up river to a town called Ghasa which is where we wanted to start from.  Two hours into the ride we stopped at a tourist checkpoint where we were told to get off the bus and show our TIMS permit.  Well naturally we did not have one of these so I just said, “Hi there, we are volunteers.”  I was asked for a Volunteer ID card, which I do have, and that seemed to work.  So off we went.  At Ghasa we got our things together and petted a nice snow leopard (tan dog on which someone had kindly added black paint spots).  Walking through the town we were stopped at another tourist checkpoint and asked for our Annapurna Conservation Area permit, which again we did not have.  So again, “Hi there, we are volunteers.”  This time I was met by a look that seemed to say, “AAANNNNDDD??”  Shit.  These permits are found in Pokhara, but we all live past Pokhara by several hours in the direction of Mustang Valley, so we never went there to get one at a reasonable price.  They were asking a lot for a permit on the spot, and were not budging on the price or the necessity of this permit.

Now it’s time to make a few excuses.  I actually think permitting is a great idea, and paying for a permit almost always goes into protecting the place you are going against the hordes of people that visit.  But here’s what happened: the people at the checkpoint were being pretty grumpy which was making me grumpy and hot headed and after what seemed like a long time, but was probably only a minute or two of arguing I just threw up my hand and said, “Fine, trip cancelled!!”  And then proceeded to storm out of the building leaving my poor bewildered friends no choice but to follow.  We walked about 200 yards back down the path to where I had spotted a nice trail winding up into the woods at which point I told my friends, “I think it would be best if we just snuck around the checkpoint.”  So we did.  The trail, of course, quickly degenerated into some pretty world class bushwhacking, but after about an hour of sneaking (crashing) through the woods we ended up on the other side of town and more importantly on the other side of the checkpoint.  At this point I finally realized that we were going to have to come back this way and our plan was to take a bus back so we were going to have to deal with that checkpoint again and the workers probably weren’t going to be too stoked about seeing us again without a permit coming the other way.  Hmmmm…

We continued up the road/trail for a ways and were quickly greeted by a nice view of one of the shoulders of Dhaulagiri. 

 

The trail went into an extremely lovely pine wood for a quite a while in which there was some flower blooming that smelled really good.  A short while later we stopped for a break and read in the trekking book we had that in September the villagers in that area see Himalayan Bears. Google them, they look so, so snuggly!!

I didn't take this picture.  From Google.

 

looking North from our break spot.

 

nearing the end of the first day, looking south down the valley.  Neat braided stream!

 

After another hour or so, we came to our goal for the day and found a little hotel to stay in.  Right now is off season so a lot of the hotels are closed and the ones that are open are definitely looking for business.  Our plan was to eat dinner there and then head out to the woods to sleep, but there was only one lady running the kitchen so the food took a while and after tasting her apple pie we decided that we wanted to stay and eat breakfast there in the morning for the apple pie.  My friends mingled with the other guests and I went to the kitchen and helped the lady make everyone’s dinner.  She was very grateful for the help, but when it came time to settle the bill she didn’t cut us much slack.  She was very nice and friendly the whole time and jokingly called me a beggar for asking for a discount so we still felt good about the stay.

That morning the clouds had cleared and we could see some of the enormous peaks that we were surrounded by which gave us some energy and excitement for hiking up towards the Dhaulagiri Icefall. 

Morning light looking towards Tukche Ri.

Tukche Ri

 

This was not part of the original plan, but when I heard it was an option I cast my vote to take the time to go up there and my fellow Coloradan quickly sided with me.  The person who made the plan was planning on just checking out the Buddhist culture and temples in the area, but was just as happy to go see the icefall.  We made it to Sekung Lake at around 9000ft and ditched a pack there with our camping gear since we were planning on returning there to camp in the evening.  While we were sitting there a nice yak herd came wandering up to cool off in the lake.  A sign informed us that in April there is a yak blood drinking ceremony at the lake.

A yak! With a yak bell.

Yaks!

Friends and Yaks, looking towards Nilgiri.

 

We continued up and ran into another yak herd around 10,500ft but this one contained a very small yak puppy!

A little fuzzy Yak puppy!

Up we continued.  One of friends has a bad ankle which was giving her some trouble and around 11,500ft we started hitting some snow and the trail got a little more uneven, so she opted to turn around and wait for us at the yak herder’s hut where the yak puppy was probably still sleeping in the sun.

Nilgiri

Annapurna I

A Friend and Nilgiri

My other friend (from CO) and I kept going up and up. 

Summer Yak herder huts around 12,000ft

 

I set a turnaround time at 3, and around 2:30 we were at 12,600ft and were starting a nice pattern of continuous post holing in the snow. 

Standing a harder section of snow, Nilgiri starting to sock in.

 

The weather had socked in, and we were still 1000ft from the icefall viewpoint.  We stopped and had snack while it started to gently snow on us. 

A socked in Nilgiri, but the peaks are still above these measley spring T-storms.

Looking towards the icefall.

Enjoying the mountains in some pretty incredible terrain.

 

Then back down to meet our friend and like any good trip through the soft spring snow in the mountains involved some penguining!  It was so great to be up in the mountains again!

Penguining!

No need for skis on this here powder snow, face shots!

At the lake it started to rain and I thought we should find a place to camp, eat dinner thinking by then it would stop raining.  We got a nice fire going using some of the gas from my stove to help the wet wood along, and then ate a nice dinner of oatmeal.  It was still raining after dinner so we retreated to some shed thing we found along the trail.

The morning dawned clear finding us in the middle of some very nice mountains. 

 

After a nice breakfast of oatmeal we were on our way again.  The weather held for a couple hours, but after that it rained the rest of the day and the view of the mountains left when the rain came.  It gave me a better chance to look at our more immediate surroundings.  The valley bottom is scrubland and reminds me a lot of the desert southwest in the US.  There were a lot of Pinõn pine trees and the hillsides were covered in scrub for a thousand feet or so at which point the vegetation switched to big pine forests.

Crossing a nice suspension bridge in the drizzle.

The valley floor

We passed through an old Tibetan refugee camp, and shortly after reached a town called Marpha.  At the first hotel we stopped at the owner seemed unprepared for guests as it was off season so while my friends sat and drank some tea I continued on to find another place.  I randomly picked one and quickly imposed my presence in their kitchen where I struck up a conversation with the owner/cook lady who used to work in health development and so we immediately had a connection.  She said she would give us a volunteer discount and everyone was very friendly.  On top of that there were a lot of other tourists there so the place was clearly in go mode.  I fetched my friends and we settled in. 

Checking out a Buddhist Monestary

I offered my help in the kitchen and they were pleased but didn’t need anything at that time.  I told them to call me if they needed help.  They said, “in fact, five of our rooms have been without electricity for 10 days.  There was a short in the wiring, and the electrician hasn’t come.  This is Nepal, so he keeps saying ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ then the next day ‘I’ll come tomorrow.’  Can you look at it?”  “Sure,” I said.  They showed me the spot where the sparks were coming from when it was shorting, and I pried some rotten wood off and found some very old, fried wiring on which the crappy tape job had disintegrated.  I tested the wires with the back of my hand and found that none of them were live.  So I grabbed one quickly discovering that I had not tested completely after shocking the shit out of myself.  At this point the power in the town went out, and then we flipped a few main breakers that were located around the building.  I went to work on stripping the wires and cleaning up the fried parts.  Again I got lucky as it turned out because we later found out that none of the breakers actually did anything so I was playing with wires that could have become live at any point.  We found this out when the power came back on and I when I touched any other wires together you could see some small sparks come off.  After trying a few more breakers and fuses around the building I just asked for a pair of decent gloves and attached the live wires and taped them up using those.  This worked and all the lights came on in the rooms that didn’t have light. 

While I was doing this my friends were taking to a guy from New Zealand who was an electrician and they mentioned he could probably help me out, but he said he didn’t want to get near that shit.  I don’t blame him.  All of the connections were done with poorly wrapped electrical tape with lots random wires going every which way.  Also, the wires I was working with were pretty main lines coming from the outside power lines and those were probably only 14 or 16 gauge wires.  Anyways, the lady was extremely grateful and gave us a free homemade apricot juice and a free piece of apple pie.  Honestly, it is great to get an extra discount for helping out, but I truly enjoy getting involved with the places I am staying here.  I get to have some interesting experiences and I just really, really like interacting with Nepalese.  I can’t put my finger on it, but I just get along very well with probably 90% of the people I meet here.  The rest of our stay was full of yummy food and good company, and I left that hotel the next morning 15 dollars poorer, but a couple friends richer.

Niligiri casting some cool shadows in the early morning light

Zoom in of the summit area of Nilgiri.

We missed our 8:30 bus as it was actually on time so we ended up waiting until noon for a bus to come.  Getting tickets in this town was work.  The lady even called ahead for us and told them to give us a discount, but they didn’t want to.  The man was very grumpy and while I was trying to get him to lower the price my voice was definitely rising, so I walked out and we talked to some of the other Nepalese who were waiting for the bus with us.  They sided with us and told us to send one of the ladies I was with to go in to haggle.  We did so, and this worked.  The bus came and we hopped on checking out some spectacular views.  I had to look almost straight up to see some of the summit areas on the peaks surrounding what is supposedly the deepest valley on Earth which is sandwiched between the 8,000m monster, Dhaulagiri, and the 8,000m Annapurna I which boasts are pretty impressive 40% mortality rate of climbers.

Nilgiri

The Dhaulagiri Icefall from the valley floor with some strong winds whipping snow off of a false summit of Dhaulagiri.

Later we arrived in the town at which we had snuck around the tourist checkpoint.  All the white people or their guides had to get off the bus to check in.  I got off, and just sort of loitered around the bus at a distance hoping I wouldn’t be recognized as the jackass that had stormed out of the building three days earlier.  When a group of tourists came out I just sidled back into their line and got back on the bus and off we went!  We had to switch to a jeep in that town in which we spent three more hours with 11 of our closest friends (so 12 people total).  Cramped (or snuggly perhaps?), but uneventful.  As usual an awesome adventure with some great experiences and good friends.