1 April 2018

Finally, I took a bus from Kathmandu to Langtang National Park in Nepal. As you can imagine, it was a pretty festive Easter Sunday in the world’s stronghold of Tibetan Buddhism.

2 April 2018

My new favorite food is Tsampa porridge. I had 2 bowls for breakfast, and I was ready to peel up the trail. I walked for a few hours and passed many hotels without the slightest twinge of hunger. Then I hit a steep climb and ran out of gas. A delicious snicker bar gave me a power boost up the hill to the next lunch stop.

3 April 2018

I started off the day feeling a little off. I didn’t sleep much the night before because I shared a room with a guy from Slovakia who snored really loud all night. Dinner didn’t sit well with me either. After a couple hours of hiking, a trip to the toilet, and a meal of popcorn and tea, I felt all better.

A nice woman with 4 children asked me where I was going. She insisted that we travel together to her hotel in Mundu. I had an amazing walk with them. They taught me to always pass temples on the left side, to get off the trail when a mule team is coming at you, and to stop and rest after a steep section. We arrived at their house just before a rain storm.

4 April 2018

One of the children continued on with me to her home village. I learned that she goes to school in Kathmandu and she was on her way home for break.

I arrived at Kyanjin Gumba (3800 m) mid-day and I felt great. I went for a hike up a small peak overlooking town (4400 m) and I still felt great. It snowed a lot and was mostly cloudy, but it cleared off for a few seconds now and again as the clouds flew by. I can’t wait to go higher.

5 April 2018

Amazing day. Climbed Tserko Ri (4900 m). In the morning it was socked in and lots of snow on the ground. At breakfast the clouds broke and I headed off for Tserko Ri. I got off course at the very bottom, only to realize that I couldn’t be more on course. My trail dead-ended into someone’s water hole on a small creek. I could see people on the ridge above me where I was supposed to be. I gazed up at the peak and realized that from where I was standing there was a perfect route straight up the face of the peak. I put on my yak trax and started up a yak trail. A third of the way up it got steeper so I got out my trekking poles. Two thirds of the way up it got more steeper so I put the poles away and used my hands to crawl.

The clouds came back in, and I could see in front of me just far enough to follow the route. At the top I was exhausted. I was looking forward to meeting other people at the top and walking back down the trail with them, but nobody was there. There were no tracks in the snow. Everyone else had turned back before the top that day.

I ate a delicious Tibetan flatbread and yak cheese quesadilla. The wind picked up and it started to get cold. I didn’t want to go back down the route I came up. I wanted to find the trail. I wandered around for at least 30 minutes looking for a trail. I felt the danger of being alone, lost in the clouds. But I stayed calm and eventually found a rock cairn, and then another, and then another. I fell through the deep snow at least a dozen times. I see why the others turned back. Eventually I found tracks where the other party stopped. From there it was an easy putz back to the hotel.

6 April 2018 Day 1 of Yala Peak Expedition

I woke with a horrible sun burn on my nose, lips, and neck. Learned my lesson the hard way: SPF 100 is not enough. Me and the guide packed our bags, splitting the weight equally between us. We met up with 2 more people: his friend (another local guide), and a foreigner named Artur from Poland. Fortunately, I have a lot of experience conducting wilderness excursions with weird Polish people, and so I felt right at home sharing a tent with Artur.

It took us 5 hours to reach basecamp (4900 m). My sunburn felt a lot better up there once my face was frozen. We set up the tents and cooked lunch as it started to snow. We stayed in the tents the rest of the day, ate dinner and went to sleep.

7 April 2018 Day 2 of Yala Peak Expedition

At 4:30 AM the guides woke us up with breakfast ready. Me and Artur dropped our cocks, grabbed our socks, ate breakfast, and were hiking by 5 AM. It was dark and foggy. It snowed several inches the night before. As we followed the guides through the dark, I felt so glad to have found a local guide that knew the route so well. As we climbed, the clouds broke. At 8 AM it was perfectly clear. At 9 AM we reached the summit (5500 m). On our descent the clouds came back in. Back at base camp we ate lunch and packed up camp before walking back to the hotel in a snow storm.

The climb was perfect. It was as high as I wanted to go. It was as steep, technical, and physically demanding as I wanted it to be, and we got the perfect break in the weather. I felt like I was on the top of the world (even though I was surrounded by peaks 1000 – 2000 meters higher). For so long I have gazed at the white Himalaya from a distance, nurturing a dream to climb. It feels very satisfying to check that dream off the list, and at the same time, form a new dream of climbing higher.

I was expecting to take the cake for style points by wearing my upriver mountain gear (CAT hat and flip shades), but Artur’s guide gave me a run for my money doing the entire climb in corduroys and having an authentic Advantage™ camo sleeping pad.

8 April 2018

Rest day. Slept in. Laid in the sun. Yoga. Laundry.

9 April 2018

Possibly the best birthday ever. I went on a long, strenuous day hike. I had the mountains all to myself. First, I explored Yubra glacier, an amazing 1000 m ice fall. I climbed up the right lateral moraine, then hung right up a 5000 m no-named peak. From there I traversed the adjacent valley and made a big loop back to the hotel. I managed my way with yak trax and one ski pole, but it would have been a lot easier (safer) with real crampons and ice axe.

10 April 2018

Another rest day.

11 April 2018

My bottom lip fell off. It started to go last night after dinner. Then more this morning. The last piece fell off at lunch. My new lip is very sore and tender, definitely not ready for the intense sun that killed my old lip. After the rest day yesterday, I was feeling antsy to explore. Artur met me at my hotel right on time and we set off to upper Langtang valley to explore glaciers.

We were the only people in the upper valley, and we were also the luckiest, because we found some prized glacier booty: a full unopened jar of peanut butter. I could tell it wasn’t too old because the plastic had minimal UV degradation. I hadn’t had peanut butter in months. It was delicious.

We set up the tent at Langshisha Kharka. The locals advised us to put our tent in a yak house to protect ourselves and our belongings from yaks. A yak house is a stone fortress, usually missing a roof. After setting up the tent in a yak house, we went for a walk. One hour later we returned to find a yak in the yak house stepping on our tent. We had forgotten to close the gate (a steel pole). Good thing it wasn’t my tent.

12 April 2018

This morning when I got out of bed, I was face to face with a yak up against the gate. The day before, I watched the yaks fight in front of our yak house, so I had a sense of how strong yaks are. If yak wanted to, it could push down our gate along with the entire wall of our yak house, so we were very friendly to yak and luckily there were no problems.

We took a day hike up the valley past Morimoto base camp. We had great views of gigantic glaciers in every direction. I had Tibet in my sights, but the receding glaciers left giant piles of giant rocks (very slow going), and Artur wanted to turn back. The clouds rolled in and it started to snow, so I gave in and went back to the tent to drink tea and eat peanut butter.

13 April 2018

I got up early and poked around the route to Tilman’s Pass and Ganchempo basecamp, solidifying my dream to climb Mt. Ganchempo.

Looking back down the valley, I got a nice perspective of Yala peak.

14 April 2018

Long walk down the valley back to the road. Stopped along the way to admire the Langtang village, and the power of the surrounding cliffs. During the 2015 earthquake, a huge land slide buried the town, killing over 250 people.

15 April 2018

Made it back to Kathmandu with $2.50 left in my pocket. After two weeks of free walking, the bus ride was noticeably long and bumpy. On the home stretch, I had a bout with diarrhea, and I convinced the bus driver to stop for my own personal bathroom break in the jungle. A perfect end to a perfect trip.

End

19 December 2017

Hello again from Panchkhal, Nepal. I am back again monitoring the performance of household biogas systems.

Photo: This nice woman traded us a giant cauliflower for fixing a leak on her biogas system.

Photo: Uncle Ryan

I found the cheapest flight to Nepal on China Southern Airlines. Unfortunately, the flight was pretty boring, since they do not allow drones in the cabin, but you get what you pay for.

It’s great to be back to the luxurious Panchkhal hotel, once again wigglin my toes in NFL grade astroturf and plungin the toilet. We store our filter samples in the freezer in the hotel kitchen. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen because every time I go in there for filters, the hotel workers want to chat. The kitchen is very dirty (unsanitary). There is lots of freezer and fridge space available, but for some reason they prefer to store both fresh and leftover food on the floor. I saw a bag of raw chickens tip over and a chicken slid across the floor. They threw it back in the bag and kept on cooking. I am astonished that I (and everyone else at the hotel) have not gotten sick.

Two days later I got sick. It might have been the chicken. I barfed three times, shat 3 times, shivered and moaned for a few hours, then fell into a deep sleep. When I awoke, I had no energy to even get out of bed. 24 hours later I was back to normal, once again eating the tasty food from the hotel kitchen. The experience taught me a valuable lesson about life in the village: If you want someone to make you tea, just barf in their yard.

I took a few days off work to take a much-needed hike in the mountains to Khaptad National Park. It was great to go back to the Far West to see old friends and places, and even greater to punch higher into the mountains to explore new places on foot.

The trip started with a 24 hour bus ride from Kathmandu to Khodpe. The bus travelled through the night across the flatland of Southern Nepal on a straight, bumpy road. At the 20 hour mark, we reach a critical turning point (a right turn into the mountains) and the bus stopped for a break. It was 5 in the morning and still dark. We were outside the bus sipping tea from a road stand. The moon and stars were out and the air was wet and cold. A bus rolled in from the opposite direction, radiating heat mixed with strong smells of brakes and barfs, foretelling the good times to come. Back in the bus, we took the right turn and rose with the sun up and up and up into the mountains, inching closer to the white wall of the Himalaya on the horizon. After that right turn, the excitement and thrill of being in the mountains overcame any and all feelings of discomfort.

Photo: Khodpe

When travelling on a bus in the mountains, the roads is windy, the bus sways, and good percentage of the passengers get car sick. If you have to barf, it’s polite to barf out the window, or barf in a bag and throw it out the window. Sometimes the barf doesn’t make it out the window, but nobody seems to mind. If the person next to you barfs, it is polite to rub their back until they stop barfing – repeated downward strokes along the length of the spine. I never got car sick.

I met my guide Shivraj in Khodpe. I thought I would save some money by going hiking with my old friend Shivraj instead of hiring a professional guide. But Shivraj didn’t have any hiking gear. After outfitting Shivraj with a set of fake North Face gear, he ended up costing about the same as a professional guide.

The first day of the hike, we climbed all day through amazing mountain villages. We passed through interesting forests of rhododendron, oak, pine, fir, and spruce. At 3000 meters elevation, we reached a plateau of golden prairies just in time to catch the sunset. That night we slept in a bunk house, and ate dinner served by a local resident. Lying in bed, I felt very content, and was looking forward to the next day exploring the area and visiting ancient temples.

That night a storm blew in. We awoke with a couple inches snow on the ground. For me, it was the perfect addition to an already perfect adventure. But unfortunately, Shivraj was afraid of the snow, and insisted that we leave immediately. He had little experience in the snow, and he perceived a strong danger. There was a trail crew at our camp, and they supported Shivraj in his efforts to sabotage my perfect adventure. “If it keeps snowing, we’ll get stuck here” they said. And so we hiked out.

In hindsight, it was great that we left when we did. Even though the storm cleared, we underestimated the time it took to hike back to the road, and catch a bus with room for us. The trip was amazing. I had a great time with Shivraj. None the less, I made sure Shivraj understood he was fired, and that I will never hire him as a guide again.

Photos: Khaptad National Park

End

=====================================================================================

10 August 2017

Namaste from Panchkhal, Nepal,

I have returned to Nepal to measure stove emissions. This time we are measuring emissions of clean burning biogas and LPG stoves in addition to the regular old wood stoves, and it has been fun, new, and exciting. It is very inspiring to see happy people cooking with biogas from 20 year old biogas systems that are functioning great.

The village we are working in was destroyed by the earthquake in 2015. Most of the homes are made of brick and mud. Many have been repaired, but are now 1 or 2 stories shorter than before the quake. Many people still live in shacks make of sheet metal that was provided by disaster relief efforts. Rebuilding is happening slowly.

We are staying in a luxurious hotel a short mud slog from the village. For $10 a night, my room is carpeted with NFL grade astroturf. Ironically, I packed light this trip and gone done and left my cleats at home.

Soon after I got settled in and spread my equipment and tools around the turf, my first trip to the bathroom revealed that the toilet was clogged. The hotel staff was not interested in fixing the toilet, so they instead offered me several options of other rooms. But the other rooms had lower grade turf below my standard of quality, and so I accepted the minor inconvenience of a clogged toilet. Some may say the toilet was half empty, but I say it was half full (actually all the way full), because the bathroom came equipped with a complimentary plunger. I splashed around in there day after day, working on my technique, until the clog broke free on the 4th day. Once the sewer smell dissipated, I could finally enjoy the turf with all six senses.

I experienced mit and it was great while it lasted. In Nepali culture, mit (pronounced “meet”) means best friends forever. It occurs between two people of the same gender who share strong similarities. Once mit is declared, the first step is to sit really close to each other and just talk it out and really get to know each other. After mit is initiated, you must honor and respect your mit for life, stay in contact with them, and make a big deal whenever you reunite.

At one particular house we visited, my first impressions were that the residents were not very friendly and did not really want us in their home. Then a man about my age became more and more interested in talking with me. After a couple hours, his wife had finished cooking, and I was trying to get out the door and back to the hotel before the rain picked up. Then the man called mit fair and square, and I had no choice but to face him. Fortunately, I had already been briefed on the concept of mit, so I had a rough idea what to expect. So there we were next to each other holding each other by the arms. He said many kind things to me, so I said kind things back. Then he requested that I stay for dinner. The mit took a turn for the worse (and may have even ended) when I declined dinner, but I am hopeful he will get over it and power of mit will prevail. He still hasn’t accepted my Facebook friend request.

The weather is too hot to have hair, so I walked to the market to get a haircut. For $1 the barber hooked me up with a nice short haircut that included a perfect shave, nose hair trim, and full face and head massage. He even worked some magic on top to conceal my receding hair line.

My new favorite food is jackfruit, a big slimy mess of bubble gum, guava, and banana flavors.

This is not my first rodeo in Nepal, but it is a new region for me, full of new fascinating things – people, plants, insects, and mountains. Everything here is amazing. I have no complaints about anything. My sandal blew out and I couldn’t care less. I look forward to giving another update when I return in the winter and spring.

End

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------