Speak Plainly Podcast
Hosted by 2 time best-selling trauma author, Owl C Medicine. A veteran of the US Military, Owl's no nonsense approach to mental physical and relational health is exactly what you didn't know you need. Listen in for ideas worth chewing on and science based tools for living life after trauma.
Speak Plainly Podcast
Exploring the Annapurna Circuit on a Budget: Tips, Trials, and Treasured Moments in Nepal's Himalayas
What if you could experience the majestic Annapurna Circuit without spending a fortune? Let us take you on a captivating journey through Nepal's Himalayan treasures, where we reveal essential tips on group planning, navigating Nepal's trekking legalities, and choosing the best time to embark on this adventure.we delve into high-altitude trials and the heartwarming rest days that punctuate the journey.
Join us as we navigate limited food options, cope with jet lag, and tackle logistical hiccups in Kathmandu. Highlights include the enchanting city of Manang with its delightful apple wines and cozy cafes. We also explore meaningful conversations with fascinating individuals we met along the way, and the emotional moment of spreading a loved one's ashes in the Himalayas.
This episode promises to leave you inspired and ready to explore the wonders of Nepal.
Music by Wutaboi
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Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I am your host, owl Medicine, and in today's podcast I would like to talk to you about my recent trip to Nepal and hiking the Himalayas. It was awesome. Spoiler alert it was dope. I'm going to talk about kind of the whole thing. I'm going to give you some information on how to go about finding a group to do it with, about the legalities in Nepal for hiking the Himalayas, about how long it takes and what time of year to go do it. I'm also going to talk about some of the awesome conversations that I had and the cool people that I met. I'm just going to try to give you everything that you need to know for one, to get you excited to maybe go to Nepal, because it is my new favorite country in the world. I love it so much. It was South Korea for a while and I'm assuming that that was. I mean one, it's awesome. But two, it was also the first country I went to outside of America, in Mexico, so that held a special place in my heart, but Nepal won. Nepal beat out kind of everything else, so that's what we're going to cover in this episode.
Speaker 1:So Nepal is nestled up in the Himalayan mountains. You probably know that. What you don't probably know is what I didn't know, which is that most of Nepal is actually pretty regular, like 1,000 meters, like 3,000 feet elevation. Most of it's pretty normal. It's not until you get into the Himalayas. I kind of just assumed all of Nepal was in the Himalayas, but that's not the case at all. Kathmandu is kind of just assumed all of Nepal was in the Himalayas, but that's not the case at all. Kathmandu is kind of a concrete jungle and then at the base of the Annapurna circuit, which is the circuit that I did and what I'll be talking about this whole time, at the base of the Annapurna circuit, well, so it's kind of jungly. So let me tell you about this hike.
Speaker 1:So the hikes in Nepal. I went on one hike and it lasted about two weeks and it's the Annapurna circuit, is the hike that I did. You can do Annapurna base camp or Everest base camp, those are the big ones. And the Annapurna circuit and the Annapurna circuit is, I found out once I got there, the single most hiked trek in the world. More people come and hike the Annapurna than any other hike in the world. It's a buttload of people. There was a decent amount of people when I went, but it really wasn't crazy because I got in at the very, very, very tail end of the good season. I got the tail end of the shoulder season, to be fair, and it was awesome because that meant that I still had good weather and the crowds weren't too intense and it wasn't like the weather wasn't too extreme as far as hot or cold Outside of it's just effing cold at 17,000 feet, which is what the pass is, the Rongle Pass. That's the name of the high pass at the very end that you do on like the last day of the hike.
Speaker 1:So the way this is all set up is when you fly into Nepal, you fly into Kathmandu and then you have to take a bus eight hours east to Besishahar. And once you are at Besishahar, then what we did is you can, we took a Jeep north to another town and I don't remember what exactly what it was called, but some people start the hike in Besishahar and when you do that, you wind up hiking through beautiful low jungle country, and we did like one day of low jungle country rather than like five days and we cut those five days out by doing a Jeep. Two weeks was long enough. So technically ours it wasn't two full weeks, it was 12 days. So we and when I say we, this group of people that I found is who I'm talking about we were all staying in hostels and signed up to do the Annapurna circuit about the same time, so we all went as a group.
Speaker 1:So let me talk about this really quick. If you were looking online for stuff like to do the Annapurna, you were going to be paying thousands of dollars to do the same thing that I did for five or six hundred. And the reason is, you know, because you can, they can charge you anything on the internet and you don't really have. If you don't have boots on the ground, then you don't have another choice. But I didn't want to pay that and I was looking at the legalities before I came and there was all kinds of stuff about how you can't go without a hiking guide. They have to be government-approved hiking guides. There's a handful like three or so treks in the entire country that are allowed without a hiking guide, one of which being the Everest Base Camp, and they made the same law about Everest Base Camp. The Everest Base Camp and they made the same law about Everest Base Camp.
Speaker 1:But because in Nepal there are three gods Buddhism, Hinduism and Tourism chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. One of the guys I met in Nepal said that to me a Nepalese guy, and I thought it was adorable. But since there are three gods and the last and greatest of which is tourism, the Everest Base Camp people like the local people in the area who actually do the stuff for the travelers who are coming through to do the hikes, as in like they maintain and work in the hotel restaurant things, they help with the trails and all of that sort of stuff the local people people were like fuck that, fuck the government mandate, because people just won't come. People stopped coming and the reason they stopped coming isn't because nobody wanted to pay for a guide, it was because there were not enough government approved.
Speaker 1:Nepal is pretty useless. If you go to Kathmandu for even a day, you will immediately recognize the absolute uselessness of their government. The buildings are collapsing, the streets are filthy, there's poo and trash and stuff everywhere. It's an amazing place. It's really cool for like four days and that's kind of it, and I feel like for most people, it would be like two. I'm just happened to be a bit trashier than the most, so for me it was pretty dope for the time that I was there, but I was definitely ready to go. I'm not a big city girl.
Speaker 1:So we took that bus to Besishahar and each of us were trying to find in this group we're trying to find a way to do the hike without paying a bunch of money, because we're all like shoestring budget travel backpackers, and there was a German girl, a French guy, an Englishman, a Floridian and me in our group, and then we also me and the Englishman split a porter who carried some of our heaviest stuff, and I carried maybe 25, 30 pounds. So it was much nicer for me because I really wanted to focus on taking pictures. But long story short with how all of this got set up is, if you do it online, it's going to be expensive. Get there, get to Nepal and find yourself a hostel, like I did, and look for hostels that are putting groups together, and I was able to find this group. We paid $600, rather than I saw as much as $5,000 for some of these, for some of the guided treks, and you get different things with different ones. It's not like everybody, it's not like my $600 trek was exactly the same as the $5,000 trek, those expensive treks. That includes food and lodging, and ours included all of our lodging but it didn't include food.
Speaker 1:But it does turn out that if you go alone which I ran into three separate people I think that came alone slash groups that didn't have a guide because they'd done it before or they just decided to try it without a guide guide, and I asked them how they got through the checkpoints, because there are checkpoints in a few of the early on cities between Besa, shihar and the deeper mountain towns of like Manang, and they said nobody bothered them, they didn't care, as in like the security people did not seem to care. So I thought that was pretty cool and I was like cool, maybe I won't do a guide next time, but there definitely are a few places where it's sketch and the roads like fork and you don't really know where to go. Most of those roads do lead to the same place, but they are different routes to get to the same place, some of which are longer and harder and some of them just do kind of dead end and you've got to backtrack or scramble your way up the side of a shale mountain Most of the hike that I was on was shale in order to get back to a trail. So I do think that hiring a guide was the way to go. But if you can hire a guide to do a three-week trek of the Annapurna so you can go a little bit slower, that is what I would suggest, because that shit was miserable.
Speaker 1:I have done a lot of physically challenging things. I enjoy physically challenging my body. I was in the military for six years. I did CrossFit, we did HIIT. I've done high-intensity programs and all this stuff and nothing came close to how grueling this trek was. None of it. So do do some kind of training. Do do some kind of conditioning for it. Unlike me, I did not. I'm in okay. I'm in okay shape in general, but I definitely should have done some training At any rate, once you get there and you get to your hostel or whatever.
Speaker 1:Or you just go online and you find a hostel that's if you're not a hostel person and you put your feelers out there to find a hostel. Find one that is putting together a group and hire your guide, and I highly suggest hiring a porter because you're going to carry a bunch of stuff that you think you need and that you don't actually need, and hiking for weeks on end with a very heavy backpack, with that elevation, is rough. Now after about a week you start to really get used to it and like you move a little faster and things go easier. But that first four or five days can be extra, extra hellacious. So from Besa Shahar we took a Jeep up to another town, which was really fun because the Jeep is a five-seater.
Speaker 1:We had six people in the Jeep and two in the trunk, the trunk being like a truck bed. It was like a Jeep with an extended bed. They don't have that brand here, so it's not quite like an actual Jeep that you're probably imagining. It's like between a Jeep and a Gator, if you know what I'm talking about, from like football fields and stuff where they like run and go pick up injured players and they drive them off. It's like. It's like a big. They got two rows, two bench seats in the front. That's the body of the car. And then there was a big, a big, like a big ish bed, and the bed had all of our stuff in it and it had our guide and it had our porter.
Speaker 1:And as we're driving taking this Jeep for I think it was like a seven-hour drive that day and we are taking the Jeep through towns we have to get to the edge of town, stop, let the porter and the guide jump off of the back and then walk a different route through town so we could drive up to the checkpoint, because riding in the back of a vehicle is illegal. So they had to get out so we could go to the checkpoint. They look at our stuff. None of us got like passes and the stuff that we were supposed to get. They, I guess, just gave them the money for it and was like all right, that's it. But none of us like you're're supposed to get like a passport photo and do this stuff in Bessah Shahar. But the guide took care of all of that for us, so none of us had to worry about it. That was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:And then we'd pull past there, get just out of sight of the checkpoint and wait for our guide and our porter to hop back in. And we did that through about four or five towns that day. We pulled over on the side of the road and saw some beautiful, massive, massive waterfalls that I got great photos of. I even saw mad honey hives. They had these giant black hives that were way far away. They looked itsy bitsy to us but you could see from how far away they were and how far up this crazy sheer cliff rock cliff was, how far up that it was. They were big. But I got to see Mad Honey. We got to see the waterfalls. The drive itself was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:We listened to this song that we were. Toward the end of it I was like, is it me or is this the same song? Like 10 minutes later, and they're like no, I think it's a different one. And then someone else was like no, I think it's the same. And I was like, yeah, I think it's the same. So anyway, it kept repeating itself, enough that a few days into the hike we met somebody and I was able to like play a tiny bit of the recording, because I wanted to record it, because I really liked the song. I was able to play a tiny bit and you could barely hear it, but the guy immediately recognized the song and pulled it up and I was able to download it on my YouTube. So now I have it on my YouTube and that became our like marching song.
Speaker 1:Every morning as we would start the hike, we would play this adorable Nepalese song that was like eight minutes long, seriously like eight minutes long, and it was super fun, super cute, and that was kind of how we started each day. And so we have the bus to Besa Shahar, we have the Jeep up a little further and from there the trek started. So the first two days were me being six foot in a tiny, tiny bus and there was a guy the Englishman was taller than me, he was like 6'3", 6'4". He was a big dude and we both have long femurs and these local buses that we took that cost like $4 to take an eight-hour bus. They are made for Nepalese men. They're made for Nepalese people who are much smaller than us.
Speaker 1:So I wound up having to sit for eight hours twisted at like a 45 degree angle, with either my knees pulled up into my chest and my head resting between them because that's how close this chair was to me. I could literally rest my knees on my forehead and my knees on the chair in front of me, or most of the time I had to sit with my knees out in the aisleway which people were constantly coming in and out and in and out of the aisleway, and the aisleway was completely stuffed two layers deep with people's bags Not our bags because we were going all the way out to the middle of nowhere, all the way out to Besa Shahar, which was eight hours away. So our bags got thrown under the bus, but all of the local Nepalese folks who were doing a shorter trip than that, when they came on, they just flopped their shit in the middle of the walkway and everybody was like trying to step over and step around, and that's just the norm, that's what you do. And we were supposed to stop and get lunch on that bus ride. However, we were not able to get lunch because the place that we stopped at our guide was like you know, normally this place is pretty good, but it's looking a little sketch today. It looks like this food might be left over from yesterday, so I suggest that you don't have that. So we're just not eating lunch today, I guess. And I was like, okay, fun, we're just not going to eat lunch. But luckily I had a giant bag of grocery outlet snacks that I had brought on the plane and I was able to share those with everybody.
Speaker 1:So we all got a little bit of footage and then continued that that cramped, cramped, cramped bus ride, uh, then we took that jeep I already told you about that and then the actual hiking started. So here is where it got very interesting, because now we're actually hiking. I'm in the Himalayas. It's super surreal. It's beautiful everywhere that you look. The first couple of days honestly looked a lot like Washington. It's beautiful where I live, like absolutely stunning. And there were good sections of the hike that looked a lot like where I live and that, like that was really cool to be like I'm in the highest mountain range in the world, like the biggest mountain range in the world, and half of it seems to look like where I live, and that's that. I felt really spoiled and that was super, super, effing cool. But I already told you that your, your, uh, your lodging is taken care of.
Speaker 1:Food was not, and for the first few days you can kind of order whatever you want. The menus are pretty limited, as one could imagine, but about five days or so in you wind up in the city of Manang and the way this hike works is they call them tea house hikes and basically you're hiking from small mountain village to small mountain village, but this has been going on for so long and it's the most highly trekked hike in the world, so tons of people come through and they want the infrastructure for those people. And since all of those people are, like me, there to take pictures like have a cool experience, but also take pictures and then post them on the socials, they have electricity and Wi-Fi at nearly every single one of these villages and they're tens of thousands, like they're literally 10,000 plus feet in the air some of them, and there's still Wi-Fi. There's nothing in between, it's just rock Like it's just rock and ice, especially those last few days. But there is internet and electricity at pretty much any of these, but the way in between is nothing, like I said, which means everything past Manang.
Speaker 1:Any meat that you get has been carried, usually by donkey, for up to four days unrefrigerated, so they don't have a lot of meat options. And when people do decide like oh, I'm just dying, I need protein, I need meat, they often wind up getting sick because it was packed in on a donkey unrefrigerated for days. So the general rule is everybody just eats dalbat Dal, meaning lentils. I'm sure you've maybe heard of dal as an Indian dish, but dal itself just means lentils, and then bat is rice, so dal bat is the. That's the food that everybody eats and survives on the entire time. And you have breakfast, you have lunch and you have dinner, and this is what was really really hard for me at first is they want you to eat all these foods, so I tried eating breakfast. I'm not a, so I tried eating breakfast. I'm not a breakfast person. I skip breakfast. I have a little bit of black coffee and then I go until the early afternoon and that's when I eat lunch, usually something high-protein, and then I'll eat my carbs and stuff at dinner, like dinner-ish time and waking up.
Speaker 1:But I'm in the Himalayas, right, and I'm doing this incredible hike that I truly have not prepared for. So I want to default to listening to my guide. My guide is the one who's supposed to keep me safe and keep me healthy during this, so I listen to the guide and he is just all about you've got to have a full tank. You've got to have a full tank. Like tapping his stomach and being like no, you've got to have a full tank. Gotta have a full tank. Like tapping his stomach and being like no, you gotta have a full tank, you gotta eat, you gotta eat. And so I'm trying to force myself to eat.
Speaker 1:And I didn't sleep well for the first couple of nights because it's basically exactly, it's like 13 hours difference or something. So day was night and night was day and I was not sleeping well. I stayed at this, at this hotel thing, for the first couple of nights. Apparently, the dates were wrong about when I got in, so they didn't have my room, so then I had to wait until like 3 am and then they just gave me a room they actually gave me a really nice room for dirt cheap, like a nicer room than the one that I reserved and I thought I had an extra day. But they called me while I was out walking around Kathmandu to say that I didn't have another day, that I was supposed to check out, but my stuff's still in the room. So then I had to run back and check out of that room and find a new place to go, a new hostel, which worked out well, because then I found this hostel that organized this hike and then I had the meeting with everybody, like, I think, the next day, and so I hadn't slept well at all because of the jet lag and the switching time zones and going from one hotel to the next.
Speaker 1:And then we start on this hike. We do we, we do the, the, the bus, and then the, and then the Jeep, and then I start eating breakfast and eating lunch and eating dinner and I wind up with such a horrible stomach ache for like four days to the point where I got really concerned because I was starting to get, I was starting to get paranoid. I was starting to get like not quite delusional, but every single like thing I was. I was really getting paranoid, um, in a way that I don't normally get. I was texting Michael about it and being like, okay, I'm watching myself. The sleep deprivation is real, even though I'm getting like a few winks here and there. It's been just a few winks for days now and I'm getting paranoid about everything. I'm getting paranoid about being cheated, I'm being paranoid about the bus and about where we're going and I'm just, it was not fun.
Speaker 1:And eventually I put together that I had a stomach ache and the reason I put that together is because I had some Tums that I got on one of my last airport trips, because I had some food that didn't settle well with me, so I got some Tums in the airport. Thank God I had those Tums because I ate those. I ate like five or six every night for a few nights until they were all gone and that's when I realized what was keeping me up at night at this point was a hellacious stomach ache. And the stomach ache was happening because I was eating rice and lentils. And I don't do carbs, especially not in the morning, especially not in the middle of the day, Maybe at night, especially if I've smoked a bunch of weed or something, then I'll do a bunch of carbs. But having all of my protein being delivered with like 80% carbs, even though it's complete proteins like Dahl and Bott together are a complete protein. So I'm getting all of the nutrients that I need, but it's being delivered in a vehicle of carbs that I'm not used to processing need. But it's being delivered in a vehicle of carbs that I'm not used to processing.
Speaker 1:And I'm certainly not used to waking up really early, shoving a bunch of food down my gullet and then immediately hiking for four or five hours and then taking an hour break to order more food, eat more food, more dalbat with potatoes. My favorite bit was the potatoes. More dalbat with potatoes, my favorite bit was the potatoes. So you would get the. You would like literally get a big metal platter with a upside down bowl of rice in the middle like a just a big dome of rice, and then a little bowl, a little metal bowl of, of watery lentils and they're good. But you, you, then you dump the lentils, inils in the rice. You get a little bit like crispy cracker kind of thing. Sometimes early on in the hike that stuff went away higher as well. But then you would get some potatoes, some curried potatoes, which were fantastic, but potatoes is carb, lentils carb, rice carb, the cracker carb Everything is a carb and I'm not used to that.
Speaker 1:So I was having a horrible time not being able to sleep. Once I ate the Tums and realized what was going on, I talked with my guide about it and was like I'm not, I'm not doing good, I need to, I need to like not eat. And he was like no, you like, you gotta eat, you gotta have, you gotta have food in your tank. And I finally just had to look him dead in the face and go no, I'm not, I'm not doing it, I've tried your way, I'm listening to my body, I'm not having breakfast and be like okay, fine, it was like okay, and then walked away and left it at that. And then everybody thought it was crazy because I was skipping meals. Because not only did I skip breakfast that day, I skipped lunch that day and by the afternoon I was tired. But when we finished hiking I got dinner and that was great.
Speaker 1:And there was many a times on this hike where I would have a boiled egg or something for breakfast or nothing at all, or just ginger tea would be a thing, especially at the higher elevations. I just had ginger tea which was not like any kind of tea, tea that you would think of here, but literally just hot water with slices of ginger in it. Um, and I would have that until my stomach ache went away. Uh, but then I would have all all the morning to hike on an empty stomach, which helped me reset things and that helped so much. And then often I would have lunch and then I would actually just skip dinner, and then I would have a really light breakfast the next day, or no breakfast at all, and then have lunch, and then sometimes try to slow us down a little bit so we could have a little bit of a break between eating and immediately hiking, because these hiking days were between like six, I think, was the shortest, or probably seven hours of hiking, to 13 was the longest day. It was like 13 for me, um, and some of some of us took longer. Some people was like 14 and a half hours, because it's it's a group but everybody hikes at their own pace.
Speaker 1:When you're hiking that far and that long, everybody hikes at their own pace and some of us kind of hike off on our own. Some of us pair off and typically that happens. Certain people pair off more than others because they're approximately the same speed, but it's really important to know your own pace. But it's really important to know your own pace. It's so important, in fact, to know your own pace that the last four days or the last two days of the hike, there were four people that were evac'd, two by helicopter, one by horse and one by jeep on just the last two days, and each of those people were younger and looked more fit than me. They were all like, almost like probably half my age. They were all in their early twenties and they got air of act, or horse of act or Jeep of act.
Speaker 1:Um, when we got some on the, some on the Monong side of the Thurong La Pass and some just after Thurong La Pass, which is at 17,000 feet, and the reason you have to know your pace in all this is because the reason that these young people are the ones it's always young people apparently who wind up getting evac'd, and it's because they think their body will just make up for their speed, because it always has. They're young, they're full of energy and they can force their body. They can just force stuff to happen and their body will compensate. But when you're sitting at like 40 to 50 percent of the oxygen that you're used to and you've been living on a foreign diet for weeks, then your body's not as able to adapt as you might think. And so these young people push themselves and wind up, injuring themselves or making it to where they can't finish the hike and it would suck to have gone that far and do that much and then not make it over the pass. There was a lady who was carried over the pass by a horse and then picked up by a different horse and then carried down the pass and then I think she was evac'd out by a Jeep after that. But that kind of stuff, that kind of stuff is why it's so important to know your pace and to stick to it.
Speaker 1:And that was a big lesson for me. Was that like, yes, my guide is the expert of the environment, but he is not the expert of me and it is important to listen to your guide. They are guides for a reason. Our guide had done 50. He'd done the Annapurna Circuit 50 times. He'd also done Annapurna Base Camp a bunch, and Everett Base Camp and even Everest not Everett Everest Base Camp but he knows the area, but he does not know you. He did not know me. I do, and I decided to default to him because he's the expert but ultimately I'm the expert on me.
Speaker 1:So if you do do this, pay attention to your body, really, tune in and listen and see if there are things that you could be doing differently to help yourself. Maybe meet halfway, like I did, of skipping a few meals here and there so your body can kind of catch up. And all of us were like what the fuck is happening? We're doing all of this hiking, we're working our ass off and every single one of us felt like we were gaining weight. Literally all of us were like how are we fatter now than when we started? And it's just from eating Dalbat, that Dalbat power 24 hour. Baby Dalbat is so famous in the area I mean, that's the Nepalese dish is. Dalbat is so famous in the area I mean, that's the Nepalese dish is dalbat but it's so famous, especially for hikers, that you can buy handkerchiefs and you can buy T-shirts that say Dalbat Power 24-hour. So it's important to listen to your body as you're going through this.
Speaker 1:Now I want to talk about my favorite place in this whole thing. I got my favorite photo from the trip in the city of Menang. Menang is the last like city that you wind up in. It's like five days in or four days, I don't even know. It's like somewhere around there and it is like just south of Menang. Two days before Menang you hike through an area that's got a bunch of apple orchards and they're small, shrubby little apple trees, but they are totally apple trees and it turns out that that's the thing that they grow there. It's kind of the only thing. They can grow chickens. They can obviously get eggs from the chickens. They can grow potatoes and apples, and so they turn those apples into wine, and Manang is famous for their apple wines Nope, not ciders wine and we tried some, but I'll get there in a little bit. We tried some at the Bob Marley Hotel that we stayed at, which was a wild night. But before I get there, we'll talk about Manang. I loved Manang.
Speaker 1:If I was doing this trek again, I would totally take three weeks to do it and I would stay in Manang for an entire week. I would have stayed at a few places just because it looked so cool, and I would like to be hiking for five to eight hours a day instead of six to 14. I think five to eight hours a day is plenty of hiking and leaves time for exploring and recovering and enjoying the views and all of that stuff. Now we had one of our people in our group had a flight to catch, so we couldn't really slow down a little like very much at all, really at all, because she had less than a day to spare. So if you are with a group and there's nobody that does have a flight to catch, you might be able to finagle a few extra days which can make all of the difference in the world extra days which can make all of the difference in the world.
Speaker 1:And if I had those days, I would have stayed in Manang, because in Manang, as we pulled in I say pulled in as we walked in the rain started. And it was the only day outside of the very, very last day. It was the only day that I actually got rained on. But the rain started right as we pulled into Manang. So that was cool because we didn't have to be in the rain or hike in the rain. We were able to just get to our hotel just in time, order some dinner. And I didn't actually order dinner that day.
Speaker 1:I literally went to sleep after eating a few Snickers and in the morning I woke up at like five something in the morning because I went to bed super early, because I was exhausted. I didn't do dinner, I just ate some and laid down. I was like I need sleep and I felt much better in the morning. It was about 520 or so. I woke up and I peeked out the little window and the sun is just coming up. And because of the, because of the rain, it had snowed all over the place, all over those mountains, and we were in an area where there's a big river and then then behind the river is a massive sheer cliff and then beautiful gangna purna, which is one of the mountains in the Annapurna, a little cluster there, and, oh my God, that 5.30 in the morning sun was just fabulous. It was truly, truly amazing. I was so happy. I got beautiful photos.
Speaker 1:And then I walked around and found a little bakery cafe that served Illy coffee. So I had at I think it's like 3,900 meters or something, so just at 10,000 feet-ishly the city of Menang, you can get decent like good espresso and fresh baked apple pies and apple turnovers and apple like apple. It's the only flavor that you can get. Everything else is just bread. It's either bread or apple flavored bread, because that's the only thing that grows up there is potatoes and apples. And, oh my goodness, it was so wonderful. That was.
Speaker 1:Our one rest day was we took a short hike up. Well, it wasn't even that short. I made mine short, me and one other guy. We did half the hike and we're like I need an actual rest day and I'm doing it came back down and I seriously would have stayed there for weeks, because that's also where I got to have yak steak, which wasn't like a, like a hunk of steak that you like cut pieces off of, like I was assuming it would be. It was more like ribbons. It was like a like carne asada. It was served more like carne asada style but it was the beefiest beef I've ever had. It was served on one of those cast iron skillets, like a hot skillet from Chili's or whatever. It was served on a cast iron sizzling skillet with noodles and peppers and, um, or noodles and onions and, uh, like a mushroom gravy on top. And we uh, we talked to the guide, made sure that it was okay and all that, and he's like, yeah, it's okay and it's real yak, because sometimes they fake it and they'll just do like cow meat and call it yak at some of these places. But he's like I know the guy we talked and it's real yak. So I got to try yak there. That was really, really cool.
Speaker 1:Menang is beautiful. I have seriously thought about, like you know, it'd be nice to just hike up to here and then have medical insurance and then just call an Aravac and just be done, hike in for five days or whatever. Go check out Menang, have a few days of like beautiful espresso andies and apple-flavored baked goods and call it good from there. That would be a serious treat because the views are stunning. Oh, the views in Manang were incredible.
Speaker 1:But from Manang then we started heading up toward Lake Tlecho, and Lake Tlecho is the highest lake in the world. It was a bitch to get to. That was the scariest part for pretty much everyone except me. There is a hike here where I live that is pretty famous and has a washout where a rock slide came through and kind of washed out the trail and it continues to kind of just the rocks continue to fall and move and shift and so there's an area on that hike that you have to kind of be careful with your footing and kind of make your own, make your own trail. You can see where the trail is supposed to be. Um, it's just like a little bit run over with some of the new small like shale pieces. Well, large, large portions of the hike up to the highest lake in the world was like that and it was a sheer like shale, like 45, probably steeper than a 45 degree angle down, straight down, nothing between but shale, and just like sharp rocks between you and a river a thousand feet below us or whatever.
Speaker 1:Um, so from there we were hiking up toward Lake Talicho and I remember asking the guide and being like, all right, not that I plan on it, but just in case something does happen, I'm assuming that if I were to slip and go down there, I would just follow that river back to Manang. And he's like, yep, that's exactly what you do. I'm like, okay, cool, that's fine. I just, I just like to know things like that. I like to know, worst case scenario, what I ought to do. And that made sense to me. And we hiked.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, it was terrifying because most people had never hiked anything like that and it was just really scary for them. It was really sketch because there was massive sections where there was no trail whatsoever. And then there were enough people on the trail that you'd get to these sections and you have a guide walking people through one step at a time, holding their hands, making sure that they're not falling down this cliff and the path, where it does, wind up being a path again, the path is as wide as your feet. It's not like a trail. It's literally as wide as your feet. It's not like a trail. It's literally as wide as your feet. And so you have your packs on and you're tired and you have to make room to like balance around people. So there are times where you kind of have to grab strangers by the elbows. As they grab you by the elbows so you can like do a little spin, just so you can wind up on the other side of them and they can wind up on the other side of you so you can continue your hike in your appropriate direction, and that's. There was a lot of bottlenecks at these places and it just it scared the shit out of the Floridian and the German girl especially. It was really interesting. So now I'm going to move on to some of the people.
Speaker 1:I spent the entire time in a room with the Frenchman and we hardly spoke a word. His English was great, but I think he didn't think it was as good, so we didn't talk a whole lot, just kind of very basic When's dinner, what time are we waking up? That was kind of it, but he was really cool and a great photographer. And then there was the Englishman, who has been to like 40-something countries. He hasn't been living in England. He's younger than me, he's like 34 or something, and he hasn't lived in the UK in 11 years. He's lived in like the Philippines and in Bali and he's been in Dubai for quite a few years now. He works events Like he was just going and helping set up for the Olympics, because that's what they do. He's an events organizer. He organizes the groups of contractors and things to go do that sort of stuff. He was a really cool dude.
Speaker 1:And then there's the Floridian, who was a Marine and in his early like early I guess, mid-20s or something like that, so young, fit and a Marine. So I loved that. I always finished before him when we pulled into. I think it was Manang. I remember like I'd been there for a minute and I see him slowly, slowly walking up. I'm like knees to chest, marine, knees to fucking chest. It was great. I loved even him. Shit, because I'm the gay. I'm the gay old Air Force guy and I'm outperforming. I'm outperforming the 25 year old Marine. That was really fun, but it was cool.
Speaker 1:We had some really interesting conversations, especially once the hike was over me and the Marine and that sort of thing. During the hike though, one of the guys, the Englishman, he, as we were hiking, he came up and randomly goes. So what do you think about the trans and I just was like, wait, what One? This is out of nowhere. Two, I didn't expect it to come from him. And three, like what? So not having any idea, like not knowing this person at all. I just went well, I'm gonna need a more specific question than that, because asking me what do you think about the trans is like asking me what do you think about the sky? Is that bitch blue or what Like that's? That's not like. I need something more specific. And so I said that I need something more specific. I've got opinions about just about everything, but I like anything that I've got enough information on. I love to have opinions on, uh, but I need, I need, I need something more specific.
Speaker 1:And so he starts asking questions and I start answering the questions and we talk about this, that and the other and talk about mental health stuff and like there's a lot of mental health concerns with trans people, but not because they're trans, it's because of the way trans are treated. So we went on that conversation and whatnot. And then it turns out that the reason this guy was asking one of the other questions that he asked was is it gay for a dude to date a trans girl and I was like no, because I have definitions for all of these things. I think it's really important to have your own definitions that you stick to, and for me, my definition for gay or straight is do you want to have long-term relationships, long-term romantic relationships, with people who live their life as the same gender that you do? And if the answer is yes, then you're gay and he is not interested in living his life with any male.
Speaker 1:But he did meet this marvelous woman who was also a prostitute in Bali, or Bali or Thailand, I forget, anyway. He talked about both a lot and he kind of fell in love with her and had this whole thing. But then there was a lot of interpersonal stuff and a lot of like he's bad at relationships and intimacy and all these other things. And it was really cool because this conversation that started off with some some guy going so what do you think about the trans? To me it turned out to be him being like am I gay for loving a trans woman? And of course I was like no, and so we actually got close, like quite a bit closer after that, because this was during the hike and we spent another week after the hike all hanging out together and we're actually still in contact.
Speaker 1:We have a little bit of a group chat going on me, him and the Marine. Especially, we stayed the most in contact with each other and he actually decided to take the Marine to Thailand because, turns out, the Marine guy also has a thing for trans girls. And I thought it was fabulous because I love it. I love the androgyny. I have always had a thing for extremely effeminate men, whether they're cross-dressing or whether, like, they're just effeminate or androgynous or whatever. So I thought it was marvelous, and the Marine apparently thought it was marvelous enough that he was living in the Philippines and was like fuck it, this was so good. He's already moved to Phuket, so that's really cool. We had some really cool deep conversations.
Speaker 1:After everything was all said and done, we go up to Lake Talicho, which is that, like I said, the highest lake in the world. It's thousands of feet up and then thousands of feet back down and then thousands of feet up again to go over a ridge on the east side, to go down into the valley that's on the east side of the Talicho Valley, take a big old steel suspension bridge across the river and then up thousands of feet more again to get to a plateau, to make it to the next available town where we were going to stay that night, and that was one of the longest, if not the longest and hardest day between that one and the actual pass day, cause it was like 4,000 feet up and then like 7,000 feet down in a day. And I didn't have any like sticks with me, any of the hiking trekking poles. Every single other person that wasn't a guide had trekking poles with them. I was the literally the only one. I checked every single person. I was the only one who didn't have any walking sticks, but I don't really like them. I don't really like them. I don't really use them. Having one with me probably would like. If I were to do it again, I would totally rent one and bring that with me. But I wasn't going to bring trekking poles all the way around the world, especially when, after Nepal, I was also hitting up Taiwan and then Japan. What am I going to do with trekking poles in those places? Nothing, I could boof it, that's about it, and they're too sharp for that. So don't do that. But it was marvelous Then.
Speaker 1:From Lake Talicho day, we had just a couple more days until we did the pass on one of those like the second to last or third to last day. I, we stayed at this, at this place, and in the morning we were getting ready and checking all of our stuff and getting ready to go as a group and I see this dude with really long blonde brown hair that has got shorts on and a flannel shirt that's wide open. We're in the Himalayas and it's cold. Five or so days in my sandals and then everything else I did in just my, my normal barefoot boots with no kind of support or sole or anything like that on them. But he was out there with the flannel shirt open, nothing underneath it, and was ripped like crazy, fucking body, super, super sexy, crazy chest, amazing abs, a great smile and had like long, almost like dready looking hair. I was, I was smitten, but also I had shit to do, so didn't think too much of it other than like, oh damn, he's fine as hell.
Speaker 1:And a few hours later I'm trekking. I have left everybody in the dust again. It was usually me and the Frenchman in front, and usually the Frenchman, um, but I was hiking and I ran. I was in the very, very front this time and I see that guy and his group and he actually comes up to me and starts asking me about my shoes, cause he's in barefoot or he normally is in barefoot boots I can't remember if he was or not, but he asked me about my boots and he's like they're awesome because they're like barefoot but they don't look like lame barefoot boots. And I'm like, yeah, that's the reason I got them. So we started hanging out, because obviously I'm going to hang out with the smoking hot dude that has no shirt on. That's like all hairy and sexy as shit.
Speaker 1:And uh, turns out he dropped acid. That morning. I was like you a fucking hero, bro, you a fucking hero, you up here 10,000 feet in the air in the Himalayas. But he was like I just did like a little quarter tab or half tab or something. It was less than a full tab, I remember that. But yeah, he just did like a little quarter tab, half tab or something. And I was like, honestly, that actually sounds really dope. Like a little half tab up here like mushrooms wouldn't work for me up there, but like acid, it's totally energizing for me in that way. So I would have totally done that. And because I've done so much acid in my life. I didn't need it.
Speaker 1:I was just hanging out with bro and had a grand old time, not only because was he smoking sexy, but we were just talking and laughing and then talking about his girlfriend and like the relationship and having like deep, awesome philosophical conversations and conversations about trauma and life and maturing and all this stuff and I'm getting to ride his high and he's smoking hot, super gorgeous and a super awesome guy. It was a great day. We wound up playing Jenga and got way too far in the Jenga game Like clearly acid was involved because there's no reason that that game should have lasted that long and got like the Jenga tower, gotten so high. But it did. It was really fun.
Speaker 1:And then that last day where all of the evacs were the last day and the last two days I guess, but that last day that hike up was intense because it was straight up shale. It was like and I mean like kind of quite literally straight up your feet. Like every single step your feet are slipping and at this high of an elevation you have to take Diamox, which is this high elevation or acute elevation sickness pill, so it's used for congestive heart failure and like getting the fluids off of the heart, but it's also used for elevation sickness. So I started taking mine prophylactically, like I took sickness. So I started taking mine prophylactically Like I took.
Speaker 1:I took, started taking a half a a half a tab on, I think, three days before the pass, and even the the guide said, no, don't worry about it, don't take it until like the last day or take it when you start to not feel good. Then you can take it. But I talked with a, a, a PA there who, uh, was like no, you can totally take it prophylactically and you should take it prophylactically, in fact. So that's what I decided to do and it helped a lot because I have never had to control my breathing so much and it wasn't just the last day, but the last day was obviously the worst because it's freezing cold. It was like negative 16 or something on the top, but the fact that, like, you have to control your breath so much was crazy.
Speaker 1:I typically my average, like the last, like the last half of the hike, the average like breathing rate for me was and it would be and it would be the double in breath on one step and the out breath on the left foot, double in breath on the right, exhale on the left. Double inhale on the right, exhale on the left. And that was my like flat rate. Okay, like when things were when there was no elevation gain really happening. That was my breathing rate and it had to be that way.
Speaker 1:And you notice that you're not hearing. Like you're not hearing because that wouldn't work. It did not work for me. Your instinct is to breathe through your mouth because you can move more air but you don't actually get more oxygen exchange for that air. So I really focused on inhaling and exhaling exclusively through my nose the entire time. And one thing I did notice is it actually made me prettier because I worked. I worked parts of my face muscles that like hadn't been worked in a while, but it really allowed the oxygen exchange to happen, because when you're exhaling through your nose you're creating back pressure in the lungs that is, creating more oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange through the mechanotransduction of the pressure created by using your nose. So there's a bit of a back pressure.
Speaker 1:So most of the breathing was, but that last day it was literally with a single step Left foot, right step, left foot, right foot, Left foot and I could maybe make it 25 steps before I'd have to stop and pause and not take any steps and breathe like that for three or four breaths and then do it again Because I had to keep going. It was too exhausting, I couldn't start over again. Anybody who's run any distance knows that you can be running or even hiked any distance. You can be running or you can be hiking and you can have a good pace and then you stop to rest and if you stop to rest too long it's almost worse than if you hadn't stopped. So I was trying to make sure that my my breaks weren't too long and I, I, I did a pretty good job, but man, it was grueling.
Speaker 1:So I make it to the pass it's 17,500 and something feet at the, at the Thurong La Pass, and I carried Ki, my pup, all the way with me. I specifically brought some of her ashes in a little vial and when I was packing the ashes I sobbed and sobbed, and sobbed and I actually captured some of my tears in the vial, so my tears and her ashes kind of mixed together and I carried her and there was a few places that I left her, including the Bob Marley Hotel, and then pretty much all of the rest of the ashes that I brought I left at the top. I knocked out and I didn't leave the bottle, I just poured out a bunch of her ashes at Therong Lepas because she always wanted to be at the highest, softest place and I was like, well, I can't do much for you up here, that's soft baby girl, but this is the highest place. You always wanted to be in the highest, softest place. So here I brought you to the highest place in the world, to the top of the world. That's what they call. The Himalayan Mountains is the top of the world, and it was really nice.
Speaker 1:I did an episode a while back about being overwhelmed by grief and realizing that I needed to do something for her, like funeral-wise, and that was a big part of it for me was taking her with me to the Himalayan mountains and I kept a little bit of her ashes and stuff with me so I could keep her with me through Taiwan and Japan as well. But I was able to bury some of her ashes, along with my tears together, up at 17,500 feet, which was marvelous. Now that pretty much covers the hike. The rest of Nepal was amazing. I could talk more about that. I met this wonderful, wonderful guy and had a great time with him. But the other really cool thing that happened I have to talk to you about before I wrap this up, just because it was so funny and surreal.
Speaker 1:We, after Manang, we got to this place where it's like Lower Pasong, I think was the name. There's Upper and Lower Pasong, and Upper Pasong has good, has better views if it's not like cloudy and raining, and it was cloudy and dumb when we pulled in. So we didn't miss anything by not going to Upper Pasong. It's also packed in Upper Pasong. We stayed in Lower because our guide was smart and knew all of these things and also had known the owner of the Bob Marley Hotel for 16 years Now in Nepal.
Speaker 1:Marijuana is a weed. It is literally weed. It is everywhere, on everything. If you're in any city, especially Kathmandu, every crack in every sidewalk has weed in it. Every dirty, abandoned parking lot has 10-foot tall, 8-foot wide bushes of marijuana growing everywhere. It's everywhere.
Speaker 1:So we pull into this place, meet the guy. He's super cool, super fun, and we're like talking and hanging out and ordering dinner and whatnot. Super fun and we're like talking and hanging out and ordering dinner and whatnot, and he brings out because he knows our guide and our guide smokes a little bit of weed and he pulls out like these massive, massive cola nugs of weed and of course it's terrible weed and it's like 50% seed, but we had so much of it it didn't matter. He packed, he grabbed all this weed and then pulled out a bong and then we bought some of the apple wine to try the apple wine. And so we're sitting in the kitchen area not the kitchen, the dining area of the of the Bob Marley Hotel in the Himalayan mountains, passing around a bong and a bunch of weed that had just been given to us for free by the owner of the hotel.
Speaker 1:His only thing was like just follow us on Instagram. He had just created and TikTok he had just created a TikTok and an Instagram account. He was like follow us on Instagram and TikTok. I don't really do TikTok, but I totally did on Instagram, and so we spent the entire evening cranking up. He had a speaker, so we cranked up the dance music. We cranked up that original song that we started every day hiking with. We turned that on.
Speaker 1:We were introduced to a bunch of other really awesome Nepalese music that night because another guy who came through and stayed at the same hotel was also a huge stoner and grew his own weed. And when I say grew his own weed, I mean this guy showed us pictures. He has hectares, hectares of outdoor grow. It's far as the eye can see sweeping, rolling hills of seas of weed and of course it's not like California weed, obviously. But we're passing joints and passing bongs around and passing this apple wine around and then they pull out. He pulls out some apple brandy that they made from distilling the apple wine from the Menang orchards that we had passed through a week before or a few days before or whatever. It was. The whole thing's kind of a blur in my head as far as like what days or which. None of us ever knew what day it was or how many days we were on or how many days were left.
Speaker 1:We were all kind of in this weird, this weird limbo place but being able to hang out in the dining area of this place and he made some kind of like little Nepalese snack out of like broken ramen and like some chili and like ramen packet powder and some chilies and some oils and like tossed in some like chopped veggie things and tossed it all on a plate and we were all like sharing this, this cool made-up meal, and having a great time. It was so awesome. So if you're, if you're, do the hike and you're doing it and you want, when you get to upper and lower passong, stay in lower passong and go to the bob marley hotel and ask him for some weed, because he will give you fistfuls. Enough that we carried weed with us for the entire rest of the trip and we didn't even finish it until we were done with the rest of the hike. It was really cool. So there you go. That is my. That is the overarching.
Speaker 1:I tried to get as many of the really cool things that happened and the cool conversations. I didn't even get to talk to you about the German girl and the hours of conversation that we had about her relationship and her having to go, no contact with this guy that she really, really loves. But she's 20 years old and then I realized that was almost twice her age and was like, wow, when did this happen? It was all kinds of cool stuff going on, but I can't fit it all into one episode, so I just hope that you go have an adventure like this on your own. It really wasn't that expensive like to get there. I stayed in the nicest hotel I've ever really stayed in one of them. I've stayed in in nicer but barely and I stayed there for a hundred dollars for the week in Pokhara in Nepal, also went to the sickest club of my entire life in Pokhara. So if you go, go to Nepal, go to Pokhara, go to the catwalk club, have the time of your life, do the Annapurna circuit.
Speaker 1:If anybody wants to do this and wants to get a hold of me, I still have my guide's number. Just shoot me a message and you can shoot me a message like leave a comment or whatever. Or you can email me at owlchrysalismedicine at gmailcom and I will be happy to put you in touch with my guide and my porter, because they were awesome. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. It's been cool going back over all of these incredible moments. I hope that you're inspired to go and adventure and I hope that you've got the information that you need to do so. I hope you have a marvelous weekend. Thank you very, very much and if you like this episode, please leave a comment, rate it, leave me a rating, leave a comment.
Speaker 1:The more of those I get, the better off everything is for me, the more people can find me and all that sort of thing. So thank you again. I appreciate y'all and remember, stay curious and stay uncomfortable. Thank you. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it. You said it, you.