China: Beijing & The Great Wall 20-23 Aug

Chinese currency: Yuan 10.62  (CNY) to £1 (GBP) Aug 2012

Leaving Nepal was difficult, on a late night flight to Beijing. It’s always funny to see the rest of the passengers checking in when going to a new country, you get a little taste of the place before you get there. There was a huge group of Chinese students, all with bright pink matching t-shirts being herded together by a women with a clipboard, a bright pink sign and a loudspeaker, telling them where to go, what to do, when to laugh and maybe even what to think. I hadn’t done a stitch of research on the place but no matter, I was only going to be there for three days before boarding the train.

My original plan was to spend three weeks in China before catching the Trans Siberian Railway to Moscow, but I loved Nepal so much that I left out China and got to Beijing the day that my booked trip started. I was joining a tour for the first time on my trip... organised by a company called Vodkatrain (Sundowners Overland) that specialised in Trans Siberian, Trans Mongolian and Silk Road train journeys. I wanted the last month of my trip to be as hassle free and painless as possible so that I wouldn’t have to need a holiday once I came home as is so often the case with travelling, so I was doing this the easy way, someone organising my tickets, transfers, accommodation, and with a local guide (usually a local student from the city) to meet as I got off at each stop. The trip lasts for 23 days with three days at the start and the finish to look around Beijing and then Moscow.

I had two flights to my destination with China Southern Airlines at 11pm that night, Kathmandu to Guangzhou which was four hours and then from there to Beijing taking three hours, so I only managed small amounts of broken sleep. On the second flight I was for some reason placed in business class and I didn’t want the flight to end, just wanting to sleep comfortably on their big chairs. The aircraft and flight attendants were nothing special, just a standard airline that was neither memorable nor bad. But when I got to Beijing early in the morning I waited in vain for my bag to come by me on the carousal because it wasn’t there. It took a really long time of frustrating gesturing, drawing on bits of paper and arm waving at the luggage enquiry desk,  using print outs of Google translate and all manner of communication other than English to work out what happened, to find out that my bag was held back in Guangzhou due to a dangerous object inside it. What was the object? Further communication efforts revealed it was a lighter, they held my checked in luggage back because there was a lighter buried somewhere inside it. Was this a joke? Has anyone ever heard of a lighter in a checked in bag being forbidden? I gave them a description of my bag, the combination to the lock on it and permission to open it and remove the catastrophic object. They promised it would be there the next day and I could collect it, and I left only in a mild state of panic knowing that I was leaving Beijing two days later. I was thinking to myself that I had had no problems whatsoever on my entire trip with luggage or cancelled flights or losing anything, so maybe it was about time. 

Working out the subway in Beijing is super easy, they have signs in English and if you've been on other train or subway systems in any other city it’s intuitive. It’s also much cheaper than taxi’s and way quicker than buses. I was heading to Jade Hostel near the Forbidden City, without my luggage. They had sent me instructions in English and Chinese which really saved me a lot of hassle, so I could stop and ask people and point it out to them. Jade Hostel is around a 15 min walk from Tienanmen subway station, but when I came out the subway I got really confused, everything was so huge, and modern. Coming from Kathmandu to Beijing was a culture shock to say the least. Huge roads teeming with shiny new cars (all following the road rules), huge skyscrapers and government buildings and everything new and clean and hot and in working order. There were no signs in English, and the map I had with names of the roads in Chinese didn’t correlate with the signs I saw, so it was a bit of a job finding my way at first. I just couldn’t take in how big and intimidating everything was.

I found Jade Hostel eventually, tired from travelling all night with no sleep, the lost bag fiasco and the assault on the senses of such a place. The hostel is okay, more like a hotel but with dorm beds. The rooms were clean and the beds decent, the staff could speak English which really helped too. There wasn’t an atmosphere of a hostel though, just a big reception and an empty restaurant, this wasn’t a Western style hostel with a vibrant atmosphere of backpackers so if that’s what you’re looking for in Beijing then Jade hostel isn’t it. I went straight to sleep in the air conditioned room and woke up to find Julia in the room, a friendly Australian girl. We chatted for a bit and then discovered that she was also in Beijing for a Vodkatrain journey, but unfortunately not the same one I was on. Her group were doing a shorter version of my trip, with fewer stops. We spent the next couple of days wandering around Beijing and taking a trip to the Great Wall together.

I met the group I was going to spend the next 23 days with that evening. There were four Australian girls; twin sisters Bec and Aimee and their friend Jen, and Alison who was taking a long holiday from work, all of them from Sydney. Julia’s group were also all Australian except for one British girl, and I discovered this was because it was an Australian company and all Australians take the route from Beijing as it was closer to them, and on to Moscow. The people starting in Moscow and went the other way were mainly Europeans which made sense. I got in touch with the tour company and asked them if I could change to Julia’s group because I really got along with her and they were all more my age, my group were much younger than me and didn't have too much else in common. But they said I couldn’t change that late in the day as everything was planned and booked.

So I had three days in Beijing to roam around and soak it in. The main thing to do was of course to go see the Great Wall. There are a few different areas to visit the wall, and it is possible to do on your own but the easiest way and not that much more expensive than going it alone is to go in a minibus organised by your hostel with a group. The cheapest and easiest option if you do want to go on your own is to go to Badaling on a local bus but there are thousands of local tourists doing that and you won’t get any part of it to yourself at all. I decided to go to Jinshanling which is a three hour minibus trip away from Beijing. I organised it through my hostel at Yen300 (we worked out to do it ourselves would be around Yen200 and would take ages figuring out buses and taxis) and it was definitely well worth it. Julia and I decided to go together while the Aus girls took a different, closer trip to Mutianyu where you can take a toboggan ride down the hill.

Jinshanling is far enough out of the city to feel like you're properly in the countryside being a few hours outside of Beijing, and it's peaceful and quiet. It was a glorious, sunny day with wall to wall blue sunshine and the bright green rolling mountainous landscape stretching out as far as the eye could see almost completely uninterrupted, except for the snaking grey road appearing and disappearing among the folds of the landscape. There was no city or buildings in site, which made it feel extra remote and special. You could look out at kilometres of wall hugging the high points of the hills and not see a single person, and there were parts of the wall still in its original state and then parts that were renovated to their former glory, so it  was a good taste of all states of the wall.  You can hike along the wall for around 4km to another section but I think that was recently closed, but people still trek to points that are deserted and camp there. It isn’t fun to mess with highly strung Chinese officials who can’t speak English though! The sun was scorching hot, and we walked briskly at first up and along the undulating wall, up stairs and through corridors and under archways, and then more slowly as the day wore on, gasping in the heat, trying to make our way to the farthest point we could before having to turn back to make our bus.

The road to Beijing

There were little sun shrivelled old men and women with their identical grass hats and flowered blouses selling drinks from ice buckets along the way, most of the bottles of water were solid blocks of ice. They were much needed, the late summer sun was making us dehydrate like crazy with the steep extreme steep staircases and lack of shade. But how lucky we were to have this superb blue sky and sunshine, most of the time Beijing is grey and smoggy. It was fantastic to be amongst only a tiny handful of people on the wall too, the further we went the less people we saw until there was nobody, sometimes just a man in the corner of a facade with an ice bucket of lemonade flavoured ice pops and water.

Most tourists who visit the wall are Chinese. We were told that there aren't many days holiday generally given and not many people have the money to travel abroad, so there is a lot of internal tourism. We were an anomaly as Western tourists, and people would often ask to have their photo taken with us or would (not so) slyly take pictures of us as we walked along, doing all kinds of hilarious acrobatics to pretend they were taking pictures of something else instead of us when we caught them out. 

Included in the cost of the day was lunch in a huge, almost totally empty Jade Museum / shop. Most tours will take tourists to some kind of Jade shop but some can be just a cattle market to sell aggressively and ends up annoying most people. Our lunch just happened to be in the museum and we weren’t herded around to try buy anything, although there were some beautiful pieces there. Lunch was yum, rice and sweet and sour fried stuff and warm spicy cucumber. We had to pay for drinks though, Yen10 for water when it’s usually Yen3 so it wasn’t technically a ‘free’ lunch. The minibus was fast and comfortable though, and the roads! So smooth and without potholes, I had genuinely forgotten what it was like to drive in a straight line on a smooth road, I nodded off like a little baby because of the gentle lull of the car, something I hadn’t done in months. We left at 7am and had around four hours on the wall which was perfect, and got back after lunch around 5pm. It’s a good day out and I can recommend it.

The rest of the time my tour group of the four Aussie girls hung out with our local guide for Beijing, Snow. They went to the Forbidden City and saw Tiananmen Square which is the main focal point of Beijing and has huge cultural and historical significance (and only walking distance from our hostel). But I wanted to see more of the living culture of Beijing since I only had one day left, and not so much the deadened, museum-like history that was stamped and approved by the rulers. If I had more time I would have definitely checked out those things, but as it was I had a great time riding around on the subway, getting out at random stations and just wandering around looking at markets, side streets and lanes trying to soak up and understand a little of what made China's major city tick. 

Panoramic view of Tiananmen Square - Wikipedia pic

I went to the main markets to see if I could find some funky, outlandish clothes but there really wasn't much like that. Beijing seemed very conformist to me, I didn't see a lot of individuality. They had this sign up everywhere, sometimes on huge billboards: Patriotism, Innovation, Inclusiveness, Virtue. Beijing Spirit. 

PATRIOTISM, INNOVATION, INCLUSIVENESS, VIRTUE. BEIJING SPIRIT

It didn't feel too different from any other major, first world city. The underground was packed, huge and hot but it worked well. There were huge buildings everywhere that weren't particularly ugly nor beautiful. Everything was modern, but sometimes a tiny shred of unforced and unguarded historical culture would seep through somewhere, reminding me that I was in fact in China. Everything is in Chinese but most people (always young) I stopped could speak a few words to help me in the right direction. Not speaking the language isn't a huge hinderance when exploring this city at all, as long as you have a good map. There is wifi everywhere too but many things are blocked, mainly Facebook and most of Google's products, like documents or Blogger. You can use Google search, but many things are unsearchable and you may even get a threat to have Google use cut off if you continue to try search for forbidden things. 

I found a great Beijing style fast food place to have lunch in. Everyone sits in rows, and you get your own section with a hot plate with a pot of boiling water and a ladle. You then choose from a selection of soup bases, meat or fish, vegetables and sauce. You then get this huge plate of vegetables like carrot, spinach, green beans, mushrooms, lettuce and some things I didn't recognise, and hidden amongst them are dumplings, crab sticks and tofu. I had shrimps and these came raw on a huge plate of their own, way too much food for one person but it was all so good I stuffed my face until I could almost get most of it down. I had to get help from the bemused group of businessmen sitting next to me, they showed me how to cook all the raw food in my broth and then use the small bowls for dipping. It was a lot of fun to sit there cooking all this delicious food and then eating it fresh. I got quite a few glances, I guess most tourists would go to Macdonalds or Subway instead of the more difficult (but way more fun) China style fast food place. 

Julia and I did some night time wandering too and found a night  food market. There were many stalls all lined up next to each other, but they all sold pretty much the same thing so they were probably all run by the same company. There was a lot of sea creatures on sticks and tentacles of octopus or squid bursting out of every container, and lots of other weird ick looking meat displays. They seem to have a real obsession with seafood or any kind of animal product, I didn't like looking at it. I had some corn on the cob and some dumplings, and we tried to sit on the stairs of a big hotel but we got shoed off by a man who made gestures to show us that people pissed all over the stairs at night, so we had a lucky escape. The streets where buzzing on the huge main road with lights and shops open and the market, even though it was only a Tuesday night. We had some really bright fruit covered in sugar too and had a little sugar rush. 

One thing that was really annoying about central Beijing was the amount of people out to scam tourists. A typical one was that a friendly student would start talking to you, pretending to want to practice their English. They are always young, innocent looking and super friendly, so it's really easy to be drawn in. They ask if you want to go to a teahouse and then while you're ordering your tea they order all kinds of food and wine, which you'd probably refuse. Then when they bill comes they force you to pay half, and its always a ridiculously huge amount like 3000 yuan. It happened to poor Julia, she ended up paying over a $150 after hanging out with two girls for the afternoon. I think its the calculating, cold way these people scam, I can handle a pickpocket or bag grabber but this sneaky way of ripping tourists off is really shitty, and must say something of the pride they have for their city and their psyche.

The night before we were set to leave Beijing I still hadn't had my bag. The receptionist at Jade Hostel really tried to help me out by phoning them a few times, and each time getting a different answer. First it was ready for me to pick up, then it was still in Guangzhou and it was on the next flight to Beijing, then the flight was delayed and my bag would be late too, then they actually hadn't sent it to Beijing at all and had lost it, because the luggage label had come off. Then they asked for a new description of the bag which I had to write down again, then they forgot what the 'dangerous' object was (the stupid lighter) that they needed to take out. It was a frustrating song and dance and I thought there really would be no hope, I would spend the next month without my luggage and they would end up sending it to somewhere in Mongolia or deepest Russia and I would never see it again. Just when I thought all was lost after hours of banging mine and the receptionists head against the wall, they all of a sudden said they 'found' a bag matching my description on a conveyer belt in Beijing, and delivered it late that night. When I got it I looked inside and there was no lighter and no one had opened it. Thanks for all that fun China Southern Airways!

In the evening of the third day we got everything together and set off for the train. I was epically excited, the last leg of my journey, the romantic lull of the train and strange lands all lay before me and I couldn't wait to get on the move. 

Let the Trans Siberian Railway begin! 

Here are the China pics. 

Nepal: Lower Mustang 13-19 Aug

So it was back on the bus to Pokhara for me, happy with the company of Ido. We planned to go to Lower Mustang to trek as it was the only rainless trekking area in Nepal at that time of year that wasn’t a restricted area. Upper Mustang would have been amazing too but it costs $500 for a ten day permit besides all the other costs and hassle that goes with organising a trek in that area. But, in Lower Mustang you can get a taste for the scenery and culture that the magic of restricted Upper Mustang holds. Because we only had a few days (it was the 12^th by the time we left for Pokhara, and I had a flight to Beijing on the 19^th) the plan was to fly to the tiny airport at Jomson and then hike that area – Jomsom to Muktinath – Muktinath to Totapani.

I knew this bus route from Kathmandu to Pokhara well now, Blue Sky Travels again with the same tasty food stops in the muggy sweltering heat. Pokhara remained lovely, with the lake glistening in the heat and the lazy low season chugging on, though like Thamel it was filling up as low season was coming to an end. The evenings began to have the slightest of chills. It was back to Yeti Guesthouse who remembered me from all those solitary days I had there a couple of weeks back. We went straight to a travel agent to ask about all the details on getting to Jomsom. There had been many serious landslides on the route that we wanted to take (between Ghasa and Totapani) so a jeep couldn’t drive all the way from Pokhara to Jomsom, and even if it could you wouldn’t want it to at Rs70,000 ($600 USD). And you’d be bumping along a crazy road for an entire day, changing jeeps after every landslide. So the easiest and cheapest option was to fly to Jomsom from Pokhara for $95 and a twenty minute flight. We were lucky in that we could still go without a guide, though the law is changing very soon to say that everyone needs a guide even though you really don’t need it on the Annapurna circuit. The permit was more expensive if you’re guideless, around $25 instead of $20. (This is for Lower Mustang, the non restricted area of Mustang) All in all for the flight and permits needed came to Rs12,500 - £89. A bargain if you asked me, to trek one of the most beautiful areas in Nepal.

Ido had come from India and so was happy to find all the nice restaurants and coffee places in Pokhara, we treated ourselves to some nice food. On the lake you can hire boats so we took one out at sunset. The lake is clean and a beautiful dark blue-green, surrounded by mountains and if the clouds have completely cleared (not often at this time of year) you can see the Annapurna snow-topped range in the distance. The boat costs Rs300 an hour and has some really heavy awkward wooden oars so it’s not that easy to row across the lake, much better to row to the middle and float around getting lazily rosy cheeked on red wine.

The next day we set off ready for our flight and our trek, all very excited. But when we got to the airport early in the morning it turned out that the flights were cancelled, and had been for the last two days because of clouds and wind around Jomsom. Gutted! We sat and played chess at the tiny airport until lunch time to see if anything changed, but they were completely cancelled that day. There was no flying in the afternoon because of the strong winds in that comes each afternoon to the area. 

Pokhara Airport

No matter, Pokhara is a place I could definitely spend more time although we only had one more day to make the flight work otherwise we’d have to call off that trek, our days were numbered. It was a scorching hot day and we walked back the 45min from the airport to the centre. That afternoon we took another boat out onto the cool, dark green lake and jumped in to swim which was all I felt like doing, it was so hot. It’s not appropriate to wander around in swimwear so the opportunity to swim without having an entire bank full of revellers gawping at you is to escape to the middle of the lake in absolute privacy of water and mountains.

We got to the airport next day at 5am, one hour before the first flight when it was still dark and the place wasn’t even open. It was more like a bus station than an airport, it was that casual and tiny. Things were looking good, as the dark lifted it revealed the grey outlines of the Annapurna range which I’d never even seen from Pokhara so often were they obscured by clouds. As the light grew more orange-pink and the warm rays of sun broke out from the horizon the snow topped peaks became sharpened against the clear baby-blue sky, it was an incredibly beautiful and perfect morning and we were again extremely lucky, the weather hadn’t been this good for days.

Sunrise at the airport

The flight was definitely going ahead, and after being frisked and our bags searched in a small booth we walked out onto the tarmac to see our tiny propeller plane which scared the living daylights out of me, I’m scared of flying at the best of times. I think it’s the claustrophobia of the tiny space and not being able to escape that really gets to me, and this plane was seriously tiny. The propellers made a huge racket warming up to take off, this was no pressurised cabin and the noise of the engines and wind were deafening. I expected an extremely bumpy take off and flight, but the mountain air was still for us with no wind and so the take off and flight was quite smooth, thank goodness. My palms were sweaty and my chest tight, not sure how I would have coped with the tiny plane flailing about on the wind too. And the scenery was astonishing. We got to see the Annapurna range from the top on a clear day. The mountains and valleys were dark green and the very highest (from around 8000m) were topped with glinting glistening snow. These are the crowning moments that make up my travels!

Landing is always when I have the worst time (ever since I had a serious near death experience landing in the worst gales that England had in over 100 years once when I was arriving in London from South Africa one January) and so when the plane started its descent amongst the mountains I had to bury my face and cover my ears in my lap. The fumes from the engines were also making me gag and when the landing came amongst the wall of mountain I felt woozy as hell. But who cares! I was in Jomsom, lower Mustang, with the Annapurna range splayed across the sky like a mountainous feast.

The Lonely Planet ‘Trekking in Nepal’ describes Jomsom as not being pleasant, but actually it was one of the nicest villages I saw on this route. We left the tiny airport and were directly on the main street which was paved in grey slate and lined with comfortable looking guesthouses, small mountain shops, a restaurant or two and some other village necessities like banks and the collection points for trekking permits. It looked like somewhere I could definitely spend more time, but time we did not have. It was now the 14^th of August and I had to be back in Kathmandu on the 19^th for my flight. We were straight on the route to Kagbeni. This area was extremely different to the Annapurna trek I did before. The ABC trek was soaking wet, hot and bursting with forest and greenery,  had well worn paths that hugged the side of a smaller, deeper valley. Lower Mustang in comparison is bone dry, with a sharp, blue, cloudless sky, a steady wind in the afternoon and almost no greenery, just the beautiful endless mountain desert.

Jomsom main road

I love this landscape; it brought back all the happy memories of Ladakh in India. The high altitude and the expansive, empty desert with epic, huge mountains and valleys dipping and towering at every angle makes me feel clear headed, tiny, problems insignificant, and spiritually connected with the hugeness of space. The way to Kagbeni was all these things, along a huge river valley of ancient mountain rocks gorged out by millions of years of steady water flow.

Recently a road has been built between Muktinath and Ghasa which the Trekking in Nepal Lonely Planet guide mentions, saying that makes this trek ‘over’. But if you could see the road that statement would be absurd. The ‘road’ is a rough track gauged out the mountainside, twisting and winding around the most landslide susceptible landscape I’ve ever seen. Just putting a foot wrong would see you tumbling down the mountain and straight into the ravine, which genuinely almost happened to us. Between Jomsom and Muktinath it’s drier and so the road survives a bit better, and I’m sure that in high season it’s a bit busier but really, this is no highway. If you didn’t know there was supposed to be a road there, you would probably mistake it for just a rough mountain track or part of a river. At one point, between Jomsom and Kagbeni, we had to take off our shoes and socks and wade across a freezing river that just appeared in the middle of the rocky valley. Two jeeps were trying to get across this river too as it was the ‘road’, and one of them was half submerged in the rocks and water and the other had a rope tied to its bumper trying to pull it out.

Crossing the river in the 'road'

The route were taking was delightfully clear of people in this low season, and we just couldn’t believe or understand why. The sky was clear blue with no hint of rain in this area. The days were sunny and long, warm in the day getting crisp and chilly in the evenings. The mountain peaks shone and glistened at the tips with snow in the mornings, and at their highest point were just covered in the afternoon by some rainless clouds. It couldn’t have been more perfect for trekking.

We decided to spend a night in Kagbeni, an ancient Buddhist village that is also the ‘gateway to Mustang’, it’s as far as you can get (officially, we found out that you can get further if you wanted to into Mustang, another six hours walk from Kagbeni on an alternative route to Muktinath). It’s nestled into the valley with very comfortable, friendly guesthouses. These guesthouses are also homes so it’s as if you’re staying with a village family, making them it extra bit special. We stayed in Hotel Shangrila which was a big old wooden house with an open mezzanine hall making it really spacious and airy, but also at the same time traditional and cosy with a dining room on the top floor with all glass walls so you can gaze out onto the mountains. As with everywhere we stayed in the area, the food was freshly made with lots of love and care, one of the best things about trekking in Nepal, and so cheap. There was dal bhat of course, and mushroom soup and oats with locally grown apples.

The village has tiny old lanes of crumbling ancient Buddhist monasteries and homes, but there is also a lot of building work going on there as in the rest of the area, probably to accommodate all the thousands of trekkers that come here in high season. But now in low season we had the whole place to ourselves, the only guests at Hotel Shangrila, seeing other trekkers infrequently.

Hotel Shangrila

Kagbeni

Kagbeni

Kagbeni orchards

There were many apple orchards in this area that they make brandy and cider out of. There is a small restaurant that is just newly opened near the check post on the river, where the entrance to the restricted Mustang is (and past that the Tibetan plateau), and there they had scrumptious home-made cider that was strong and scented of the apples in the area.

Gazing out towards Upper Mustang from the edge of Kagbeni

The plan was to walk all the way to Muktinath the next day. Blazing sunshine and wall to wall blue sky was the morning greeting. The path lead through the apple orchards and their green and red apples, I picked and ate one and it was tangy and delicious.

 Not wanting to follow the road all the way we ended up following another track that lead to ledge on the mountainside that was virtually a vertical drop into the ravine so we had to scale up a rocky and landslide prone mountainside to get back up to the road. It was treacherous and fun at the same time... there wasn’t much to hold onto except some gnarly small shrubs and rocks that broke off into fragments erratically. We got to road eventually sweaty and panting to find the most dazzling view. Dramatic valleys of rock and the bright green patches of the cultivated land of the villages that lay here and there along bottom of the valley next to the river, with the striking peaks of the mountains against the bright blue sky. We were high up now, above 3500m, where your breath becomes shorter and your head clearer. Buddhist prayer flags dotted at the high points lent picturesque colour to browns of the mountains. It was all just so stunning.

As we got higher up the mountainside the landscape became greener with more crops and farms of hay and apples, grass with horses grazing and summer flowers blooming. We stopped in Jharkot which is a village just before Muktinath for lunch, and it turned out to be one of the prettiest villages I’d yet seen. Tiny warrens of ancient buildings toppled over and around each other, hundreds of years old. There was a 500 year old Buddhist monastery and the whole place had an ancient historical atmosphere, a true Buddhist mountain village in Lower Mustang. We had lunch in one of two guesthouses open in the village (it looked like there was only three in total) of salad and yak momos (I got an addictive taste for yak momos from our previous stop, I think I also was craving protein after so many months of vegetarianism) and again it was made deliciously and with love by the women of the house. The salad was a work of art...

Jharkot

We left Jharkot after lunch for Muktinath, our highest destination at 3800m and the last village before the Thorung La Pass at 5400m which unfortunately we didn’t have time to climb on this trek. Instead of scaling Thorung La the plan was to turn back along the way we came and then continue to Totapani in the opposite direction. We planned to stay in Muktinath which only took 20 minutes to climb to from Jharkot, but were met by a very disappointing site. Muktinath appeared as an ugly big village that lead you in on a wide throughway that was a building site from start to finish. There were no alleyways, interesting nooks or even very old buildings or the feeling of history that seeped from every other village. There was tons of new building going on, with a disgusting concrete square hotel smack in the middle of the town, banging and building and dust and dirt and piles of rubble and machinery dotted all around. Maybe once this was a pretty town that now was being flattened by building and ignorant officials who thought that what tourists most wanted was concrete hotels. The Trekking in Nepal Lonely Planet guide gushes about Muktinath being a beautiful place and somewhere you should stay with a vibrant atmosphere, which is so weird, I can’t see how this village is more beautiful or better than the quaint, friendly and pretty village of Jharkot, for instance. The views of the mountains are beautiful there though so it’s worth the climb, but take my advice and go back down to Jharkot to spend the night, it’s nicer in every way.

Muktinath

View from Muktinath

Once back there we met a friendly man who grew up in the village but now was a businessman elsewhere and was back to visit, and could speak a bit of English. There were cute kids running around and also very funny dogs, one that was following us got into a spat with the dog that ran things at the monastery. He was waiting on the roof as we looked around, and chased the dog away that had followed us from Muktinath. They love sitting on the roofs in this part of the world, I noticed. Also chickens and any other small domestic or non domestic animals around, maybe because of the way the buildings are layered on top of each other on the hillsides.

After a night in Jharkot it was back down the valley the way we came to Kagbeni. We were to do an epic amount of walking that day, trying to get all the way to Marpha. Even after agreeing to take the faster, main route we still managed to get lost trying to be clever taking a shortcut. It only ended with us huffing and puffing back up a steep valley to the main path again. Back in Kagbeni we ate apricots off the trees and had a yak burger at Yak Donald’s (note, get your own burger they aren’t big enough to share, and are so delicious you won’t want to). We sped down to Jomsom which was where we started, there is a strong headwind on this route on most days and walking against it became a real effort, for me anyway. But we didn’t slow the pace, and after around six hours of hard walking we stopped at Krishnu Guesthouse (where Jimi Hendrix famously stayed) and had some coffee and Tibetan bread with yak cheese, one of my favourite meals on the trek. There we met an Australian guy who was cycling the trail, and this involved carrying your bike and gear over many, many areas too rough to cycle. Very hardcore, that’s all I can say. We saw a New Zealander also doing this along the way, it looked utterly amazing to be alone in the mountains with next to no possessions, but I can’t imagine how physically difficult it must be. This was just enough energy for the final push to Marpha.

Yak Donalds Kagbeni

Jomsom

The sun was going down but the wind was still relentless, only quietening down just as darkness fell and we were safe in Marpha. The scenery after Jomsom became more and more beautiful, dark greens and greys and dramatic mountains covered in pine forest, with the river flowing faster and more energetically over the millions of smooth grey stones that made up the valley bed. The sun was dropping and so was our energy, but we powered on and passed speedily by a few more trekkers also heading to Marpha who were surprised to find other trekkers on that route at that time, racing along. There were also buses on this rough mountain pass but none that would take us at that time of the evening.

Eventually just before nightfall we reached the stunning town of Marpha, famous for being the Southernmost Buddhist community in the world (they are all centred around Tibet, Bhutan etc) and also for brandy, there being many apple orchards in the area. I picked another apple en route that was delicious and crunchy. They made lots of things out of this diverse crop... brandy (which was famous and even exported) cider, apple pie, apple crumble, apple juice, dried apple. It was all so yum.

As with everywhere else Marpha was almost completely empty and if felt as if we had the whole village to ourselves. I think this must have been my favourite village on the trek overall, and I wished with all my heart that we could stay there for longer and climb the mountains and discover the ancient monasteries dotted around, and the old ancient part of the village that is set deeper into the surrounding mountains and valleys. There was no building work going on in this village, it was neat, small, ancient and complete, with a big main monastery proudly set in the hillside (being looked over by a tiny three hundred year old monastery precipitously wedged into a steep big of mountain) with a meditation retreat right behind it. I longed to spend a week or more there. We found a friendly, homely guesthouse along the main pathway of the village, where the owner greeted us like old friends and treated us with such devotion, making fresh delicious food for dinner with his wife, and plying us with the local cider and brandy to keep us warm. We had walked for eight hours that day and covered quite a distance, and so needed lots of sustenance.

Marpha main monestary

Three hundred year old monastery 

There were many equally lovely looking guesthouses in the village and also some tourist shops selling yak wool scarves or Tibetan jewellery, but there were next to no tourists there at that time of year so it was mainly the village locals buzzing with the evening’s activities of chatting to neighbours and children playing together.

It was very sad to leave early the next morning but I vowed to go back to Marpha one day. It was now the 17^th and I had to be in Kathmandu by the 19^th, a little ambitious but made possible by being able to take a mountain bus from Marpha to Ghasa, walking from Ghasa to Totapani for four hours, staying the night in Totapani and taking another bus an hour walk away from there to Beni, and then taking a taxi from Beni to Pokhara where I’d catch the next morning’s bus to Kathmandu. Phew!  The bus from Marpha to Ghasa cost Rs700 which seemed quite steep for the two and a half hour ride, but the roads were crazy and treacherous so maybe that was why, also of course it was a tourist not local price. While we waited for the 8:30am bus some local children came to watch us play chess, noisily commenting on the best moves and pointing them out to us. They were very sweet, energetic and curious of us and after putting the chess set away they pranced around us, confidently taking our cameras to take pictures and laugh at themselves.

The bus took us through some more beautiful landscape that I would have much loved to walk not drive through, stopping for dahl, fried bread and chai for breakfast and then carrying on with the just eaten food bouncing and lurching in the stomach. This was the ever crazy, jagged, boulder strewn roads of Nepal’s mountains at their best. From Ghasa to Totapani were some quite unbelievable landslides. The bus would stop when it came to one and everyone would gather their things (some families with babies and huge loads) get out the bus, climb over a huge pile of boulders and rocks from a landslide, and find the next bus waiting on the other side. This happened over and over again so that progress was really slow, and I was glad to get off at Ghasa and walk the four hours to Totapani. I’ve never in my life seen roads such as these; I can’t even believe that vehicles attempt to drive through them. It’s like an assault course set up by the mountain for its own amusement.

This was now the Western route of the Annapurna II trek, and the scenery became more like my Annapurna Base Camp trek. It was hotter, wetter, with closer valleys with much denser forest. It rained a bit but then the blazing sun came out making the day extremely hot. It was really beautiful though, of course, but just so different from the dry desert mountains left behind only a few hours away further north. We got to Totapani hot and sweaty, finding a big old wooden guesthouse with rooms set in a jungle-like garden with steps leading down to the village hot springs. It was the same idea as the hot springs at the ABC trek I did, but definitely not as pretty or as rustic, more like an artificial square of swimming in a fenced in area. We took an evening walk along the main pathway of the village and ate some local rice snacks, sitting amongst the locals chatting amongst themselves in groups of young men, mothers with babies and little kids excitedly chattering as the sun went down. The electricity was out, and you could see studious children sitting at desks doing their homework by candlelight. We ate and played chess by candlelight too, spending an evening in that soft natural light is always a pleasure and a novelty.

Because of all the landslides, getting to Beni meant some more walking of around an hour and a half (including a little bit of steep, tiring climbing) through the muddy, hot pathways of the now wet Annapurna trail. The culture and people changed instantly from Buddhist to Hindu, and we saw some smartly dressed pilgrims sweating and hoisting their skirts up from the heat, asking us directions to an unknown to us site. Eventually we found the bus to Beni after climbing on a slippery muddy path close to the mountain, next to a powerful river. There was a road (of sorts) and a collection of buses surrounded by some chai stands. Some men were hoisting a motorbike belonging to a foreigner that had obviously broken down, straight onto the top of the bus. It took about ten men and a quite gargantuan effort to do this, but these Nepali’s would have put a house on top of the bus if that’s what someone needed. We climbed onto a packed bus and set off on the crazy road, sliding, I’m sure very nearly into the ravine, at every turn. After an hour the rickety old bus stopped abruptly and everyone got out, it had run out of petrol and a boy had to run to the closest village to fill a big bottle up with some to bring back. The bus passed by villages so closely to the shacks that lined the side of the road that you could see what the family was eating on their dinner plate, or what board games the children were playing at their little tables. The extra height of bus because of the motorbike meant that sometimes someone had to climb on the bus to move aside electricity wires, with no hassle or objection, I’m sure they did that every day.

Putting a motorbike on the top 

Funny video of us bumping around

I never got car sick before, but after months of sitting on all these absolutely insane bus rides I really started to feel it, and couldn’t wait to get off after around two and a half hours later when we finally arrived in the small town of Beni. There, thank goodness, we could get a taxi the two hours to Pokhara. There was a Spanish couple there who wanted to do the same, and after a breakfast of boiled egg, Tibetan bread and tea we thankfully got into the car and looked forward to a smoother road. The taxi cost Rs3000 between four of us and was totally worth it.

We made it back to Pokhara hot, tired and happy. We did the trek in four days which was very fast, but still completely stunning and worth it. I can’t wait to go back to go into Mustang again one day, which I most definitely will do. Everything worked out perfectly even on the tightest of schedules and as always with these things I’m so happy I took the risk and made the effort to do something like that instead of playing it safe.

The bus the next morning to Kathmandu was long and hot, and after one last race around Thamel and my last dahl bat at Or2K, I made my way to the airport to board the plane to China. I had absolutely not mentally prepared myself for the insane clash between Beijing and Nepal, I hadn’t thought about it (or wanted to) at all. I loved Nepal with all my heart and would have stayed there much longer if I could have, but I will be back one day.

To Beijing, and the first world!

Here are the pics.