Week 17: Another Harrowing Experience – Pokhara Nepal

Week 17:  Another Harrowing Experience
 
(Disclaimer:  There are some ugly pictures of me in this post.  But I’ve heard ugliness is true beauty, so I guess I should be a model)
 
Hello Everyone,
 
I’m writing to you feeling quite lucky to be alive.  After a slow start to the week it sure picked up.  This entry is going to focus on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and a little bit of the weekend recovery process.
 
Before we get to anything travel related I want to say how amazingly supported I feel by friends and family.  I expected to be searching for Beta Readers for weeks and thought I’d be lucky to get a dozen.  Well in just a few days over thirty people have volunteered to read and give feedback to me on my new book Into The Flame.  Thank you so much to everyone who has volunteered to read, it means a lot to me, and I do really appreciate it. I still welcome more readers for anyone interested let me know on facebook or email me your address so I can email you the file.
 
So, back to travel.  First off, I’m still in Pokhara, I can’t myself leave, though I promise I will this coming week; probably on Tuesday.  That said over the last few days barring the weekend I’ve done more and definitely gotten back that sense of adventure now that my batteries are recharged.
 
 
Just  chilling hard
Alright on to the meat of the post:  Wednesday was a peaceful and tranquil day for the most part as I had breakfast at Maya’s my favourite breakfast place here in Pokhara (Yes I’ve been here this long)  and then headed down to the lake to rent a boat for the second time.  I headed out onto the lake for the next 8 hours, paddling around, exploring still more hidden corners and even letting the boat drift for an hour as I read, alone in the middle of the lake.  It was a lot of fun but the highlight came in the later afternoon when I again stumbled upon a different and bigger family of monkeys, playing in the trees and on the cliffs.  They were a lot of fun to watch and this time I even managed to find a sketchy landing site and join them in the trees and rocks.  They seemed a little afraid, and certainly didn’t approach me but they didn’t run away either, just kept right on playing with each other.  It was all fun and games until I looked and saw a pretty little parade of leeches on both feet, impressive as I had only stepped in the water for about 5 seconds.  I retreated to my boat and pulled them off rather painfully, luckily only about 6 had latched on and bit, or so I thought.
Red faced as me come the end of Friday
 
After observing the monkeys for a while more I paddled further along through the channel leading towards Devi’s fall before spinning around and rejoining the monkeys for a bit, then paddling back as quickly as possible racing against the sun, stopping to pick up a couple of Nepali hitchhikers from the boat platforms and taking them to shore with me.
 
 
When I arrived on shore I felt a prick of pain and found an unseen leech with had latched on tom between two toes and feasted on my delicious blood for quite some time.  The combination of my own blood thinners, the leeches blood thinners they inject with you with, and the time it had to suck me dry it must have been pretty damn full, still I pulled it off and survived and luckily all of these leeches were on the small side.
 
I returned to the hostel and shared a delicious dinner, with my Belgian roommate who has returned from his trek, and a lovely German couple.  Good food, good conversation, and good laughs.  Just the beginning of our foursome relationship.  (Nothing sexual)
 
Rice Drying in the Sun.
The next day I decided to walk back out along the lake and the same thing happened to me as did my first day in Pokhara.  I intended to take an hour-long walk or so, and ended up walking 8 hours, until the sun was ducking behind the jungle covered hill horizon.  This time I brought some Pens with me, as one of the children on the first walk had actually thought to ask for a pen before asking for money or chocolate.  I passed the end of the lake quickly and just kept right on going.  Almost all the rice that had been growing tall on my first walk was gone, all harvested by the locals who were now drying it just about everywhere you looked and sifting through it.
 
 
Homework found on the ground.  Go Panda’s
Leaving the lakeside neighbourhood of Pokhara reminds you just how poor Nepal actually is, and even in my 8 hour walk I was in nowhere near  the poorest Areas.  I’m falling in love with this country though, and hope that one day I can come back for a longer period of time to volunteer teaching English in some small community.  I think it would be a wonderful experience.  Speaking of teaching, I found a kids homework on my walk and found it impressive, especially how they worked in reading, writing and panda’s in half a page.
 
I gave away all my pens before long and made some children very happy and arrived back in Pokhara at dusk, sweaty, exhausted, but very happy.  Of course even Thursday I was not left without scars as a rather large blister took shape on my pinky toe.
 
There are so many hawks and falcons in this part of the world.
 
 
 
 
At any rate, I had an amazing dinner of Pad Thai on my way back to Karma Guesthouse and spent the night working on some rewrites of my TV show project with the always sexy Ben Lewis of Authentic fame.
 
Friday was the highlight of my week in so many different ways, both good and bad.  It started early, that much is for sure, as we woke up at 4:45.  We being my Belgian roommate and the German couple.  We caught a taxi which our friendly guesthouse owner Chandra had booked for us to go up to the tiny hill top settlement of Sarangkot to watch the sunrise over the Himalaya’s.
 
On the taxi ride I was impressed by how many kids I saw up and waiting for school buses.    Hundreds of them up at 5 am, I’m told some take buses of up to 3 hours just to get to school.  It’s very easy to say poor people deserve to be poor and that if they just worked harder, they wouldn’t be.  Trust me the world does not work like that, all the Nepali people I have met not only work hard, but work well too.  Again I was left with a wish to come back here on a more long-term basis.
 
At any rate, the tax driver dropped us off most of the way up and we walked together in the darkness to a crowded but amazing viewpoint and settled down to watch one what was for me, the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen.  The way the light crested the peaks, dancing off the snow and gradually building into a soft fiery glow, before the actual sun appeared in the sky and quickly we were left to bathe in the dazzling view of the Himalaya’s which, despite being some distance off, seemed close enough to reach out and hold.
 
We retreated from the crowded viewpoint up into the tiny town and found a small family run guesthouse which made us some delicious Tibetan bread and let us sit on the rooftop and look out t the mountains.  The morning up to this point was pure and utter serenity.  I felt at peace.  I was in love with my life.  I was in awe of the beauty of this world.  Just look at the pictures.
 
False Dawn
 
The first glimmers of the sun.
Panoramic view
Me blocking the Panoramic view
The lake and Pokhara from above.
Quite a view from the breakfast balcony
We crossed a stream that fed that river later.
 
If the first half of the morning was white, the second half was black, but not in the evil way (wow that sounds racist but I mean in the fantasy mythology sense), just utterly different.  After breakfast we had decided to walk down the hill (really more of a mountain)  to visit a Tibetan refugee camp.  We asked around when we did not find the path and learned that a landslide had buried the path on our map many years ago, but locals gave us vague directions towards another way down.  We found a small and sketchy looking staircase into the jungle and asked some locals and they said “It is one way, there is many ways.”
 
Somehow we took that to mean go for it, so we headed down the staircase which soon disappeared and turned into a narrow, and overgrown dirt path which zig zagged through the forest, which disappeared and turned into nothing.  We, perhaps foolishly, tried to go cross country, stumbling on to what could only be game trails and forcing our way through a thick mountain jungle, looking for a way down.    The problem was, every path we took either had a bunch of fairly sheer and big drops, or the jungle just got so thick and thorny that pushing through was not an option.  We had not planned for a jungle trek, it was supposed to be a casual walk.  It turned into anything but that.  We spent almost four hours trying to work our way down with very little actual progress made, climbing on narrow mud and rock ledges and looking for any path down.  We were forced to backtrack so many times and the forest was thick enough that we could have very easily been totally lost, but luckily some of us had god directional sense.  At about 11 o’clock we decided to try to find our original path and head back up to the top and admit defeat, sadly easier said then done.  We finally managed to find what we believed to be our original path, but then my friend the Belgian found another way, a path down to a massive dry riverbed of stone which led down to the refugee camp.   The only problem, the path involved several sheer drops and lots of steep slippery descents.  I was skeptical, the german couple looked downright terrified.
 
Naturally I had to be the idiot who turned to them and said here, do you want to see me try to go down and then you can decide if you want to?  So I start to climb down, attempt a kind of jump and grab maneuver, but the roots in my grips break and the stone I am landing on gives and down I go, flying through the air, crashing to the ground and sliding a good distance through rocks and brambles before I finally manage to grab some rocks and stop my fall, just in time as the descent was about to get quite a bit steeper and quite a bit more dangerous.
 
The fall probably lasted all of 10 seconds but those ten seconds felt like hours.  My life did not flash between my eyes but time certainly compressed and I remember so many different things, the feeling of falling, complete helplessness, the instinct to pull my head up into my chest and reach out and catch myself, the cries of the Germans who I’d so bravely told to watch and then decide if they would go, and then the crunching first impact as I hit the ground, and then each individual impacts as I slid down over rocks and bushes.  I remember feeling terrified that I wouldn’t stop in time, I remember waiting for the deadly impact, and remember clutching at countless rolling rocks and roots, then I remember slowing down, and finally managing to stop my tumble.  As I think about it now, I find it interesting that I didn’t scream, I guess there was no time; or brain cells to spare.
 
I took a mental stock of my limbs and miraculously discovered nothing was broken, and said as much.  Slowly I climbed to my feet and found I was bleeding from just about every limb, but still alive, though I hurt everywhere.  I also discovered that there was no way in hell I wanted to climb back up the mountain now, then I discovered the trials weren’t done, as I shimmied my way down the steep and rocky hill attempting one of my favourite climbing maneuvers, the controlled slide.  Well  Control is a funny thing, and on two separate occasions it evaded me and left me careening down a rocky precipice on my bum just desperately trying to stop my forward momentum.  Needless to say more cuts came and I’m a bleeder now so my condition was not so great.  Here’s are the ugly pictures mentioned ate beginning of the post.  One of my wounds and one of me after reached the riverbed, using every pain handling technique I know not to scream.  Good luck not screaming yourself!
 
Worst Selfie ever,  I even got blood on my face.
Borderline Pornography?
I even cut myself through the sock.
 
Once I was at the bottom I found an easier path down for the others, and with the valiant help of my Belgian friend the Germans clambered down managing not to seriously hurt themselves.  We all found ourselves laughing in amazement and fear though I still was a little worried, my leg was hurting like hell and the rest of my body wasn’t doing that much better and we had a decent ways to go.  Still I emerged lucky to be able to walk, otherwise, the situation would have been a fair bit worse.
 
I limped my way down the riverbed and then we had to climb up and over a series of already harvested rice terraces before finally crossing a river, which was mercifully only knee deep.  Locals were down washing clothes at the river and all started looking at us like we were crazy.  They had good reason as we were covered in burs and I was if not quite bathed in blood, at the very least heavily speckled.  They asked us where we came from to we pointed up the mountain and they laughed again, apparently we are the first tourists any of them have ever seen come out of that stretch of forest, and after all we’d been through that made me feel a little proud.  I washed my wounds in the crystal clear water and then we finally stumbled up over the hillside and into the Tibetan camp where we found a small whole in the wall restaurant which felt like a mirage as we sat down, enjoyed ice cold coke in glass bottles, and seemingly endless buffalo Momo’s (delicious Nepalese dumplings).
 
I was still in a lot of pain, but the bleeding had stopped for the most part now and pain was starting to recede.  I felt more and more sure that no serious injuries had been sustained.
 
We stuck around town as my Belgian friend new there was incense ceremony going on at the Tibetan temple, so we spent an hour laying beside a soccer field watching local kids play and thanking our lucky stars we were alive.  I listened to music for some of that hour and must say it may have ben the most I’ve appreciated a good song in a long time.
 
The Gate to the Temple.
3 o’clock came and we hurried to the adjacent and incredible temple.  My camera was out of batteries so I only managed one shot and of course photography inside was banned.  Either way we ducked into the temple as all of the young Tibetan monastic students came rushing into the temple to avoid being late, somehow shedding their shoes without even slowing down from their full sprint.   We took off our shoes and ducked inside.  In the hour that followed I had probably the closest thing to a religious experience I have ever had sitting cross legged on the carpet  and listening to the incredible chanting and music.  I ended up in a state of trance like freestyle, just muttering rap lines and poetry under my breath as I swayed back and forth.  We were the only 4 tourists who stayed through the hole thing and I’m hoping it’s not my last such experience.  It has also given me some interesting ideas for the building blocks of a religion in one of my future novels which I’m starting to map out in my mind.
 
After the ceremony we met a nice taxi driver who took us back to our hostel at a good price and talked to me the whole way.  I’ve learned that I am too big for Nepali cars and every time it is interesting cramming myself in.  Another interesting thing is that in Nepal people are unafraid to point out my fatness, and general size.  Not in an insulting way at all, they seem more enthralled by my height and weight, but I will admit the first time a smiling small town Nepali woman  told me you are very fat, I was a little put off, now I’m used to it though, and if nothing else this three day cycle definitely took some weight off me and not just in blood.  Sweat too.
 
After a shower for all involved we joined up for dinner and feasted for real, laughing and recollecting what was likely the craziest days of my travels so far.  I got back from dinner and did a proper job cleaning my wounds using my excellent first aid kit (best money I ever spent) and then we headed to bed.  I was exhausted but relieved too, though for a while whenever I closed my eyes I felt myself falling I did manage to nod off.
 
Waking up the next morning was not fun, my whole body ached and today was only a bit better.  Only now in the evening is the soreness fading, the bruises still purpling though.  Still It could have been a lot worse, and it was a unique and one of a kind experience.  My leg is still sore enough that I don’t think I’ll be doing Poon hill trek, but still this one day adventure was incredible and a true taste of Nepal untamed.
 
This weekend was spent lazing around Pokhara, writing , shopping and shipping a small Christmas package home
 
I spent the weekend reflecting on how lucky I was, and how glad I am that I know how to fall well.  The Germans who’d watched my fall from above said if I hadn’t have tucked my head up, it would have crashed into a huge rock and I likely wouldn’t be writing this entry.  At least not with this positive tone.  It is the interesting thing about life though and something I’m discovering for the first time on this trip about myself.  I like risk.  I like fear. Not when sought out for that sole purpose but when it comes unexpectedly and I mange to conquer it.  I have no desire to go bungee jumping or sky diving (well almost no desire)  But three of the best days of my trip so far have involved unforeseen danger, in Malta swimming in the interior sea, into a cave which lets out to the sea and getting caught and thrown around by waves, just managing not to be smashed into the rocks.  In Bosnia climbing around Kravice falls and slipping near the top of them.  And now this wild jungle trek full of spills and thrills.   They’ve all been highlights, and I think that comes not specifically from danger, but from pushing my limits, and I’m looking for more opportunities to do that now, though with a little less danger involved for sure.  Even Hiking the Samaria gorge was a highlight, simply because before that I had no idea how I would cope with 20 km of steep downhill walking in a day.   I like stretching the elastic of my life, the tension is enthralling, and sometimes the best things happen when you are sure you can’t stretch that elastic any farther, when your hanging by a thread and your comfort zone is out of sight.  I fully intend to be more careful in the future but it is good to know that I like this kind of adventure, so, when appropriate, I can take measured risks and keep loving life.  (Dad don’t be scared, this all sounds crazier than it probably was and I’m fine)
 
Thanks for reading, and for those of you reading my book, I really hope you enjoy it.
 
Luke
 
Song of the week:  Fire in Freetown  by K’naan
 
 
My Belgian roommate introduced me to this song and I really enjoyed it.  I hope you do too.  When I saw a live cbc performance I couldn’t resist, being Canadian and all.
 
Reading Log:  Storm of Swords  by George R.R. Martin.

About Me

Instagram

Read previous post:
Week 16: Even the Energizer Bunny Needs to Chillax Sometimes – Pokhara Nepal

(Pictures will be added as soon as I get a decent enough internet connection)   Hello everyone I’m still in...

Close