Do What Now?

I was thinking about just fast forwarding through the five months we worked in BC, cos who really wants to be reminded of working 100+ hours every week for an entire summer? Really, though, it was peculiar enough that it does warrant a mention.

But not right now.

Right now we're on a train, en route from Toronto to Montreal. Lovely Wife is asleep, or so the noises and drooling suggest.

Just spent 5 days in Toronto. Had a blast.

The next week is in Montreal and Quebec City, then we're off to Cuba for a 3-week cycle tour.

Then there's a month back in Canadialand, playing in the snow, before we leave on an aerioplane for Bangkok. And then biking Thailand/Laos/Vietnam/Cambodia/Thailand before flying to NZ via Oz.

So, Southern Hemispholks, we'll see you in a few months. Northerners, get yourself ready for some farewell hugging.

 

Whistling

Short Version:
Freeski? Non! Free ski!

 

Long Version:

Last time we were in Whistler, Nene won her first Canadian National Championship*. Hooray!

The loot from her victory was cheese, and a pair of Whistler-Blackcomb Winter Season Passes. We’d originally thought they were dishing us Summer Passes, and that we had several months of gravity-fed mountain-biking to look forward to. We were disappointed at first to find that we were being invited to participate in winter sports instead, but warmed to the idea over the next year and a half, and arrived in Whistler geared up, revved up, and ready to go.

Except that there’d been no Puppet-skiing for over twenty years, and Nene had only ever done half a day, as a university student**, on NZ’s North Island icefields.

The obvious best course of action under those circumstances was, of course, for Tim and I to wind Nene up mercilessly about how difficult learning to ski was, and how much pain and unfun she should be expecting, to the point where, by the time it was time to actually hit the slopes, she was… less-than-enthusiastic. And had no idea what she was supposed to actually DO, as we’d steadfastly refused to actually impart any information of actual value***

Luckily, a friendly Sunshine Coaster took pity on her and gave her some instruction on how to put skis on, and to execute a pizza wedge. Which she did. With irritating ease.

We were slow, we were clumsy, but we were skiing, and we kept doing it pretty much every day for three months. We had visitors from Canadialand and Orstralia and Nuzzilind, we played disc golf in the snow equipped with snowshoes and cinnamon whisky, we barbecued bacon in the snow, visited a trainwreck become graffitoed bikepark, . We drank good beer and read good books.

And then we left, and went to work.

 

 

 

 

* = Details at http://neneandthepuppet.blogspot.ca/search?q=cheese

** = ie probably drunk

*** = To be fair, it’s entirely possible that only one of us actually HAD any information to withhold.

Long Time No Rant

Short Version:
We’ve done some stuff

Long Version:
When we last wrote, we were in Barcelona*, cycling around seeing cool and/or mad stuff, and hanging with Senor Brettus, Senora Sylvia, and hombre poquito Miquel. We left after a week feeling like we’d just scratched the surface, and that Barcelona still held a bunch of cool shit we’d like to see.

We also left hungover, and with the beginnings of what would eventually be diagnosed as pneumonia, which I advise you all to not get.

A week or so of coughing and spluttering later, antiXmas rolled into town, with ye olde festertivities and animal feet/head slippers.

And then onwards and upwards, to Whistler, and to snow action.








* = Actually, we were in Whistler, but the subject matter was Barcelonan. Do you feel cheated?

Cacophony of Yap

Short Version:
Barcelona on bike, and buses, and feets. Xmas poop.

Long Version:
Barcelona has a robust and mature public hire-bicycle system, named bicing. It's widely-available and widely-used, by all manner of Barcelonans.
Unfortunately, it's only available to locals*.
Fortunately, we were able to borrow not only bicycles, but also a bicyclist, Senor Brettus, for riding around guidance.

The sun was out, and many people were out and about enjoying its rays. Including us. We didn't swim, but we were loving the warmth as we rode along the beach towards the pier and casino. Then we turned uphill, away from the coast, towards the building for which Barcelona is best-known; the Sagrada Familia, which is an enormous, distinctively-styled church, still under construction 130 years after it was begun and 60 years after the death of its primary architect, Antoni Gaudi. If you haven't been to or seen photos of it, you probably should do one or both those things now.

~~~~~~~~(wavy lines to indicate the passage of time)~~~~~

Done?

Good.

That should make it easier to describe the indescribable.

Towers topped with flowers; sculptures, vultures, sepulchres**... the place is nuts. And that was just the outside.

We ate eggy, cheesy goodness then set off again, further up the hill. We passed water spouts carved as monstrous heads, and the dog pound with its cacophony of yap, and eventually reached the base of the hilltop access funicular, which we avoided in favor of beer and panoramic views in the sun at a cafe before setting off back down the road, much, much faster than we'd come up. Past the now-silent pound, past a dry-docked submarine named Tiburon I*** outside one of the Science Museums****, through parks and narrow streets, past decommissioned bullfighting arenas and through enormous and busy roundabouts, and on to Montjuic, which is a hill near the port that houses a number of sports stadia, sculptural wonders galore, and several once-castles that now house art.

And then beer, and a bar, and bed...

...then up to do it all again, but without Senor Guido, who had job/life/etc to attend to. This time we explored the interior of the Sagrada Familia, which is even crazier than the outside. Having said that, the sculptures on the western facade, of the so-called "Passion" of someone's messiah, were pretty amazing. Hats off to sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs! In short, the building certainly highlighted the banality of other buildings... but 130 years of construction and still nowhere near done isn't necessarily the best evidence in favor of widespread adoption of the styles and/or techniques in use.

On to Parc Guell, which is another Gaudi-designed Barcelona attraction. Awesome stuff everywhere, much of it curved and mosaic-clad, and most of which you can read about on the intertubes. One highlight not prominent in official guide material was the busker near the park peak. Leopardskin tights and shoes, billowing shirt, shitty sunglasses, incoherent yelling, swearing, occasional singing... he was great. Especially when he asked Nene:
Are you ready for me, babe? Cos I'm ready for you!
Nene blushed fetchingly.

Gaudi buildings are scattered throughout Barcelona, and we peeped at their faces as we rode past. Didn't stop though. Nor did we pause at the several under-construction cathedral-looking buildings we passed. We DID stop at the Xmas market though; largely because the sign that said "XMAS MARKET" featured an enormous cartoon picture of a man pooping. The market was full of more-and-less-cheesy xmas crap... and had a number of stalls selling figurines of pooping men. And women. And non-human entities, like Satan, Michael Jackson, the Pope... you name him/her/it, he/she/it is there, assuming a reasonable level of celebrity. And they're all pooping; snapped mid-poop, trousers down, skirt/habit up, pile of poop on the ground beneath their bare buttockses. Welcome, friends, to the wonderful world of xmas, a la Catalunya.

These caganers do not constitute the only poop-related Catalan xmas tradition, though; there is also the Tio de Nadal, or "xmas log." Also known as caga tio or "shit log," this is, believe it or not, a log.

Of wood.

With a face on one end and two little arms.

From December 8, this log is fed a little bit each night, and covered with a little blanket so it doesn't get cold. Then, on either xmas day or xmas eve, the family gather round and beat the log with sticks while singing songs that exhort it to shit:

"Caga tió,
caga torró, avellanes i mató,
si no cagues bé
et daré un cop de bastó.
caga tió!"

(Shit log,
shit nougat, hazelnuts and cottage cheese,
if you don't shit well,
I'll hit you with a stick,
shit log!)

or:
"Caga tió, tió de Nadal,
no caguis arengades, que són massa salades
caga torrons, que són més bons!"

(Shit log, log of Christmas,
don't shit herrings, which are too salty,
shit nougat, which is much better!)



And lo, the log shits, and the shit is candy!



Barcelona rules.









* = Just tried to validate this fact, but the bicing website is in Catalan or Castellan (Spanish), with no English option. I'm guessing they only have Castellan because the law requires it. More examples of Catalonian independence:
- The bicing website is at bicing.cat rather than bicing.es
- Just after we left there was to be a football match between Catalonia and Morocco.

** = No vultures, really.

*** = Not the only dryland-mounted submarine in Barcelona; a replica of the Ictineo II, which was the world's first real, functional submarine, can be found near the waterfront

**** = Multiple Science Museums must surely be one of the most indisputable signs of a truly civilized civilization

Asparagus Wees

Short Version:
Beer from above and below ground, plague sores, birthdays and boat people

Long Version:
Our first experience of Barcelona was an attempted Catalan-language GPS navigation.
We visited the port, were told off by a policeman, and eventually made it to Brett y Sylvia y Miquel's apartment overlooking the water in Barceloneta. One of us had never met Brett before, and it was first meeting for both of us with Sylvia and 2 year-old Miquel, so we parked ourselves in the sun and drank beer pre-siesta, then drank more beer post-siesta while eating ceviche and guacamole/salsa nachos, and then we set off out into the night to celebrate Brett's birthday at a bar called Bubo, named after the grotesque black sores that characterize the Black Plague.

Looming massively above the bar was one of Barcelona's many historic churches; Santa Maria Del Mar (Saint Maria by the sea), and we sat and drank sangria with the boat-people and were impressed. Also impressive was the fact that one of the boat-people was incapable of rolling his Rs, rolling his tongue into a tube, or of smelling (or, he believed, generating) asparagus wees, thereby proving the Puppet hypothesis that these traits are interrelated.

Barcelona is the main city of Catalunya; an area which is currently - and often grudgingly - part of Espana. We saw our first evidence of this separateness near the church, as we made our way deeper into the el Born district in search of more bars; an eternal flame in a memorial plaza dedicated to the Catalan dead of the War of the Spanish Succession. Admittedly, that war took place in the early 18th century, but the grudge, and the desire for a separate and autonomous Catalan state remain strong, and strongly evident throughout Barcelona.

For the record, we ended up buying beer from a street vendor and drinking in one of the wide pedestrian plazas. Apparently these guys buy beer (six-packs of cans) from the supermarket and hide it under manhole-covers, carrying just the one six-pack around with them so that police confiscation doesn't wipe out their whole inventory.

Sheila Dikshit, Bjorn Borg and Sarah Ulmer

Short Version:
Filth, filth, and more filth. Sheila Dikshit. Fireworks and flying. Bjorn Borg, Sara Ulmer (or not). And some more filth.

Long Version:
We'd checked out of the hotel in the morning, leaving our bags securely stored there while we explored the city. When we arrived back at the hotel, we found our bags still in our cleaned but not-yet newly-occupied room. So we washed the worst of the black filth off our feets in the blue bathtub, then tried to wash the blue bathtub clean of the transferred filth, then gave up and went up to the rooftop restaurant for one last delicious foods experience.

The city was alive with fireworks as we ate. The sky became extra-hazy as the smoke joined the general Delhi smog. Sheila Dikshit was mercifully absent from dinner, having been a persistent presence throughout this second Delhi visit; she'd appeared on billboards and in newspapers, and on signs at multiple buildings - including her house. Sheila wasn't the creepiest creeperstalker of the day though; that dubious honor went to the utterly mad-looking short man in the shiny purple tracksuit. He was first noticed on one of the Metro trains, staring balefully about with his bizarrely protruberant eyeballs. His long hair was held in place by an elasticated towelling headband, like Bjorn Borg wore during his heyday. In fact, this guy kind of looked like Bjorn Borg, only about two feet shorter, and with huge googly eyes. And Indian. So not really much like Bjorn Borg at all. Apart from the headband. He was lost from view during the crush of exiting the Metro train, and neither of us gave him another thought.. until he strode briskly up the escalator behind us, planted the crown of his beheadbanded head into the small of the Puppetback, and then stood still, leaning into the contact like some kind of domesticated animalian enjoying contact with its human. It was odd behavior, but he didn't murder us violently, or non-violently, and for that we were grateful.

The fireworks didn't let up all through the evening, and were still lighting up the night as we made our way to the airport around midnight. A good day in the Hindu calendar for weddings, we were told, and we saw a number of festive events still underway as Sunday rolled into Monday and we rolled towards aeroplanic departings, past trucks towing other trucks, and broken down cars being pushed by worse-for-wear wedding partiers. The airport hadn't changed much, although there was some queue chaos at passport control that could have used the attentions of a uniformed, moustachioed, stick-wielder, and a Departure Gate security lady took undue and really irritating extra interest in the contents of Puppetbag and Puppetpockets.

And then we were off, and eating, drinking, and sleeping our way to London, where we bought coffee so disgusting we abandoned it nearly untouched. Vile filth, and not in a good way.

We then hauled our travel-weary selves onto a plane full of the Spanish schoolgirl Tae Kwon Doe team, whose manager looked like a more haggard version of Sarah Ulmer, and went to Barcelona.

Rickshaw Madness

Short Version:
Rickshaws, queues, touchy-feely security guards. Oh, and a really impressive modern temple.

Long Version:
Sometimes the tiniest, most cheerful, cheapest-price-quoting rickshawman is also the most determined, and the fastest, and the best-tipped. Our miniature smiler responded with gusto to our exhortations for more speed, despite the pair of us weighing about as much as the luggage-laden family of six that occupied one of the other rickshaws that we passed en route from the Metro to the Akshardam temple complex.

Akshardam, like Jama Masjid, was recommended to us as a must-visit. We really should have listened to the bit about going first thing in the morning, though, because by the time we arrived in the early afternoon there was a MASSIVE queue for the pre-entrance cloakroom where every imminent entrant had to divest themselves of all electronics, on pain of ejection and (probably) a beating and some burning in hell for eternity. And then there was an even MORE MASSIVE queue, controlled by a series of person-held rope barriers which led us through a gate, eventually, and on to...

Another queue! This one led to a security search that included an inordinate amount of genital manipulation.

An hour or so after arriving, we finally made it in to the complex proper, where we wandered through the ten gates that symbolize things, and through some buildings with info about the complex's construction, and on to god's footprints which were, as Nene said, "...much smaller than I expected."

The main building was awesome. HUGE, and completely covered in intricate carvings that took over 300-million man-hours to execute. There were people, and animals, and gods and goddesses (many of whom had sizable upstanding breasts. Maybe that's why so many men were staring at Nene's chest). There were also elephants galore; all the way around the outside of the lower tier was a carved frieze depicting elephant-human relations through the ages. There was a lion v elephant fight. There was a goat standing on an elephant. There was a hare which had fallen over, and a rabbit with an erection, and an elephant with seven trunks and four tusks named Airavata.

There was a queue at the Boot House. We'd had enough lining up for one day, so left our (now rather ratty-looking) sandals next to a wall atop a roll of astroturf and set off up the wide stairway of white marble and into the main building, which was just as awesome on the inside as it was on the out. Intricately-carved walls and especially ceilings were intense, and impressive.

Back outside, we meandered away from the main building and along a series of covered walkways towards a large open area. Suddenly, gates slammed shut just behind us loudly and emphatically. There were no other people in the section of walkway we were in. It was like we'd walked right into some supervillain's trap. Having no choice, we walked onwards. More gates closed in our wake. We reached the open area - a large, step-sided pool area, with terraced stone seating for thousands. More gates closed, herding us to our left. Uniformed persons lurked in the shadows. Any minute now, we thought, some chap with his undies outside his pants is going to leap out and cackle maniacally at us.

Somehow, though, we found ourselves back at the main concourse, near god's wee feets marks. We eventually deduced that the area we were in was the location of the regular evening lights-and-fountain show that we'd not bought tickets for, and that the crew were most likely clearing the space prior to allowing the paying punters in.

Dusk was closing in as we made our way across a bridge over a lotus-shaped garden and into the foodcourt area, where we bought and ate delicious foods before viewing a statuary and some bats on our way out of the complex. Electronic goods retrieved, we found a rickshaw, and then found OUR rickshaw, which meant, of course, that we had to have a rickshaw race. Once again, the wee grinner somehow managed to get enough force out of his foot-long legs and broad toothy smile to mash the competition, despite having a hefty Puppet passenger, and there was a significant lag before the normal-sized rickshawman and Nene pulled up. Tiny rickshawman was very proud, and rightly so.

No, YOU'RE a Manus

Short Version:
Metro, mosque, moustaches

Long Version:
That Delhi's Metro is awesome is a fact which may already have been mentioned more than just once.
It caters for folks from all walks of life, and endeavors to level the playing field a little bit for those that fortune/genetics/the gods have not favored by posting signage (mmmmm... delicious signage) instructing travellers to give up their seats for the disabled and the elderly. Given the seethingness of Delhi, and the enormosity of the population, and the dog-cannibal struggle for survival and/or advantage in which all those millions of people are engaged on a daily basis, you'd be forgiven for expecting the seat-donating uptake to be low.
And you'd be right, except that the aged and the crippled know this is the case, and are fighting the fight on their own behalf (because realistically no-one else is going to do it for them):
They're not even a little bit shy about asserting their gammy right to seatedness.

A number of times we witnessed wrinklies, crazy people, and limping broken husks demand - and receive - a seat. Standard practise seemed to be:
1. Select target seat/sitter
2. Approach at high/low/gnarled speed
3. Issue high-volume request for seat while staring at sitter.
4. Repeat #3 while continuing to approach until sitter's resolve crumbles beneath the weight of attention and disapprobriation and shame and the knowledge that failure to move is likely to result in a lap-full of someone with dubious bladder control, and moving along occurs

The different Metro lines are identified by color. We rode mainly on Yellow and Blue Lines, and rode on them enough that we got to know the more intelligible of their announcements by heart. Somewhat surprisingly, the announcements were not uniform across the lines: the Blue Line woman was much more polite than her Yellow Line counterpart, politely yet authoritatively asking travellers to "Please stand away from the doors." Yellow Line Lady, on the other hand, bluntly demanded action: "Stand away from the doors."

We rode both Yellow and Blue Lines to get from our hotel to Chawri Bazar Station, which is the closest station to the Jama Masjid mosque complex. Not so close that the tuk-tuk drivers were prepared to offer the stoopid Westerners reasonable fares to get there, though, so we walked, down narrow streets past people performing their morning ablutions at roadside faucets, and the streets became narrower, and stinkier, and the people more and more downtrodden, and we started to wonder if maybe we should have just paid the 50 rupees, and then suddenly we were there, at the base of the flight of stairs leading up to the entrance arch, where a man who didn't use words took charge of our shoes, and another man gave Nene a robe to wear during our visit; a very fetching lime green one, with flowers printed on it.

The Jama Masjid complex was pretty awesome, with domes and towers and arches galore. There was a pond in the middle of the square, in which people and pigeons bathed faces, bodies, teeth, and beaks. The water was a similar shade to Janine's robe, so we weren't tempted to join in. We did, however, join the flow of people - mainly tourists - towards the southern tower, which on can climb. For a fee.

Before we got to the tower, though, Nene was conned into paying for taking photos of a small girl - largely through the girl's evil Fagan mother administering a beating (to the girl, not to Nene) for allowing an non-earning photo to have been taken.

And then we were into the tower, hard on the heels of a group of punks from some Baltic state, and hauling ourselves up the unevenly-spiralling red sandstone stairs, worn smooth by the passage of untold thousands of feets. At the top, a traffic jam. And massive views out across the domes of Jama Masjid and away into the hazy distance. Birds of prey wheeled in massive flocks around ghostly structures. Leaving was difficult, and not just because the stairs were blocked by upclimbers.

Once we'd reached the ground, returned the lime green draping cloth, reclaimed our shoes, and eaten our stolen samosas on the stairs, we set off into what turned out to be a veritable maze, replete with locked gates that were sometimes open and public ablutions blocks where we did wees as others showered*. This led us eventually to the market between Jama Masjid and the Red Fort. Lots of tacky crap was for sale. Lots of tacky people haggled for cheaper deals on tacky crap. Lots of jostling, lots of no-personal-space. Lots of had-enough-time-to-leave.

At the Red Fort, we joined the enormous queue, and waited patiently for all the thirty seconds it took an alert guard to spot us and hustle us away to our own, special, no-other-people, fifty-times-the-price queue, where we in turn were hustled by some fat lady who pinned Indian flags to us and demanded money to support the orphans. She really wanted more than ten rupees out of us, but we're cheaper than we are proud, and we didn't believe her orphan story anyway. Screw you, fat lying flag-pinning lady!

The coolest thing about the Red Fort is probably getting up on top of the massively thick walls that surround the place. We don't know for sure, because we weren't allowed to go up there. We looked at old buildings, and at empty canals and ponds. Basically a disappointing monument to faded glory. Why people list this as one of the top things to do in Delhi we'll never know, unless someone tells us.








* = In separate stalls. We weren't the showerheads.

Waxy Scoop Denial

Short Version:
No, I'll keep my earwax thanks. Shopping. Old things. New things. Special dance, special ink, special drink.

Long Version:
A man tried to sell us his services as a deep ear-cleaner. He had a metal scoop on the end of something akin to a chopstick. We declined. He insisted. We declined. Repeat. Eventually, he set off in search of more amenable dirty-eared whiteys. Of course, this being India, one of his competitiors had moved into the breach before we could say "Jeepers, what a persistent earwax-scooping chap that was!"

We declined all de-waxing services, and went shopping.
Hooray.
Although it's not every day that Evil Indian Robin Williams tries to sell you a carpet made from NZ wool.

We skipped the original shopping complex we'd been aiming at in favor of one which:
a) came more highly recommended by various locals, and;
b) did not have a massive protesting crowd of hat-wearers outside.

After shopping, the National Museum beckoned. Because museums have hands.
We'd read that there was stuff at the National Museum, and that the National Art Gallery was next door for once we were done museuming, so we found a tuk-tuk and tootled off. Tootled is possibly not the most appropriate word for what we actually did - it's a good word for what you expect a tuk-tuk to do based on how it looks, but the actual experience involves much higher g-forces and a LOT more adrenaline than tootling does. Especially when the route goes through one or more of the large roundabouts that punctuate Delhi's major roads.

The museum itself had, as promised, a lot of stuff. 200,000 items, apparently. We weren't allowed to see some of it: there was an ejection of a Puppet from the Restricted Access library, and a number of galleries - including the musical instrument section - were closed for redevelopment, which was a pain in the nethers. Having said that, we still saw a lot of stuff, some of it vastly aged (various Harappan artefacts, dated to around 3000BCE), some of it just plain vast (a 5-storey, intricately-carved war chariot), some vastly cool (a tribal tiger hammered from silver). Many ancient statues of gods and goddesses. Some of the goddesses had vast breasts.

Back at the main entrance hall, we were admiring a statue of Shiva Varanam (Shiva as a dwarf) as a final farewell to the museum when we heard music from a side room. Poking a head through the door (past the ubiquitous smiling, armed, uniformed, moustachioed guard) we saw a stage, with colorfully-dressed dancing people upon it. We slipped inside, and took up station towards the back of the room*.

Unlike the Dilli Haat dance, where the same four people performed a series of long pieces, this recital was more of a barrage of short dance numbers, each performed by a different group or soloist. And each dancer was extra-special, because this was an International Disability Day performance that culminated in a truly grand and epic final number in which all 20+ dancers took the stage more-or-less at once, and danced more-or-less in unison, or at least near each other. Many dancers appeared to have been paired so that a more-competent could lead a more-pliable through the steps. The overly-excitable guy who started doing star-jumps and hooting earned a talking-to from the conductor, which calmed him down enough that he was able to take his place alongside the twisted dwarf girl for what appeared to be a tug-of-war against a girl with Downs, using a tiny girl instead of a rope.

Post-applause, we slipped away, and took a tuk-tuk to the park, where we watched the sun set huge and orange in the haze-laden sky. We were passed on the way by a new Lamborghini Aventador**, which slowed down for a red light just long enough for us - and everyone else nearby - to ogle it before it roared off through the still-red light and away into the distance.

Hungry, we found ourselves amid a streetfood festival. Great combo!
Then we found a pedestrian underpass beneath the busy street, where unlicensed tattooists of dubious qwality were drawing on people. Being inky and pakeha, we were of as much interest to them as they were to us, so we chatted for a while before heading on, to the undies store where we found some undies, and then to the Imperial Hotel, where we gatecrashed an embassy shindig, blundered through the middle of the high-faluting 1911 restaurant, and settled gratefully onto comfy barstools and were served politely and efficiently by impeccably-groomed staff wearing Raj-era uniforms. We ate chips and peanuts from hefty crystal tumblers, and drank cocktails which cost more than our usual total daily food and beverage spend. Lucky we got into those peanuts!







* = Not that the Dilli Haat experience had taught us to position ourselves for a quick and unobtrusive exit in the event that it became necessary or anything

** = Want one? They cost Rs3.69 crore. That's 36.9 million rupees, or USD$750,000.

Travel Tip #32

A travel tip you may find useful should you ever venture into Asia...

The retractable hose thing by the toilet is actually a toilet-brush replacement, not a handheld bidet. That's why the water is cold, and the water pressure very high.

Leafy Secret Pr0n

Short Version:
We go to market and are impressed by some leaf-based pr0n and a dance.

Long Version:
We'd read somewhere that Dilli Haat was a must-see while in Delhi; a massive open-air market with a ever-changing population of stallholders from all over the (blimmin big) country purveying a variety qwality wares at very reasonable prices.

So we went.

Mildly confused en route to the Metro by... well, many things, actually, but most were just standard Delhiisms (roadside urinating next to food stalls; beggars and filth; walled compounds in which clean people lived, guarded by heavily-armed and -moustachioed men... that sort of thing). The non-standard confusion source was more-or-less musical: more when it sounded like devotional song; less when it sounded like angry grrrrl hardcore punk. Or possibly the other way around. Confused? Us also.

The confusion didn't wane when we reached Dilli Haat, either: the red carpet had been rolled out through the front gate, and a large group of men in old-style crimson-and-white quasi-military garb were parked outside playing music on an assortment of instruments including huge drums with black rubber skins that were being struck with what appeared to be fish-slices. Other, similarly-clad chaps danced energetically. People - some of whom were fat - watched.

We paid the nominal entry fee and snuck in to the market area through a gap between the entrance wall and a potted plant at the edge of the red carpet. Inside we found many, many stalls, most of which sold either pashminas*, fabrics, or carpets. Some sold furniture or artworks. None sold anything we wanted.

And it really wasn't a particularly large space.

We kept looking for the hard-to-find gateway to the other part of the market that we knew must be around somewhere, but to no avail. Even assuming that the area which had been filled with a stage and many rows of seats was usually filled with stalls, either our concept of how big acres actually are in the real world is way off or the thing we'd read about the scale of the market was inaccurate. Possibly both.

We blundered into the fringes of a slightly odd, televised, and massively-photographed opening ceremony replete with persons of obvious importance** ceremonially cutting a ceremonial ribbon, and then found some interesting stuff at a stall with a stallholder so friendly that not only did we learn a heck of a lot about palm-leaf etching processes, history, and market forces, but we also had to be photographed with the artist, and with his guru, and his brother. His art was pretty cool, especially the pictures with small shutters that opened to reveal not one but two hidden pictures, depending on which way you opened them. Generally the main picture was a Hindu religious scene, the upper hidden picture animalian, the lower a graphic representaton from the Kama Sutra. One of us spent quite a while peering intently at this divinely-sanctioned smut before realising what it was she was staring at and turning bright red, drawing gales of laughter from artist, guru, brother, and Puppet alike.

We bought a painted coconut inner and headed for the exit, via the foodstalls.

Delicious snacks procured, we were about to park ourselves on a low stone wall beneath a tree for massive consumption when we heard snatches of music, and saw action around the stage area. We meandered over, found seats in the small section that wasn't reserved for media, VIPs, or VVIPs, and watched the madness unfold:

Prologue:
Speeches over, dignitaries hustle away.
Musicians begin warming up in earnest, or hand-butchering small animals, not sure which.
Dancers start limbering up at the sides of the stage. There are three women - two dressed identically in blue and silver, the other in gold - and one man. He looks like Heath Mortlock circa 1991 en route to a costume party dressed as Louis XIV. In non-Mortlockian terms, that means that the chap had funny hair and a pleasant smile, and was dressed in a shining gold outfit that included tights.

Dance#1:
Music starts.
Dancers take the stage.
Man and gold woman strike a series of static poses, many of which include his flute. Did I mention that he has a flute?
Blue/silver women dance around them.
Man looks quite pleased with himself.
Music stops.
Dancers look slightly surprised.
Dancers leave the stage.

Dance#2:
Music starts.
Dancers take the stage.
All dancers have augmented their outfits with ENORMOUS peacock tail-feather fans.
All dancers are active; no more static poses from man and gold woman.
Man produces what appears to be a deep-dish pizza tray and spins it on one finger. For a long time.
Man looks quite pleased with himself.
Still spinning the pizza tray, the man puts his finger inside the tray near the edge. Yellow petals spray out. This is actually pretty cool.
Man looks quite pleased with himself.
Petals gone, man ditches pizza tray.
Feather-waggling dancing around occurs, from all four dancers. For a long time.
Rag-wearing and somewhat grubby chap with a rusty old bicycle ute appears, starts removing the potted plants from the front of the stage. He manages to swipe about half of them before someone in authority cottons on and makes him stop.
Feather-waggling dancing around continues.
Women leave stage.
Man drops to knees and spins around in circles. For a long time.
Man leaves stage.


We snuck away while the dancers weren't there to be offended.

The fruit stalls near our Metro station seemed to have multiplied throughout the evening, to the point where they were now choking the road, as was the long queue outside the liquor store, where the most common purchase clutched in the hands of those leaving the store appeared to be one single can of beer.

Back at the hotel, we washed our feet and ate delicious foods before falling asleep in our incredibly comfortable bed. All of those things were very much needed.







* = Scarves, basically, although many places also sold scarves, so there must be some difference, the subtleties of which are obviously beyond somePuppet

** = Sheila Dikshit, bane of Paul Henry. Keep your mind peeled, you'll meet her again soon.

Asshat Bypass

Short Version:
One fat dwarf, two skinny moustaches

Long Version:
Sometimes, we're as bad as the next traveller; leaping from our seats to rescue our carry-ons from the overheads only to stand, bent uncomfortably, in the aisle while strangers without recourse to other behaviours frot and be frotted as the ire, along with the temperature in the no-longer aircon-enabled aircraft cabin, builds and builds until finally there's movement at the front of the damned machine where the wealth-gluttons have been basking, and then eventually you get to walk forward two paces before you're halted by the couple with three under three who had decided to be patient but have reached the end of their tethers pretty quickly and are failing to merge into the aisle with elegance or efficiency, but at least you no longer have what was hopefully the corner of a suitcase pressed firmly into the back of your thigh, and eventually you get to try for a smile and manage a grimace in response to the cheery farewell from the uniformed peon who's almost as keen to see the back of you as you are to be off this damned plane and into another queue at immigration control.

Arriving at Delhi for the second time, though, we stayed seated and carried on reading. For ages. And then the voice on the intercom announced that we were still waiting for the stairs to be brought to the plane, and we were smug, and turned another e-page.

Off plane, onto bus, into terminal building, past visa-on-arrival* counter and on to Immigration, where we tried not to stare at the moustachelets on the upper lips of the two friendly young chaps manning the desk as we chatted about cricket. All went swimmingly, apart from the whole "Oops, we've lost an entire container of luggage somewhere" thing, but they found it eventually and the spectre of having to share underwear abated, and we were picked up by a nice man from the fancy hotel we'd booked ourselves into and driven past all of the chaos and carnage of Delhi - including a fat dwarf - to the oasis of calm amidst the madness: Shanti Home Hotel.

When we researched places to stay in Delhi, we did note that pretty much every review of the place mentioned that it was "a little out of the way," or words to that effect. And they weren't kidding. But it wasn't THAT far to the Metro, and after a delicious butter chicken lunch at the hotel's well cool rooftop restaurant, we set off to walk to the station in the face of mild horror and bemusement on the part of the hotel staff. We learned pretty quickly that it was further than it looked on the map, and we learned which bits of which streets were smelliest, and where the footpath was missing sections, and where the people did wees (definite correlation with the stinkspots), and we only got lost once and didn't get freaked out much at all.

And then on the train, a miniature Sikh gave up his seat so we could sit.










* = Also known as The Asshattery Desk

Goodbye Kathmandu!

Short Version:
Goodbyes, monkeys, firepit peepings

Long Version:
We got to bid a second farewell to Ganga and Uzir, which was just as well, really, cos the wee gifts we had for them had been left in our locked-away bags in the hotel there for the duration of the trek. We all promised to write, which we haven't done, and then Uzir went to get supplies for his family for the winter, to be hauled three days' walk home on his back.

Ganga came with us to the Monkey Temple.

We took a tiny taxi down narrow, more-or-less cobbled streets, eventually piling out at the foot of one of the steepest sets of stairs we'd ever seen. Also, one of the longest. And the most heavily beggar-enabled. One rather young woman brandished an unimpressed infant aggressively. Others insisted that we needed one or more of their trinkets. We disagreed.

At the top, we saw many Buddhists, many of whom were little old ladies. Nepali ladies do little and old quite well. They seem compelled to add gnarled and twisted into the mix, though. There were many Buddhist holy things in many buildings, fantastic views out over smoggy Kathmandu, and monkeys galore;
- big monkeys
- small monkeys
- fighting monkeys
- monkeys eating offerings the wizened old ladies had made to the gods in exchange for more/less/different health/wealth/happiness for themselves/spouses/children/humanity. Many of them had raw-looking butts (the monkeys, that is, not the old ladies, almost all of whom were wearing butt-covering drapery).

We spent some time wandering around the temple complex, including a side-trip through the attached monastery and some minutes marvelling at the three enormous golden Buddha statues, and the hundreds of little old gnarled and bent ladies gathered at their feet for a multi-day prayer extravaganza, and then we made our way along the outer wall to the square where the taxis were congregated. Roughly duplicating our path was a young pregnant woman, clad in jeans and jandals* and a rastafarian hat. She had a perpetual sneer on her face, spat on the ground several times, and seemed to be a little bit angry; she was almost snarling as she spoke to her companion, an older woman. It was just like being in Whakatane.

And then back to Thamel in a tiny, slightly smelly van. Coffee and cake and goodbye Ganga and then we bought art and ate a celebratory Thai dinner on a rooftop patio in the light of a big, really smoky firepit and a lot of decorative light-strings until the power went out and we just had the firelight for watching the other diners and especially the group of dangerous-looking young men and their companionable companion; a young woman in a skimpy leopard-print outfit who looked like she'd just stepped out of a music video from some Nepalese Hall & Oates equivalent.

Sated and happy, we politely declined the services of the Transformers Armada-stickered taxi and walked home. Packed. Paid the bill. Slept poorly. Breakfasted in the lobby, taxied to the airport. Submitted to multiple security checks. Watched military squad doing physical training alongside the runway under a big, red, haze-obscured rising sun. Submitted to further security searches. Boarded plane. Managed to not actually soil selves when plane nearly ran out of runway. Ate tasty omelette while staring at phenomenal Himalaya views.
Omelette good. Views better.







* = Flip-flops, for Amerikaaners and CandidaAlbicansans and folks from the Disunited Queendom. Thongs for Orstralianuses. Slippers, apparently, in Hawaii, and Hawaii chappal (Hawaiian slippers) in India and Pakistan. Japonki in Poland, because they originated in Japan. Vietnamki in Russia and Ukraine, because... they originated in Japan? Clam-diggers in Texas, because everything's weirder in Texas.

Visa-on-Arrival = Arse-Biscuitry

Short Version:
Visa shenanigans. High foods are odd.

Long Version:
Even the long version is a long story short:
NZers visiting India are eligible for (required to obtain) visa-on-arrival.

It's a pain in the arse

Everything has to be handwritten in quadruplicate by many men, it takes so long that your bags are likely to have been blown up as unattended potential bomb-type items by the time you get through, and it can only be used for one non-transit (ie leaving the airport) entry to India.

In any given year.

So visiting Delhi on the way out of Nepal was a great idea, right up to the point where we decided to skip the flooded Bangkok and go to Delhi on the way TO Nepal as well, unwittingly blowing our one chance at being allowed in to India.

Luckily, there's a potential solution: Obtain a Transit Visa from the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu.

Unluckily, they might decline our application. Or they might not. It will depend on... things.

And the only way to find out? Wait for several hours then give them some nonrefundable moneys then wait some more hours.

********

Hours waited, moneys paid, more hours waited... visas acquired.

********

Then we spent some more hours looking at art. Especially pictures of dancing skeletons, and a fat blue man with fire facial hair and varying numbers of arms and corpses and severed head adornments.

And then we walked up eight flights of stairs to a rooftop restaurant where everything was served scarily flattened, crumbed, deep-fried and garlic-flavored.

Everything.

Including the pineapple and apple fritters, and the banana.

Alarming Developments

Short Version:
We explore Pokhara, which doesn't agree with one of us. Bus action!

Long Version:
Nene's alarm went off at 0600. Nene did not wake up.

Waking up in a psychedelic room was disorienting. The bright green, bright yellow, and bright orange walls were a bit much. And it was REALLY weird to not be getting out of bed into a cold morning, pooping into a hole in the ground, and then walking for several hours.

Instead, we ate delicious foods then went back to bed.

Later, we found espresso, and it was good.

Later still, we ate more pizza, window-shopped for art and random stuff, saw Honey Hunter bicycles, and ate more delicious foods in a place oddly dominated by Western women dining solo, or in large groups.

Then we went home, where Nene slept through about ten hours of Puppetvomiting. Then she was awake for a day of solo exploring while Puppetnapping occurred, interspersed with Puppetwatching of televised sports* and unintelligible local comedies.

Eventually, we left Pokhara, on a bus labelled Tourists Only! that was full of locals, including two young women who transferred on mid-intersection from a taxi labelled Anis & Menis, which was is just about the best taxi company name ever. We had the best seats in the bus; front pair on the passenger side. Excellent views out past the heavily-populated control cabin to the outside world. Unfortunately, the excellent seats we had weren't actually ours - we'd not realised that there were allocated seats, and had just sat in the ones we liked best. Luckily, the couple who were supposed to sit there waived their rights to the seats, and we stayed there for the rest of the day, which is how long it took us to reach Kathmandu, despite only stopping a couple of times; breakfast at 0930 at a place with the most foul-smelling urinals in the world; lunch at a riverside place with a curry-dominated self-serve buffet arrangement. Our bus ticket came with a lunch voucher. For a different establishment. They didn't seem to notice or care.

The bus-wranglers herded us all back on the bus, and we went up, and up, and up. Past the black polythene urinal we'd visited on the way out, then over the pass and down into the Kathmandu valley, where before long we hit the first of the slumburbs on the outskirts of the city, which became one lengthy passage through a grim landscape full of people and animals and stink. At least in the Kathmandu slums they had people picking through the trash in search of interesting stuff, which made for a lot less vile fume action than in the nastier outliers of Pokhara, where the piles of trash were on fire. Of course, Kathmandu stinks worse as it is.

And then, before we knew it, we were ejected from the bus into the seething city. All the conditioning we'd acquired in Delhi seemed to have evaporated during the weeks we'd spent in the wilderness, and being surrounded by hordes was a bit disconcerting, but a taxi to the International Guesthouse sorted that out, and then it was food and sleep o'clock, right up until 0430, when Nene's alarm went off.

Nene did not wake up.







* = Replays of old cricket matches between random countries, including a full ODI series between SAfrika and Orstralia. It's quite disconcerting falling asleep watching a cricket match, then waking up to find that, in what is apparently the same match, the score has changed in a way that is not possible

No More Walk!

Short Version:
We walk from Syauli Bazaar to Naya Pul. We stop walking.

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 22 = 1:30
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 104:00
Beer Time = 7:00

Long Version:
Syauli Bazaar Morning:
It's the last day of trekking, and we sleep in, partly because we don't really want the trek to end, and partly because we're buggered from yesterday.
Fishtail looms, bathed in sun, above the dining room where we breakfast on a tasty omlet and some delicious banana pancakes.
One of the serving-wenches has a ridiculously squeaky voice.
Our "big cups" of coffee come in glass handles, more usually associated with beer-quaffage
The reception counter sits atop a glass-fronted cabiinet. There is a random assortment of junk in the cabinet:
- a plastic dog with a waggy tail. It is old and dirty*
- a blender jug with lid
- an assortment of juice cans, no two alike
- drinking straws
- candles
- envelopes
- a can of tuna
- more drinking straws

For 21 days Uzir uncomplainingly carried all our crap, and even though we paid him to do it, it seemed just a wee bit unfair.
The whole village turned out to watch and laugh as we set off, then, with two big duffel bags strappeed to the Puppetnoggin. There may have been some complaining. There was certainly only six minutes of Puppetcarry.
Nenecarry followed, and lasted eight minutes.
Then we were back to normal, with a newfound appreciation not only for Uzir's efforts carrying our 25kg load, but also for his 105kg record effort.

Sunny Saturday means many people about; working in the fields, walking the road, building haystacks. There were also some strange nutcases around; one guy threw rocks at us from atop a cliff, another wandered past carrying a sickle and with a "seeking-victims" look on his face.

We hit Biranthanti, and specialty shops started to appear (we'd had only limited-goods general stores up in the hills). By the time we reached the outskirts of Nayapul, there were stores selling beauty stuff, shampoo and other hair stuff, hardware, electronics**, and random junk. There were also geese with bandit masks made of rooster-comb***

And then there were buses, and taxis, and we waited a bit while Ganga did some negotiating, and then the four of us and all our stuff somehow managed to fit into a Suzuki Swift hatchback. The driver had spider-web graphics on his gloves, bells and medallions and other crap hanging from his rearview mirror, and pictures of Hindu gods all over the place. And he drove really blimmin fast on really shitty roads, somehow managing to not run over any of the people and cows and other vehicles executing random-seeming manoeuvres, including the motorcycle cop with the enormous gun.

We drove past a store signed "Grossery" and then we reached Pokhara, and our hotel, and our room, where each wall was a different colour and the bedspread had lime green and bright yellow flowers, and where there was a bath in the bathroom. And then we went out and ate pizza and drank beer and said our farewells to Ganga and Uzir at a lakefront restaurant with a balcony overlooking a park where an elaborate festival of some sort was underway, and we did some reminiscing about the trek, and then they set off for Kathmandu and we wiped a tiny tear from each of our eyes and then had a nap before heading out to wander the streets of Pokhara.

Pokhara's lakefront district is similar to Thamel in Kathmandu, only less intense. We wandered aimlessly, looking at stuff and warding off sales attempts. Eventually, hunger spoke loud, and we stopped to eat delicious foods, including fried cashew nuts, tandoori chicken, and a wonderfully-flavored malai kofta which had, instead of cylinders of potato drowned in the sauce, two large Madonna-tit-shaped piles poking out like model volcanic islands in a thick brown ocean of tastiness. It was good that the foods were delicious, because the service was terrible (although that may have had something to do with the 20+ Orstralian teens who ordered just before we did).

Oh, and they played Joan Armatrading on the stereo. The whole album.

When asked to play something good they turned it down a bit.

Waking in the middle of the night to the sound of someone climbing the stairs to the third floor of the hotel, going in to the room next to ours, urinating, then leaving again was kind of odd, as was the discovery that the ceiling of our room had glow-in-the-dark stars and moons and planets on it.








* = Nothing wrong with old and dirty

** = Basically just selling shitty old TVs

*** = I assume not actually made from rooster combs. That would mean the geese were mugging roosters for their hats, and then fashioning them into supervillain eyemasks. Which is possible but unlikely.

Don't Eat the Salad!

Short Version:
We stagger from Tadapani to Syauli Bazaar

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 21 = 4:30
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 102:30
Beer Time = 29:30

Long Version:
Tadapani Morning:
The occasional night-time toilet expedition is not unheard-of, despite the difficulties inherent in an unlit environment with unstable narrow stairs, holes in the ground on the path and a hole in the ground at the end of the path.
Multiple night-time toilet expeditions generally indicate something awry.
Multiple night-time toilet expeditions followed by in-room vomiting bouts are a pretty solid sign that all's not right in the world.

Of course, Nene's clued-up enough that, even in the throes of some serious not-well, she's grabbed a bucket and parked it next to the bed to catch the detritus.
There is a lot of detritus.

Eventually, the sun comes up, hugely and orangely, and there's a delicious Puppetbreakfast but no Nenefood, and later still we hit the trail, albeit somewhat gingerly, two steps - and a retch - ahead of the complainy old Britischers.



********

Downhill. Lots of downhill. With monkeys. And mountains. And many short stops for Nene to resist vomiting on her feet.

Somehow, she managed the 2.5 hour walk downhill to Ghandruk, where we stopped for lunch. She even managed to eat half of her plain chapati before borrowing a bed for a wee lie-down. Puppetfacestuffing carried on uninterrupted. A chocolate croissant, high in the Himalayas!

Nap over, we walked downhill some more. And by "some more" I mean "for two hours."

Stairs, stairs and more stairs. Sore quads, uneven steps, stream-crossings, buffalo and kids and a woman fundraising for a school for orphans.

And then, gloriously, not long after we were briefly forced off the path by a large uphill-bound gaggle of enormously fat women heading UP the evil hill we'd just come down, we reached Syauli Bazaar, where Nene did some more sleeping while an elderly couple demonstrated appropriate workload-sharing to a beer-guzzling watchPuppet: HE sat atop the haystack, arranging the hay nicely; SHE gathered hay from the surrounding fields, bundled it together, carried it to the haystack, and then climbed a ladder and hoisted the hay up to the top of the 3m-high stack where she held it until HE deigned to take it from her upraised, outstretched hands.

Later on, the stars came out, and were beautiful.



Beer Stats:
Beer Drunk = 3
Beer Time = 5:30
Time to Next Beer = 2:30

Reasons Canadialand is Awesome #23

Headline on the main page of the Vancouver Sun online:
Photos: Shoes with severed feet found over the years

Nepali Flat

Short Version:
We walk from Ghorepani to Tadapani. Butt-slapping, tooting, hooting and hollering. And complaining. Not necessarily in that order.

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 20 = 3:00
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 98:00
Beer Time = 25:00

Long Version:
Ghorepani Morning:
The sunrise is, apparently, spectacular from from Poon Hill. So we...

...stay in bed, and watch the first rays of yet another gorgeous cloudless day paint the mountains rosy orange/peach colors while we stay snug and warm and lazy in our fat sleeping bags* while drinking passable coffee.



********

Our walk pace has been increasing steadily since Thorong La, to the point where we're blasting past all and sundry on the trails. Not so fast, though, that Ganga couldn't sneak on ahead, hide in the bushes, and scare the bejeebers out of Nene as she approached by making mutant cat noises.

The forest east of Poon Hill is mainly huge rhododenrons, which look like elderly puriri once they're enormous and sufficiently gnarled. Apparently they're really spectacular when in bloom.
The terrain was much more like NZ than it was higher in the Himalayas, with steep, wooded slopes and some big trees. Throughout the day we were largely enclosed by forest, but we did get some sneaky peeks out between the trees; mountains to the left of us, and, for the first time in a long time, to the right we started to see vistas that stretched away into a distance that was actually distant, rather than terminating abruptly at one or several bloody great big mountains.

We started the day walking up, just for a change. After several false summits, though, we actually hit some down. Down! And then up. Down. Up. Apparently this is what they call "flat" here; it's when the up and the down are approximately equal, and cancel each other out. We spent some time in river valleys, which made the hike even more NZ-like, although the slippery foot-polished marble steps were somewhat different.

The five hour trek from Ghorepani to Tadapani took us three hours. We were first in, so got the best room (end of the row, extra window in the end wall, facing downvalley) and the best part of the solar hot water in the showers. We also got the best spot in the sun outside, where we sat to enjoy our ginger and honey tea.

Unfortunately, it was the most disgusting tea in the cosmos.
Holy heck, it was vile!
Turns out that one really can't underestimate the importance of thoroughly cleansing one's grater between grating garlic and grating ginger.

Luckily, the lentil/mushroom burgers were phenomenally good, to the point that not only did we have one for lunch alongside a cheese/bean burrito, we also had one each for dinner, which we ate in the dining room, where the warmth of the under-table brazier was greatly appreciated by all the various happy trekkers.
Except the large group of elderly British people, who complained incessantly.
About everything.
For ages.
What a pack of arsebiscuits!

The whiny Englischers were so painful to listen to - and such a big group that not listening was more difficult than it ought to have been - that we left early, wandering up the scarily steep and narrow and wobbly stairs to the upstairs balcony and in to our room, where we put ourselves to bed with books. Later, when the age-mismatched Spanish couple who were our next-door neighbours for he night arrived in their room, we weren't making any noise - with e-books there's not even the sound of pages turning.
So it may be that they didn't realise that noise would be clearly audible in adjoining rooms.
Or it may be that they just didn't care.
Whatever the reason, we were treated to a veritable symphony of butt-slapping, burping, naughty-sounding laughing, and farting before they settled down and shut up for the night. We had great difficulty containing our merriment.







* = Fartsacks.

Poon!

Short Version:
We walk from Shikha to Ghorepani, then up Poon Hill.

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 19 = 3:30
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 95:00
Beer Time = 22:00

Long Version:
Shikha Morning:
Incredible views of Dhaulagiri and Tukuche mountains scraping the first light out of the sky as we dress and pack and head into the dining room not long before 0700.
Closer to hand, we watch the village wake up as we eat; sleepy-faced people and animals are emerging from their (sometimes shared) niches; the sounds and smells of village life begin to manifest...
...and then around the corner from the low end of the main street: hundreds of marathoners. Not en masse; one by one initially, then clumps, then bigger clumps building to a constant stream then tailing off to less and less-comfortable-looking solo runners* towards the back of the field.
Horses and buffalo emerging from their night-time accommodation win the battle with the runners for trail space, mainly through sheer mass. This is entertaining viewing.
One of the last runners comes in to the hotel for emergency poopage.



********

Lycra-clad ultra-fitness nuts safely past, we set off.
Uphill.
Up many, many stone stairs.

It wasn't long before we passed the race sweepers, one of whom was only too happy to furnish information about Racing the Planet: Nepal, which saw two hundred and some extreme masochists from all over the world** take part in a seven-day, six-Stage, 250 kilometer, self-supported endurance foot race. The "self-supported" bit means they had to carry all their crap, including sleeping bags, mattress pads, clothes, and food for the day. No food was to be purchased along the way; the competitors were only to consume foodstuffs they'd started the day carrying. We spoke to one racer (the pooper) who had been threatened with a time penalty for buying and eating a Mars bar on Day Two. He wasn't too worried, as he was 3rd-to-last at the time. He also said that he planned "...never drink ten pints and agree to anything like this ever again..." (Yes, he was English).

We passed several backmarkers throughout the morning, repassing some after stopping for baby goat cuddles***. We then got to cheer them on as they passed the table where we'd parked ourselves to eat chocolate and pizza and momos in the sunshine next to the rose garden in the courtyard of Ghorepani's Tukuche View Hotel. And the view really was something else: not just Tukuche, but also Himchul, Niligiri, Dhaulagiri and many of the Annapurnas. Seriously awesome.

People were telling us, though, that the view was EVEN BETTER up at the top of the hill.
Not just any hill, either; this is Poon Hill, and that's one of the most awesome place names ever.

So we went, and it was a bit like climbing Mount Maunganui in terms of steepness and stairsness, and then at the top the views were indescribably stunning.
Awesomeness.
Spectacularity.
Mountains on all sides, draped in golden late-afternoon sunlight.

The only thing that could have made it better would have been a homo-erotic photo-session romp starring a near-elderly Japanese man and his young Nepali guide. And then we got EXACTLY THAT, and our lives were complete.

Then we watched the sunset, and that kicked it up another notch.

Poon Hill rules.








* = "Runners" may not be quite the right word for some of them; "mincers," maybe, or "hobblers."

** = Apart from poor countries, countries on the non-Amerikan side of a war, hot countries, or countries where wearing lycra in public gets you stoned (and not in the "fields of marijuana" sense of the phrase). Basically it was Amerikans, Canadialanders, Orstralianuses, Japaneezers, and assorted Euromonkeys. The intertubes says there were a few random SAmerikans and some SAfrikaaaaaants as well.

*** = That's a cuddle where one or more of the participants is a baby goat. Didn't want to call it a kid cuddle.

Eat Your Way to Freedom

Short Version:
We walk from Tatopani to Shikha. Children sell us greens at exorbitant prices.

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 18 = 3:00
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 91:30
Beer Time = 34:30

Long Version:
Tatopani Morning:
Amerikan man at next table, arriving just before we leave, requests "real coffee." A plunger is brought to his table. We are envious, although this morning's unreal coffee was significantly better than some of the watery filth we've encountered.
The sun is bathing the tops of the Niligiri peaks. The Mongolian Horde across the way is taking photographs of it.



********

We've managed to get ourselves a day ahead of where we were supposed to be so we lined up a short day of walking... which meant a sleep-in and a late start! Once underway, we had a brief roadwalk, punctuated by multitudes of uniformed schoolchildren heading the other direction, towards the regional high school. One nicely-presented young chap sold Janine some not-orange oranges; the citrus here never changes exterior color, although the flesh inside still tastes deliciously ripe and delicious.

We crossed the river on a wobbly suspension bridge that, had we encountered it a couple of weeks back, would have given us the willies. We hardly noticed it. We did notice the accretionist building on the far side though - it looked like house had been built upon house a number of times, creating a teetering monstrosity that looked like a drawing out of a children's picture book brought to life. An architectural movement waiting to happen.

Can you guess what direction we walked next?

If you guessed "Up," you were right! Ten points Ravenclaw!

We were preceded up the steep stone stairs by a couple with a baby in a backpack, and we were walking against a growing tide of orange-vending schoolchildren coming downhill. Nene and Uzir bought more green oranges, from assorted more-or-less cute kids, at variously-inflated (for Nene) or REALLY LOW (Uzir) prices. One kid tried a Puppet-oriented green orange sales pitch. Bad idea. No sale. Same for the scaryweird cleaver-wielding marijuana salesman.

At one point our rapid uphill progress* was blocked by a sizeable herd of mules. Muleherds were nowhere to be seen. What WAS to be seen was an increasingly-irate little old mad lady, stuck on the uphill side. The muleherds appeared from the woods at roadside as we were encouraging the beasties to move aside by hitting them with sticks. The madwoman scolded them mightily in Nepali. They mocked her. She became angrier. Not sure if her eyes look in different directions all the time or only when she's feeling murderous. Suspect the milky, blind eye is milky and blind all the time, but don't actually have proof.

The stairs we'd been climbing were irregularly-spaced, different heights, and made of a bunch of different types of rock, including huge slabs of marble which had been polished smooth by the passage of thousands of boots. At times it felt like we were strolling around on some incredibly wealthy personage's kitchen countertop.

And then we reached the top of the steepest stair-section yet, rolling into Shikha, to yet another Moonlight Guesthouse** in time for beer-enhanced lunch in the sun on the roof, followed by book-reading and yak-watching and mountain-ogling and chillie-eating followed by sugar-eating, which actually made the worst of the mouth-inferno go away! There was a hibiscus growing outside the dining room window, and ears of corn hung from widows and eaves of many of the village buildings. the village seemed prosperous, with well-fed, healthy-looking people going about their business, and animals galore, from buffalo, horses and cows through goats and chickens galore. Many chickens were kept under upturned baskets, although at one point we espied a chicken chasing a chicken chasing a pigeon. We also saw a herd of baby goats which had been placed in a large basket attempting to eat their way out of confinement, with some success.

The guesthouse didn't just have a hibiscus growing outside; it had plastic hibiscus flowers in several of the communal areas as well. And it had an awesome array of posters, including a mutant-looking tiger using its massive claws to rip bloody channels in the flanks of a mutant-looking fleeing deer (in the stairwell between the first and second floors) and the Effiel Tower (sic) superimposed atop a background that included Mount Fuji. It also had no guests other than us, which is great when you want your popcorn soon, and for getting to chat to the lodgefolks, but probably not so great from the perspective of the continued fiscal solvency of the hotel.

Later, apple pies. Not a typo; pies. Plural. Nom nom nom nom nom.



Beer Stats:
Beer Drunk = 2
Beer Time = 18:30
Time to Next Beer = 0:00








* = The requirement for walking bestarde no longer in force after the high pass crossing at Thorong La

** = Not a chain of affiliated Moonlight Guesthouses, just samenamed random hotels.

The Future is Now! (wait a minute... no it's not, it's in THE FUTURE)

Short Version:
We walk from Larjung to Tatopani. Hot pool action!

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 17 = 7:45
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 88:30
Beer Time = 39:30

Long Version:
Larjung Morning, Take II:
Another early start, and once again friendly lodge staff bustle about as we sterilise water and eat our delicious eggy breakfast.
The two highest peaks of Dhaulagiri are catching the first sunlight as we set off.


********

Our preference for not-road walking meant that instead of heading south out of town down the road we went east, across the valley and the river's several branches, and into the forest, where we meandered our way along, and up, and down, and and up, and along, and etc throughout most of the early morning.

Mid-morning saw us back on the west side of the river, perched on stone walls outside a lodge, eating cookies and listening to two Nepali women arguing inside. We'd been asked if we wanted to go in for a cup of tea, but the disagreement was quite vehement, and the day was nice, so we stayed where we were, feeding bits of biscuit to the chickens, and the occasional whole cookie to the retarded man who wandered over to join us.

And then we were off again, through villages large and small, wealthy and not, crossing and recrossing the river, which had dropped away from the long wide upper valley and into a steep gorge filled with cream-and-green boulders.

We stopped for lunch at a lodge near the base of a huge waterfall that poured over the western cliff and into the gorge, and sat in the sun beneath a tamarillo tree as a waiter in a Misfits t-shirt took our order. Kind of idyllic, until the sun dropped behind the lip of the cliff, and the cook came and stood next to us to conduct a shouted conversation with her friends on the other side of the river, and the "potato rosty w egg" arrived with no egg but with extra rubberiness. Nene's egg drop soup* was good though, and seeing the old bloke getting his gnarled and twisted legs massaged by younger women was a neat peek into the future.

We walked the sunny side of the river all afternoon, past schools and temples and lodges, past oranges and buckwheat growing, past millet and beans drying, past beehives made from hollowed logs with mud-cemented endcaps, past a petrol-powered rice-mill machine - vastly different from what we'd seen way back in Bahundallah! - and past villages of all shapes and sizes. One village had the main trail winding right past the doorsteps and through the front yards of the homes, which was kind of odd.

We learned how to say "lizard"**.

And then we were crossing the river on one last rickety bridge, and making our way down the main street of Tatopani*** to our lodge, where we spent just enough time to stare out our room window at the massive group of identically-clad East Asians - including a dwarf - who'd overrun the lodge across the street and to get ourselves prepped for our eagerly- and long-awaited trip to the Tatopani Hot Springs.

Unfortunately, the asshat Israelis reappeared not long after we arrived.
Fortunately, they got into the other pool, which put them out of earshot, and hidden from view by the central fountain thing at which various porters and guides were bathing; lots of suds, some undies, occasional nudity. One of the undies-clad ones looked like a cross between Stop-era Perry Farrell and modern-day Lote Tuqiri.

We lounged for a couple of hours, drinking beer and enjoying the soak, then dried off and walked home, past the Bob Marley bar and past the men watching old pro-wrestling footage of Andre the Giant on a tiny TV in a semi-closed grocery store.

Cheese-bean burrito and salami pizza and early to bed.


Beer Stats:
Beer Drunk = 1
Beer Time = 31:30
Time to Next Beer = 0:00









* = Soup (tomato, this time) with an egg cracked into it.

** = Chaparro

*** = "Hot Water"

Ascent of the White Mountain

Short Version:
We walk up a big hill, and back down again. Yak v dog: Yak wins! Yak v Uzir: Uzir wins!

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 16 = 8:30
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 80:45
Beer Time = 47:45

Long Version:
Larjung Morning:
In direct contrast to yesterday's leisurely start, today we're up at 0545 after a fitful night's sleep.
Barbie Girl by 90s Danish one-hit-wonder pop group Aqua plays softly on the radio as we eat breakfast and sterilise water.
No other tourists are awake; it's just us and a whole bunch of Nepali folks, who are scurrying about doing the stuff that people in service industries do when the people they're paid to service are not around. It's an interesting glimpse into a world that overlays ours.
We're out of the lodge and heading downvalley by 0630. Stars, mountains, cold.


********


The mountain called Dhaulagiri had been largely behind clouds as we travelled down the valley the day before. Every so often the cloud would clear, and we'd get a glimpse of its looming immensity. It's pretty big: 7th-highest in the world at 8,167m. We decided to walk up it.

First, though, we had to walk along the road, where we acquired a dog. Then we had to walk up the wrong trail a little bit, and crash through bushes and down a small cliff to get back to the road near the start of the right trail. Then we walked up, through forest and across open, grassy slopes, to a field of poo with a wonderful view. A small cottage lurked at the top end of the field. We broke in, a little bit, and looked at the stuff inside. Based on possessions, the inhabitants were not particularly wealthy. Having said that, they might have had lots of love in their lives, you never know. And they really did have a spectacular view; poo, stretching away to the edge of the high plateau. And then an enormous, gorgeous mountain that filled the rest of the eyespace; the Nilgiri Himal, which is a group of three high peaks agglomerated together to form one whopping great big hunk of impressiveness.

Then we walked up a near-vertical face for a while. Notes say:
Up.
More up.
Snow patches. Some thrown.
Up. Steep. Tired legs. Slippery bits.
Reach snowline after many yaks.

Neither the "Up"/"Steep" comments nor the "many yaks" one really convey the full extent of their subjects; it really was blimmin steep, and if we hadn't shaken sticks at the yaks I'd be saying that there were more yaks than you could shake a stick at*. As it was, though, stick-shaking was necessary in order to proceed up past the seasonal yakherd houses, currently inhabited not by yakherds but by yaks.

Yaks!
Big yaks, small yaks,
Yaks of white, yaks of black.
Yaks on knolls, yaks in dells,
Yaks with horns, yaks with bells.
Yaks up high, yaks down low,
In the houses, in the snow.

Serious, extreme yakkage, and we blundered right into the middle of it. It was like we'd rounded a corner and found ourselves in the middle of a loosely-agglomerated convocation of grumpy behemoths. Scratch that; it wasn't LIKE that, it WAS that. And, just as you'd expect from any group of big, tetchy critters, one of them moved to block our path, and made grumbly noises.
Fortunately, our new dog was on the case, growling throatily at the big lummox** and baring an impressive array of toothy weaponry.
Unfortunately, the yak agitator was singularly unimpressed.
Fortunately, Uzir was on the case, yelling mightily and brandishing a big stick. That sent the lead yak's impressedness rating rocketing from none to some, and when Uzir leaped at the yak, swinging his stick in a serious "I'm attempting to hit you" manner, the yak bailed.
Hail Uzir, banisher of yakky aggressors!

Path clear, we were free to keep going. Up.

Grass/Rock/Dirt with patches of snow gave way to snow with patches of grass/rock/dirt, and then the bald spots ceased and we were slogging through shin-deep snow up one last major pitch to a ridgeline where we fixed the fallen sign:

Dhaulagiri Icefall Viewpoint: 3900m

Less than halfway to the summit, we'd reached the bottom of the huge icefall that spills down from the shoulder of the mountain that suddenly filled half the sky ahead of us. Victory is ours! We danced around a little bit in the snow, then parked ourselves in one of the roofless houses scattered around the flat spot where ridge meet massif to eat boiled eggs and chapatis.

Best lunch ever!

The post-lunch snowfight was pretty awesome also, especially when handfuls of snow were dumped down the back of Janine's pants. How we all*** laughed: Ha ha ha!

Then we walked back down. Took a lot less time than the walk up. Featured snow-throwing until the snow disappeared. Then featured yak-dung-throwing, which was all fun and games until someone (Nene) hit someone else (Puppet) in the face with a robust chunk, engendering a PuppetSulk that lasted down the steepest pitches, past the grovelly cottage and its returned inhabitants, past the found sunglasses that made Ganga look like an elderly Japanese woman, and through to the first of the small lakes nestled amongst fields of bhang and thistles and ferns.

And then we got a bit lost, and Uzir climbed down a cliff that the rest of us went around, and we found a holy lake where praying for rain happens, and where Nene really should have stopped the dog chasing the endangered nesting birds.

And then we hit the road, and the dog went home, and we found Uzir, and we reached Larjung and the lodge and the beer and the popcorn as the last of the sun disappeared behind Dhaulagiri, which we'd just climbed, but not all the way to the top like Eva Martinez did in 2007, making her the first Mexican woman to reach the summit.

Beer Stats:
Beer Drunk = 2
Beer Time = 31:45
Time to Next Beer = 0:00







* = No-one really knows whence came this expression, but the term slush fund can be traced back to the olden days, like the early 1800s, when fried salt pork was a staple food aboard ships. At the end of a voyage, the grease at the bottom of the pork barrel, called "slush," was sold to candle and soap makers. The money usually helped provide little extras that the crew couldn't otherwise afford, hence the term "slush fund." After the U.S. Civil War, the term was applied to a contingency fund set aside by Congress, outside of the regular operating budget, that was often used for bribes and other corrupt purposes.

** = Not actually a type of ox, and not a Dr Seuss critter; a lummox is a clumsy person, possibly derived from a lommock, which is a large chunk of food from the 1800s

*** = May not have included Nene

Holdy Paws? Slidy Paws! Pause.

Ski til you drop, or are struck down by a cold inherited from a two-year-old. Then ski some more.

Four more posts up today, from our new local wifi-enabled cafe (we get "Local" discount). Would have posted from home, but the open network we'd been using has been locked down and renamed to "GetYourOwnInternet"

REMINDER:
If you don't understand what's being said, it may be because you've missed one or more previous posts, rather than because you're limited - scroll down until you see a post you've read, work your way up from there

x

...and a Deep-Fried Snickers Bar

Short Version:
We sleep in, then walk from Marpha to Larjung.

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 15 = 3:45
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 70:15
Beer Time = 37:15

Long Version:
Marpha Morning:
We're awake at 0630, but stay in bed for another hour. Luxury!
The clouds that threatened rain yesterday afternoon have gone, and the orchards and fields we can see from our window are bathed in sunlight.
When we finally drag ourselves out of bed and out to the conservatory for breakfast, we see locals galore going about their business outside; some are plowing fields with handmade implements strapped onto water buffalo*; others are on the road, travelling to school, or to a near (or far!) village with things to sell. Some of these people have huge bundles of stuff perched on their heads.
The conservatory is cold, so we go downstairs to a grand-looking open atrium area with a huge table that just happens to have a fired-up brazier underneath one end. Warm feets = happy us!

********

Most maps of the Annapurna Circuit show the route following the road for pretty much the whole length of the Kali Gandhaki valley run. That didn't really appeal - despite having had a crack at walking the road between Muktinath and Marpha and finding it nowhere near as bad as we'd feared it might be - and it turned out that there was an alternate trail on the far side of the river, untried by guide or porter, that led where we wanted to go. So, a step (or several) into the unknown!

We started on the road, but soon turned left/east, crossing a bridge and passing through a place that signs indicated was a Tibetan Camp and then turning south, downvalley, along unpaved and semi-paved paths bounded by stone walls. Water was abundant, orchards flourished on all sides, and the people in the villages we passed through looked happy and prosperous in comparison to their counterparts on the other side of Thorong La. We passed a seemingly well-provisioned school, devoid of children as it was a Saturday (who knew?!?!?), which is the one day each week that children do not attend**.

We saw a tiny musha, and a skink, and we climbed some hills. The terrain reminded us of Flagstaff, AZ, and Bend, OR. One hill was high enough that we were looking down on birds of prey circling in the thermal updrafts. Every hill we climbed, though, we descended again, returning each time to the river, which we eventually crossed next to a large bridge that would have spanned the entire river valley, back when all its sections were intact. As it was, we found a series of small, rudimentary timber bridges, each spanning one slender arm of the low-water-season river, and rejoined the road just north of Kobang, which was a mid-sized village beneath a cliff pockmarked with inhabited caves.

We arrived at our lodge in Larjung just as the wind picked up to unpleasant levels, and found Uzir waiting for us on the rooftop terrace. We also found that we could see down across the flat roof and into the central courtyard of the building next-door, which meant we got to watch a man hanging goat parts from hooks, as well as having a birds-eye view of the corn and chillies drying in the sun. We negotiated a tortuous path to our room via the dining room, which had been filled by a large group of Germans who didn't deign to get themselves or their masses of gear out of the way so we - or the people attempting to bring them their lunches - could get past. Wankers.

We ate delicious foods not near the Germans, then set off to explore the village. Unfortunately, that meant walking up, although not especially arduously. We passed water buffalo and chickens and cows, we saw corn and beans and buckwheat drying, we saw a truck that had rolled down a bank. We saw men plowing fields, women carrying hay, children playing on the flat rooftops. One did a cartwheel to impress Nene and lost his shoe over the edge of the roof. We saw a temple or three, and we saw a carpenter's workshop, which was interesting enough that Ganga stepped in a large cowpat while staring in through the window.

Oh, and we saw mountains, including the one we were planning to climb in the morning.

Then we ate delicious foods, and a deep-fried Snickers bar, and then we went to bed. At 7:30pm.







* = Byushi, which we variously misheard as mushi, yushi, and bushi before getting it right. If we got it right.

** = Early start half-day on Friday as well. Sunday to Thursday children from 6 to 18 are expected to be in school between 10am and 4pm

Apple Brandy

Short Version:
We walk from Muktinath to Marpha. Marpha is famous for apple brandy, so we drink some in a huge, pink, empty building.

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 14 = 5:30
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 65:30
Beer Time = 33:30

Long Version:
Muktinath Morning:
A Swiss man blocks the upstairs toilet. A French woman thinks Lovely Wife did it.
In the streets, women are setting up their looms and stalls for the coming day's tourist sales nagging. They sell scarves they've woven, black Tibetan rocks containing fossilized nautilii, and yak tails. And other crap. The loom frames are made not from dressed timber, but from variously gnarled and bent and twisted pieces of tree.
A man who looks scarily like a young Graham Henry grimaces at us as we stride by on our way out of town.

********


The valley below Muktinath is a vastly more pleasant place than the arid dustbowl higher up. Streams criss-crossed the trail, happy-looking animals were abundant...the only blemish on the morning's hike were the ever-more-painful toes.

We bypassed a big chunk of road-walking, and dropped into the wide, flat-bottomed gravel-bed through which a) the Kali Gandakhi (Black River) wends its braided course*, and b) we will be walking for the next several days, although only today are we expected to feel the full wrath of the incredibly strong wind that picks up late morning and blows until nightfall.

Once again, we were lucky; the wind made a half-strength appearance mid-afternoon. We were glad to not be facing the full-blown version!

We lunched at Jomsom, the district capital, which was large, and had scary crazy motorcyclists riding wherever they felt like riding at whatever speed they felt like riding. Jomsom also hosts the Army Mountain War Training compound, which we walked past, and the regional airport, which had been closed by high winds for the past several days. That meant, apparently, that the local jeep owners had been raking in the US dollars and Euros as tourists desperate to make it to Kathmandu in time to catch their outbound international flights abandoned hope of catching their planned connecting flight and sought alternate transportation, at any (inflated) cost. Depending which source you consult, some, many, or most tourists now stop their trek at Muktinath and take a jeep to Jomsom, then fly to Pokhara and on from there to Kathmandu. We were, then, a minority as we hiked on, from Muktinath to Jomsom, and then onwards, south past crazy striated rock faces and on towards Marpha, where we found a butchery.

There were other things too, of course: orchards of various fruit trees (but especially apples); fields of vegetables; insistent, persistent street-vendors; houses with rows of sausages hanging beneath the eaves; the bottom end of the stairs that lead to the hilltop temple that somepuppet refused to visit... but the butchery was pretty special. An open, dirt-floored courtyard full of bloodied, knife-wielding men. Hunks of meat; semi-solid puddled masses of gore; bonepiles; pools of blood. The water-race that had burbled along beside and beneath the flat flagstones of the street ran red downstream of this charnelhouse.

It was good to get back into the countryside, except for the facts that we'd been walking for a long time, and there was something gone seriously and painfully awry inside the puppetboots. The sight of Uzir waving from the doorway of the Rita Guesthouse was a welcome one, as was the hot water that flowed from the showerhead in the bathroom attached to our astroturf-floored bedroom.

Later, post-toenail self-surgery and bathroom sink underwear laundry, we sat at a table in a tomato-plant-filled conservatory, beneath lampshades made of hats, and drank local apple brandy. We tried it straight, then started mixing it with lemonade to render it vaguely palatable. The fact that it came in a relabelled kerosene bottle should have been a clue. We made a wee bit of noise, later in the evening, but as we were the only guests in the enormous hotel, it wasn't a problem. Nor were we loud enough to compete with the truly eerie noises coming from outside; a hair-raising hooting cacophony that Uzir said was foxes. Sounded more like hyenas.

Learned to say red nose and chillies**. Spilled glass of Seabuckthorn juice*** on self. Expressed desire to not walk on the road any more, ever. Woke up in bed several hours later, with headache and dry mouth.







* = Braided when water levels are low, that is; when the rains are in, and when the big melt is happening, the whole valley is a torrent.

** = Rato nak and koshani, respectively

** = Juice made from seabuckthorns, of course. Duh!

Over the Top

Short Version:
We walk from High Camp to Muktinath via the Thorong La Pass, which is 5400m above sea level (that's quite high).
Temple. Beer. Cheese.

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 13 = 4:30
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 60:00
Beer Time = 44:00

Long Version:
High Camp Morning:
It's cold. Lips are chapped from overnight mouth-breathing.
We're packed and are in for breakfast before 5am, and are ready to roll with bellies full of eggs and (really good!) chapatis not long after that.

********

Tiny lights of many colors were strung out along the trail in both directions when we set off; each one a trekker's headlamp. Some people had been walking since 4am. We were, for a change, faster than most, and we executed many passing maneuvres, with varying degrees of rankness, as we hauled ever-higher. The day dawned flawlessly cloudless as we climbed, and - despite uphill antipathy and the effects of altitude - we were having a darn good time as we approached Thorong La, the highest point on our trip.

When we reached the top, there were prayer flags, cups of hot lemon+honey in the low-ceilinged tea-house, snickers bars, and a special dance. There were also beardsicles galore; it was blimmin cold. Apparently after 10am the wind picks up; we were there at 0730 and it was already howling through the pass at a furious rate of knots. We didn't stay long, yet we stayed too long, and it took a while to warm up on the downhill run. The snowfights maybe didn't help.

The trail down from the pass was dusty, and steep. It followed a steep valley, with Thorong Peak to one side, and another mountain just as large on the other. Half an hour or so downhill we hit the topmost section of the new road, and from there on the signs of human activity began to become more and more common; a number of ruined buildings stood near the lip of one plateau, and we found a newly-constructed tea-house (with some Swiss chaps drinking beer at a table in the courtyard) soon after. The trail and the road played double-helix for a while, and then, as the valley began to open out, the road curved away to the north, to connect another village into the matrix. We veered south, and rounded a cliff to see the most incredible display of prayer flags; from multiple points on the cliff high above, the strings of yellow, red, blue, and white flags stretched in all directions. People risked life and limb to get to some of the mount points. We appreciated the effort; it looked really cool.

Below the prayer flags sprawled the Muktinath Temple complex; one of the most famed and holy Hindu temple complexes in the world*. We skirted the fenceline and descended into Muktinath, which seemed like a bustling metropolis after the privations and simplified lifestyle of the high places. There were multi-storey buildings under construction**, and we probably looked like small-town folks come to the big city as we walked through the town***.

We were among the first groups in to the Muktinath Hotel - and Uzir had blasted on ahead of us, as he did most days, fed up with our snail-like pace and our habit of pelting him with snow as he negotiated steep, twisting paths while carrying all our shit. That meant we got one of the best rooms in the place; perched above the main, restaurant floor were four rooms with a terrace area that was in full sunshine when we arrived. There was also a toilet up there, which was pretty excellent, and came in handy once we started in on the beers we'd been earning and not drinking since Chame, while listening to a musical Buddhist ceremony somewhere out of sight but within earshot and marvelling at the big jars of pickled cabbage fermenting in the sun on the low terrace wall.

And then we got clean, which was pretty amazingly good.

And then we had another beer, and some delicious foods. With cheese.

Cheese! Banned from the acceptable foods list as soon as we left Kathmandu and its tourist-gullet-friendly food-safety standards, this most glorious of foodstuffs had been sorely missed! The bean and cheese burrito was so wonderful it was re-ordered at dinnertime.

First, though, we had some walking to do.

Back up the hill to the temple complex, and in through the imposing gates. Bells everywhere, all different sizes and tones. We know, because they're being rung constantly. Small temples have linga, big temple has 106 water spouts shaped like cow heads, and 2 shaped like dragon heads. We counted the dragon ones, took Ganga's word about the cow numbers. Could have asked Uzir to count for us as he dipped a hand in the water flowing from each mouth for good luck, but didn't. Rang bells instead. At a side temple that smelled like wee, we saw the everlasting flames, which were small, burning natural gas leaks. Unless, as we were told, firmly and repeatedly, they weren't gas. Or electric. Or anything else worldly.

Back at the hotel, we played with a kitten that looked, as Lovely Wife put it, like a dishrag, and played cards with Uzir and Ganga and another guy from their village, who had dirty fingernails and cheated. Towel-clad tourists wandered through the dining hall at irregular intervals in search of the shower, which was directly off the restaurant.

Beer Stats:
Beer Drunk = 2
Beer Time = 28:00
Time to Next Beer = 0:00







* = Sound familiar? There were many famous, holy temples. We visited all of them. More to come.

** = Or, possibly, being pulled down. Hard to tell.

*** = Actually, we probably looked like just another scruffy pair of tourists hitting town after crossing the Pass, disshevelled and stinky after several days in places where hot and/or running water was at a premium.