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!