Into Thin… Crust Pizza

There we were: Annapurna Base Camp, altitude 4,130m (13,549 ft). 

 

A five-day walk from the nearest road. Surrounded on all sides by enormous mountain peaks, each one of them higher than any mountain in the US or Europe. The tallest in the area, Annapurna I, still jealously hoards the frozen bodies of victims who have died trying to summit her.

And we were eating a pizza.

“Pizza at 4,000 meters” might as well have been the motto of our 10-day trek in the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal. Don’t get me wrong, the trek to Annapurna Base Camp (or ABC, as it’s called by trekkers too lazy to say the full name, yet somehow motivated enough to hike to it) is not a walk in the park. It’s a pretty strenuous endeavor: 10 days of hiking 5-7 hours a day over mountains and down deep valleys until finally going up, up, up to above 4,000 meters. It’s not for the light-hearted or unfit.

That said, it’s not inaccessible either. We saw all types on the trail: young, old, in-shape, flabby. Tanned, fit Germans in full trekking gear flew past us in a blur of Gortex and trail mix right before we passed a group of 15 senior citizens from Russia who were moving so sluggishly that if they had been going any slower, they would have been going backwards. A group of Japanese teenagers, all trendy sunglasses and neon colors. A horde of Korean tourists- so many that the trekking lodges served kimchi and Korean noodle soup on their breakfast menus. Really, we saw everyone. I even met two kids from Missouri!

Despite the diversity and sheer number of people on the trail, it wasn’t difficult to escape the crowds and have time to ourselves as we walked. We planned our itinerary and walking rhythm to do just that: avoid the guided tours. While the vast majority of other trekkers - probably 90%- were doing the trail with a guide and porters to carry their bags, we decided to go at it alone. 

And we never regretted that decision. While others had groups to wait for and guides to plan their departure time, V and I were able to go at our own rhythm and beat the crowds. 

A typical day was as follows:

5:45am-- Wake-up call. At the first alarm, I would stretch out of my cozy, warm sleeping bag into the cold room to retrieve my trekking clothes, which I would put in my sleeping bag to warm up while I snoozed another 10 minutes

6:00am-- Snooze on the alarm goes off. We both do our best to change into our now-toasty trekking gear while still in our sleeping bags. Once up and dressed, we pack up our stuff and shove everything into our backpacks, which each weigh around 20 lbs.

6:30am-- Breakfast. We carried our own breakfast items to avoid paying the high prices (and understandably so- everything is brought up by porters) at the lodges. We would order a small pot of hot water and enjoy our Breakfast of Champions: oatmeal with peanut butter and honey, instant coffee and a glass of water with vitamins. AARP card not included.

7:00/7:30am-- Departure. As most groups didn’t leave before 8:00am, we always had the trail to ourselves for the first few hours of the day. You can just imagine how proud of ourselves we were for being so clever.

7:00-11:30-- In the mornings, we would walk for 4ish hours at a pretty good pace with small snack and water breaks. We would carry 2-3 liters of water each, which we purified with iodine tablets, along with trail mix and dried fruit.

11:00/11:30am-- Lunch break. We would stop in little villages or lodges, of which there are many along the trail, for a hot tea and a typically Nepalese lunch of Dal Bhat: hot lentil soup poured over rice and mixed with curried vegetables and spicy pickles. Delicious, nutritious and filling. Just like our oatmeal. Huzzah!

12:30-2:00pm-- More walking (and, let’s be honest, farting. Dal Bhat does that to you…) We usually arrived at our stopping point for the day around 2:00 or 3:00pm so as to be sure to find a free room before the groups arrived. We never had a problem finding accommodation and managed to find places that were always very cozy and comfortable.

2:30-5:00pm—Shower (sometimes even hot ones!), laundry, reading, generally relaxing. The thing that amazed us about the lodges along the trail was just how comfortable they were: private rooms, often Western toilets (aka, ones you actually sit on, as opposed to squat over), sometimes even hot showers. Most of the treks we have done in other parts of the world have had accommodation that included camping and sleeping in communal rooms on the floor. This was completely unexpected luxury. And I haven’t even told you about the food…

5:00-7:00pm—Food! We would generally order dinner around 5:00 and eat within the following hour or so. And this is where we were really shocked. They had pizza. And pasta. And, I kid you not, enchiladas. In a tiny lodge in the Himalayas at 4,000 meters above sea level where the food was cooked over a wood fire and brought up on the backs of porters wearing flip flops, I could order a burrito. It was insane. We really, honestly expected that the only food available for 10 days would be dal bhat and curry. We were almost disappointed to realize that that was no longer the case. Of course, that disappointment vanished as soon as we got our pizza.

7:00-8:00pm—Talking to other trekkers, playing cards and -just to make sure we were well within the Nepal cliché- reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air about a disastrous expedition on Everest. Mind you, Annapurna Base Camp is not Everest. It’s not even half of Everest. But you better believe that as we hiked up to ABC on our well-defined path with the sun shining, we were both imagining ourselves slogging through waist-deep snow during a blizzard at 8,000 meters. I think I even referred to our arrival at the base camp as “summiting.” Yup, I’m a douche.

8:00pm—In bed. Lights out. I’m not even kidding.

So that was what we did, day in, day out, for ten days. There were the occasional unscheduled surprises in our itinerary: a few half-days with long lunches in the sunshine, some natural thermal baths, stopping to talk to farmers and peasants working on the millet harvest, a village celebration during which we danced in the streets with a bunch of old ladies drunk on local rum.

A nice old lady we met who explained to me with hand gestures what she was doing with the newly-harvested millet

This woman was a dancing machine! And probably wasted...

OMG!!: Taking time out from the party to text

These ladies were hilarious: just cozied up on the street, drinking and laughing.

But mostly, it was just lots and lots of walking.

And we loved it. Absolutely loved it. The scenery, as you would expect, was incredible. You know how much I love describing landscapes with all sorts of quasi-poetic, flowery nonsense, but I’ll spare you the adjectives and instead show you the pictures.

But before I do (you should have known you wouldn’t get off that easy…), let me tell you how impressed and awed we were not just by the beauty of our surroundings, but also by their diversity. We walked through terraced rice paddies and drying millet fields, through picturesque villages with stone houses (oh no, here come the adjectives!), through sub-tropical rainforest complete with ferns and monkeys, on to temperate forests blanketed in warm, autumnal colors (Blanketed? Really, Elissa?), then up through bush-covered mountainsides until finally reaching soaring snow-covered peaks. Every day the scenery changed completely, which made ten days of walking and oatmeal a lot less tedious than it sounds.

Now here are the pictures:

 

 

Adding a rock to a cairn and asking the mountain for safe passage

And what trek in an Asian country would be complete without adorable little kids?

Porters carrying the weight of our enchilidadas with a strap over their foreheads

 

The crown jewel of the trek was, of course, the Annapurna Base Camp, which is set in a stunning “sanctuary” surrounded on all sides by enormous, snow-capped mountains. 

Amazing Annapurna Base Camp Heartly!

Awestruck at Annapurna I

Showing Krakauer how it's done.

It was humbling to look in every direction and see such powerful, and such beautiful, forces of nature, knowing that several of those mountains had claimed the lives of many, many people who tried to conquer them. The camp sits at the base of Annapurna I, which, at 8,091m (26,545 ft), is not only the tallest mountain in the Annapurna Range, but also holds the macabre honor of being the most dangerous mountain in the world. The mountain’s ratio of number of deaths (56, as of 2005) to number of successful summit attempts (103) is the highest of any other mountain. Into Thin Air, indeed.

Buddhist prayer flags in front of Annapurna I

Standing at the foot of that giant, knowing that the majority of its victims were still up there, buried under the snow and ice, gave us the chills.

Or maybe we were just cold.  Forget those doomed souls, we’re gonna go get a pizza.

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Trash and Trekking

I hated Sapa.

We had only been there about 45 minutes and already I was fed up.

“This is AW-ful,” I moaned, head fogged with sleep deprivation as I flipped through our trusty Lonely Planet, trying to find another place, any place, to escape to.

Admittedly, I may have been jumping the gun a little bit. We had arrived in Sapa at 5:30am via an overnight bus on which I wasn’t able to sleep at all. Staggering off the bus exhausted and grumpy, I was emotionally unequipped to deal with the hostel touts who were yelling at us, pulling at our arms, doing everything possible to harass us into coming to their guesthouse. I know touts are a part of traveling, especially in this part of the world, but that morning I was so tired and miserable that I wished death- or at least grave personal injury- on each and every one of them.

We thought that we would have some respite once we had chosen a guesthouse, but it didn’t stop there. Instead of hostel touts, we were surrounded and subsequently followed by three women from the Hmong hill tribe, who tried to convince us to hire them as tour guides to visit their village. At any other time, on just a bit more sleep, this wouldn’t have bothered me so much, but I was not in the mood. Their attempts to engage us (“Where are you from? Is that your husband? Very handsome.”) seemed sinister and deceitful, their colorful traditional costumes came across as a plot constructed solely for the purpose of ensnaring naïve tourists. Normally, I am not this jaded, but that morning, I had had enough.

However, like most things, my bad attitude was nothing that a good nap couldn’t fix. After a few hours of sleep and a coffee, the little black cloud that had followed me since arriving in Sapa had cleared. My world was bright and sunny again. And Sapa wasn’t so bad after all.

We had come to Sapa to trek through the terraced rice paddies and hill tribe villages that are tucked away in the mountains surrounding the town. Before arriving, Vincent learned about a Sapa-based organization called Sapa-O-Chau (www.sapaochau.org) that educates disadvantaged youth from the hill tribes and trains many of them to be trekking guides; so we headed to their offices to get information about trekking. While we were discussing various trekking options with the manager, he mentioned that things were busy for him at the moment because he was organizing a big event the next day during which the school’s students would walk from village to village picking up trash and raising awareness about responsible and sustainable waste disposal.

“Can we help?” I asked, unthinking, and without consulting Vincent and Elodie, who were immediately implicated by my offer.

Luckily, they were just as keen to get involved and the next day, we found ourselves in rubber gloves with a few other volunteers and around 30 students, picking up trash along the road. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and warm. We had a great time talking to the students and other volunteers and feeling like we were a part of something helpful and important. It was fascinating to see this group of students from various villages, many dressed in their tribe’s traditional costume, coming together to lead an effort that would benefit the whole community. These “under-privileged” kids were an inspiration: their motivation to make their surroundings healthier and more beautiful was both humbling and encouraging.

The amount of garbage was staggering and it was impossible to collect all of it, but we quickly realized that the day was more about awareness than trash collection. All along the way, villagers and tourists alike would ask us what we were doing and were interested in our effort. Some bystanders even joined in and helped us pick up trash as we passed, including small children who would make a game out of the pick-up, challenging each other to see who could collect the most candy wrappers.

The walk through the villages also gave us a sneak peak of the region’s unique scenery that would dominate our trek the following day. We had signed up for a two-day trek with a Sapa-O-Chau guide along with two other volunteers from South Africa that we had met during the trash pick-up. We were six people in all with our adorable 19-year-old guide Lan, who had a quick smile and an infectious barking laugh.

The landscapes we passed through were incredibly stunning: several times we would round a bend and all just stop, speechless, as we were hit with the view in front of us. Dramatic, green hills puncturing a low-hanging haze and then plummeting into deep valleys. Terraced rice paddies that climbed up the side of mountains, army-green and gold with late-harvest rice stalks. We were incredibly lucky to be in the area during the two-week harvest period:  the paddies were alive with activity. We watched whole families cutting the rice grass by hand while eight-year-old boys herded the water buffalo that would till the cut terraces with their hooves. We passed groups of people picnicking in the fields, taking a break from the difficult labor, and children playing in the bins used to collect the rice. The soundtrack of our trek was the deep, muted, drum-like rhythm of the farmers beating fist-fulls of dry grass against a wooden bin to loosen the grains. It was fascinating and we were grateful to be able to witness these ancient local rituals that were so integral to the region’s culture.

A young water buffalo shepherd

A Hmong woman looks on while Vincent gets rabies

Look closely and you will see the 10-inch knife in the little boy's hand. Who needs toys when you have sharp objects? (Photo by Elodie)

At one point we passed a group of children playing under the supervision of an elderly man. We were taking photos of the kids and laughing as we showed them the result in the camera’s viewfinder when the old man started gesticulating wildly, pointing at our cameras and speaking animatedly to Lan. We were concerned that the man was angry at us for taking pictures of the kids, but Lan explained that no, he wasn’t upset: he simply wanted his picture taken as well. The man posed, grinning as Leslie, the South African girl in our group, took a portrait of him. He was simply beside himself with excitement to see the picture and laughed with abandon when Leslie showed it to him. His mirth was contagious and soon all of us- the children, Lan, the old man, our little group of tourists- were laughing together, sharing a simple moment of joy that needed no translation.

Our new buddy and his charges

Quite possibly the two cutest kids in Vietnam (Photo by Shaun Children)

Our trek included an overnight homestay with a family, who were part of the Red Dzao tribe. While the Hmong people are known for their colorful indigo-dyed outfits, complete with woolen gaiters on their legs, the Red Dzao tribe are distinguished by their bright red head-dresses. The head-dresses are striking, however some women opt for red fabric lined with white, which, if I’m honest, looks uncannily like a Santa Claus hat.  I know, my cultural sensitivity is inspiring…

The homestay was not only a great time (excellent home-cooked food, awesome company), but it was also extremely comfortable. During every other trek we have done, the beds in the homestays are mats or thick blankets on the floor, but here, we had massive beds with pillows and mosquito nets! It was an unexpected, and extremely appreciated, luxury. To top it off, we were also treated to a Red Dzao tradition: hot, herb-infused baths. Our hosts boiled locally-grown medicinal herbs in a massive cast-iron pot and then mixed the scalding water with fresh water in wooden barrels for us to sit in and soak away our aches and pains. I don’t know if there is anything in this world that feels better after a 6-hour trek than a beer, a delicious meal and a hot herbal bath.

Helping Lan make spring rolls for dinner

Our host, making dinner in her "Santa Hat"

Soaking away his worries (except the one about his wife taking pictures of him at bath time...)

And now for the obligatory social commentary portion of this blog post.  Our homestay was interesting, but not in the way we expected. What surprised us was just how similar the family was to any other family in any other place in the world.  Yes, the mother had on her Santa Claus hat and the children were all dressed in traditional tribal dress, but that’s where the differences ended. While the mom cooked dinner (over the kitchen’s open fire on the ground), the kids did their homework. During dinner, as we tourists raved over the tasty spread of dishes in front of us and chatted about our day, the whole family ate silently, eyes fixed on the TV, where a Chinese program dubbing into Vietnamese was playing. They all started out at the table, until one by one, they turned their chairs towards the TV with apologetic smiles, taking their plates in their laps. It was the normalcy of the situation and the family that struck us. When we travel, we always focus on how things, and people, are different from where we come from, when in fact we should be looking at what we all have in common. Of course there are massive cultural differences, but beyond the superficial, we really aren’t all that different.

And with that cloyingly clichéd observation, let’s jump to our next destination: Ninh Binh, a smallish city a few hours south of Hanoi. We took the blissfully comfortable overnight train from Sapa and arrived in Ninh Binh with two days to explore. The city is a bit off the main tourist track, which was its biggest draw for us. Although we loved our trek in Sapa, we were becoming concerned that Vietnam was so firmly on the tourist trail that we would never get to know the “real” side of the country. Thankfully, we saw it in Ninh Binh, where strangers still waved to us in the streets and vendors didn’t try to add a couple thousand extra dong to the prices of meals.

The countryside surrounding Ninh Binh is known as the “terrestrial Halong Bay” due to its soaring green karst cliffs and rock formations that protrude from the otherwise-flat ground. We rented scooters to explore the area (Vincent and Elodie on one and me bringing up the rear on the other) and zoomed through country roads and small towns that rarely see tourists.

A flooded graveyard outside Ninh Binh

We culminated the adventure with a boat trip in a protected flood area during which a sweet young woman rowed us in a cramped wooden sampan along the base of the towering cliffs and through a cave.  

On our way back to Ninh Binh, we passed through a tiny village whose narrow winding streets wouldn’t have been out of place in Italy. Between the scooter and my giant sunglasses, I felt like a trendy Italian, zipping through the back streets of Rome.

That is, until I remembered that I was wearing convertible pants… 

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