The journey from Tadapani down to Ghandruk took around half the time as it had going up, unsurprising given the precarious speed of the steep descent. Ghandruk itself is around 500 metres lower in altitude than Tadapani and, until the arrival of the adventure trekking business, was merely a small Nepalese village of pretty, traditional style houses constructed of stone, timber and slate.
The access ways were all paved with stone slabs which circled the contour of the land, as well as uphill and down, interlinking the community in an extended network of small roads which often morphed into steep flights of steps. You could walk them or navigate them with horses or mules, but nothing else. Everywhere people lived pretty much as they ever had, tending their small holdings of rice, maize or millet, washing by hand at the open air water troughs, the daily chores life at the most basic level of technology. It is quite understandable that many people have embraced the trekking business here as an opportunity to earn a little money, improve their standards of living and make life a little more comfortable.
Adventure tourism had made its usual mark in the form of a spreading rash of small modern hotels and guesthouses, the majority of which were now closed thanks to the impact of the pandemic. Indeed, I was lucky to be here at all, as only recently the community administration had closed the district to outsiders through concerns about the rising numbers of coronavirus cases, deferring my planned trip to Tadapani by two weeks. As it was, relatively few guesthouses were receiving visitors, and I had been lucky to be accepted by the owners of one, relatives of the same family running the hostel further uphill, two congenial and attentive sisters. A modern, unremarkable building, its claim to fame was having one of the best panoramic views of the Annapurna Range (when visible), from their terrace rooftop. Thus it was that I repaired for just over a week.
Having an indoor bathroom was a definite advantage; no more nightly excursions out into the cold. After the bright hot sunny descent, the weather closed in again and the rains continued more or less unabated. Occasional breaks afforded glimpses of the usual expansive mountain scenery with forests and waterfalls, but the elusive giants yet remained elusive. The monsoon this year has been unrelenting in its intensity and severity, and the occasional day or two’s respite has been rapidly followed by more torrential infrastructure wrecking downpours. Thus it was that a delayed consignment of yak meat arrived early one morning, coinciding with the closure of the road out to Pokhara (whence it had been destined) by a landslide, and a lengthy power outage that had shut down the fridge freezer. Fortunately there are still remembered traditional means of preserving meat.
The first I knew about it was when I went down into the communal dining room to see several ladies sitting around on the floor processing the meat for drying. It looked like the immediate aftermath of a massacre. Strings of the meat were hung on poles around a huge rusty old stove and the floor was splattered with bits of bone, meat, blood and the entire place smelt heavily of it, like a butcher’s shop. If ever you wanted a fast track to being a vegetarian, then this would’ve been it. However, I decided to tough it out (in the way I used to with traditional country living in the Andes) as I think it’s too easy to become effete and overly squeamish in our developed Western cultures. This is real life for the people living here, so although the smell was enough to make you gag, I determined to stick it out and eventually shared a lunch of yak stew with everyone. It tasted much like beef and if I hadn’t have known better, I would have thought it was.
The following day I was taken to spend lunchtime and most of the afternoon at a very old fashioned traditional house further down the village, constructed with timber, brick and slate, and with a beaten earth floor. It was reminiscent in many ways of my erstwhile experiences living with Indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Andes. The house was full of several senior ladies, all sitting around on the floor exchanging stories and gossip and going into gales of raucous laughter periodically, as well as smoking cigarettes (Nepali women do seem to smoke a lot surprisingly). One elderly lady with a voice that sounded like it came from the depths of a gravel pit, was casually lighting her cigarettes with a large flaming brand straight from the open hearth, alongside which two small kittens were curled up sleeping. Diverse other cats meowed around, angling for scraps. The ladies seemed very happy to have me there and share the yak bone broth and other traditional foods with them, despite my being unable to join in their conversations.. There’s the always uncomfortable experience of sitting mutely and smiling vacantly whilst incomprehensible jokes are exchanged, evidently about you as everyone is looking at you as they all laugh. I was given some locally brewed liquor distilled from millet grain that looked like water, but most certainly wasn’t. An old gent who might have been someone’s husband was sleeping off the effects of drinking too much of it the previous night (so I was told) in a bed in the corner of the room.
So the days passed pretty much as usual, starting early in the morning breakfasting up on the roof terrace, scrutinising the expansive view for any sign of Annapurna or Machapuchare. It is extraordinary how these mountains, as immense as they are, can so easily shroud themselves in a way that you would never know they were there at all. At times, sometimes early in the morning or late in the afternoon, there would be a small shift in the cloud cover and you would get a brief glimpse and have to rest content with that. So, as luck or destiny would have it, the first morning that dawned brilliantly clear with the entire Annapurna range sparkling white in the sunlight, a sight I had been waiting for for weeks, had to coincide with an unexpected group of other in-country travellers passing through, occupying my grandstand view and completely hijacking the occasion. I couldn’t bring myself to stay and have to engage in the usual platitudes of which country I was from and when did I arrive in Nepal, so I went and had a long cold shower instead, which perversely felt like the only way to express the depths of my feelings. It felt like the Universe was trolling me.
Never mind, a couple of mornings later, I was finally able to enjoy the view again, this time by myself, as well as occasional sightings towards evening. And that I’ll have to be content with, for the time being at least, until the next trip takes me back into the mountains, which I am planning next month to the remote province Mustang, high up by the Tibetan plateau, and to the ancient high altitude temple Muktinath with its view of Mount Kailash.
I arrived back into Lakeside after an absence of just two weeks, although inevitably it felt longer. The rice had grown impressively in my absence and now stood tall lush and dense, the entire view of the valley down to the lake one intense expansive emerald green. Pond herons that had waded through the paddies searching for prey were now barely visible in this jungle. And the rains continue unabated …