Our trek began with a jolting and uncomfortable bus ride to Nagdanda. The views from the bus, as we alternately climbed and descended on the twisting roads were magnificent. In several places enormous boulders, looking as if the had been sliced from the mountain with a sharp knife, blocked the road. They proved no impediment to our driver who swerved around them without slowing down, even when this left the coach with wheels dangling over the edge of sheer drops.
Nagdanda is just one of the many rather similar villages in the region, albeit a little larger because of its position on a relatively major road. It was also our first exposure to the amazing 'children from nowhere' phenomenon that we would witness every time we stopped anywhere over the next few days. We descended from the bus and watched as it pulled away. We stood in the village, buying water and orange juice at the tiny store. The place had seemed to be quiet as we pulled in but almost as soon as the bus had gone we were surrounded by children. It seemed that the local greeting was "Hello, gimme pen". Dozens of children milled around us all echoing the same hopeful greeting. Naturally no-one had any pens to give. When packing for a trek two gross of biros doesn't spring immediately to mind as an essential choice.
Someone did have a large box of sweets and as soon as she took them from her rucksack all of the children deserted the rest of us goodie-less travellers and clustered around her with their hands stretched out. It was a good ten minutes before, exhausted by the ordeal, she could extricate herself from this crowd. We started the walk along a track that led off at right angles from the main road between some of the buildings but were soon out of the village and climbing a very gentle slope about halfway up the mountain on one side of a lush green valley. On the horizon we could see many more impressive and forbidding peaks but we seemed to be heading away from them.
We had been walking for barely an hour when we were told that it was time to stop for lunch. The Sherpas had set up he kitchen on one plateau and spread a ground sheet on another slightly lower one. The kitchen was a marvel. Fires were lit, food unloaded from baskets and poured into large tin cooking vessels, enormous pots of tea brewed and even two large bowls of hot water placed out with towels and soap for us to wash. In fifteen minutes we were eating. It was a lot less than fifteen minutes though to another explosion in the native child population. As we walked I would have sworn that there was not another soul nearer to us than Nagdanda but literally within half a minute of resting we were hailed with dozens of tiny voices crying "Hello, gimme pen !" as their diminutive owners came running up, down and along the hillside. They seemed to have materialised from nowhere.
Lunch consisted of a bizarre mix of rice, crisps, cheese lettuce and jam sandwiches (that is to say sandwiches consisting simultaneously of all cheese lettuce and jam !), various cooked vegetables, cartons of mango juice and pots of very hot and surprisingly delicate tea.
After lunch we carried on along the trail, sometimes climbing, sometimes descending, but never very strenuously until at about five O'clock we found ourselves following the Andhi Khola river bed towards our first camp. We watched in amazement as the camp took shape. Tents were pitched at lightning speed. Latrines dug and flimsy tents pitched above them in a nearby field. Then, to our astonishment a table and chairs appeared and an enormous orange dining tent was erected around them for our evening meal.
Preparations for dinner went on by the fierce light of kerosene lamps. Dinner was a cramped and friendly and above all noisy affair as we tucked into our meal of rice and dhal and a sort of chicken stew with the appetites of true adventurers, a delusion that we were all happy to share. Outside we could hear the Sherpas singing and dancing and when we had finished we invited them to join us. Even more people crowded into the tent. We shuffled down to make room for them and they sat at the open end on the floor singing while some of them danced in the tiny remaining space. When it all broke up I was amazed to look at my watch and find that it was not yet nine O'clock.
At six the following morning we were woken with cups of tea and half an hour later presented with a bowl of warmish water each for washing. While we ate breakfast the camp was dismantled with similar speed to its erection and the porters and Sherpas loaded it into baskets on their backs and set off ahead of us. Our morning route continued along the Andhi Khola, climbing only gently but occasionally involving some slippery or muddy sections.
We passed through many small villages set in verdant rice fields with occasional brilliant flashes of yellow rape, grown for the oil. In every village laughing children followed us with the now familiar greeting. Not once did anyone seem disappointed that we had no pens to give them.
The sharpness of the contrast between the barren looking sandy soil and then only yards away trees and bushes and green fields was breathtaking. After a brief break for an early lunch at about eleven, we crossed a stream back to the path and walked on through another village. A hundred yards further on the path suddenly started to climb very steeply indeed. I was almost at the front of the party and started confidently up. After ten minutes of continuous hard slog I was beginning to suspect that my confidence was misplaced. After twenty minutes with not the slightest respite those of us who were leading stopped climbing and sat down on a wall to wait for the others to catch up. The one big advantage of pace setting is that you get longer rests. It was nearly half an hour before the majority of our party had arrived. Even then there were some at the back who were finding the going tough. Then it was off again, onward and upward.
Finally the path levelled out and wound into a village at the far side of which we came to a series of what looked like barrack rooms. One of the local children told us that this was the largest school in the district with eight hundred pupils and eighteen teachers. We looked in through the windows at the tiny desks and cramped conditions. He told us proudly that he went to this school and that children came from many miles to attend it. The previous afternoon we had made friends with a young Nepalese boy, aged about ten, and he had written down the address of his school so that she could write a letter to him from England. When our new friend told us the name of this school we discovered that it was the same one. It had taken a day and a half of hard walking to reach it from the point where the other boy had met us. Past the school we climbed a short steep hill to the plateau where camp was already taking shape. I turned around at the top and ahead of me were Annapurna South, Machapuchare and Annapurna IV. It was quite a sight. The sun was low in the sky behind me and the peaks seemed to glow with fire on the snow.
Over the next couple of hours the rest of the party came in. Men from the village brought up bottles of beer, water and orange in baskets to sell to us to replenish our dwindling supplies. Once more we had the children running around us. Occasionally the Sherpas shouted at them or gestured angrily and they would run away for a few minutes but they always came back.
As we stood there gazing at the magnificent view someone said
"This is the best Christmas Eve ever."
Until that moment it hadn't occurred to me that today was Christmas Eve.
Later, in the dining tent, the Sherpas had put bottles of cheap Nepalese rum on the tables for us to enjoy with our meal. Enjoy is possibly the wrong word when faced with something that can strip paint from a hundred yards just by opening the bottle but we gave it our best shot. Most people gave up after a sip or two but some of us are made of sterner stuff and drank rather a lot of this fiere spirit. Combined with the beer we were fairly well on the way to being extremely drunk. Everyone sat around the tent after dinner telling jokes and funny stories. After everyone had taken a turn it was still only nine O'clock. Some people went to bed. I dived into my rucksack and extracted a bottle of brandy and a bottle of an evil Austrian rum that I had anticipated needing. One of the others had liberated some more of the local fire water, another had a bottle of Red Label. We all sat on the edge of the precipice getting legless. When all the booze had gone I crawled into me tent which was fortuitously only a few feet away and went to sleep.
*
Whatever it felt like it certainly didn't feel like Christmas Day. All that Santa had left me was a hangover and a tingling in the extremities that was only just short of frostbite. I crawled from my pit, dipped a finger into the bowl of water that had already gone cold in the two minutes since it was delivered and decided to forego the pleasure of shaving. Washing was ordeal enough. Most people were the worse for wear and we picked a breakfast without enthusiasm before setting off.
Initially we went back towards the village but soon veered off into new territory. The village was larger than I had suspected and looking back toward it as we climbed revealed itself to be a sizeable town by local standards. Today I had made a conscious decision to walk near the back.
Of course you do have to pay attention on the trail. We had, as did every group, a couple of Sherpas walking with us but it only takes a momentary loss of attention and
"Where's our Sherpa gone?" asked Michelle, who I had been chatting to as we walked. I looked around for the young chap in the Dennis the Menace red and black shirt. He was nowhere in sight. Come to that neither was anyone else. It didn't matter we were on a single track that had had no turnings or junctions and there were people behind us so we couldn't be lost. We decided to carry on and only stop if there came a point where we had to choose between two routes. We continued walking and talking and suddenly found ourselves standing in the entrance to some poor Nepalese farmer's barn, complete with a couple of mangy looking water buffalo and a chicken.
We turned around and tried to find where we had gone wrong. A few yards back along the path there was a near invisible fork to the right. In the absence of a better plan we took it. A little while later we came to our lunch stop.
Lunch was taken on a school football field. Some of the others had already enquired about getting a ball but it was a Saturday and the school was closed so that a quick kick about wasn't an option. Probably just as well. It would have just been something else for the Sherpas to be better at.
The next section was long and steep and hard work. We trudged along with the silence broken only by our panting and wheezing. Occasionally one of the porters would trot lightly by carrying on his back a load that I couldn't have lifted.
We walked on through the trees for a couple more hours and eventually came clear of them. Ahead of us up a gentle slope was the village of Panchase. Some of the local people had come out to meet us and now walked up with us. I walked between the relatively prosperous looking houses, past a small hut selling drinks where I bought a Sprite and then turned a corner and stopped dead. Ahead of me was a gentle downward grass covered slope that dropped away almost vertically about a hundred yards down, into a beautiful valley beyond which rose the Himalayas, with the twin peaks of Machapuchare in the centre. I have never seen any sight so magnificent in my life. Everyone who had been ahead of me was standing gazing toward it awe-struck. Some of them had been there for almost an hour already but were still looking.
That evening, as the Sherpas prepared our meal we saw a brand new cooking technique. As it was Christmas they were going to bake us a cake. First they dug a pit in which they lit a fire. A large metal tin was placed on this and the base packed with earth which was allowed to get very hot from the flames. The smaller tin with the cake in it was placed onto this earth with a lid and more earth packed around it and over it. A lid was added and another fire set on top of it to form a makeshift oven. While all this was going on other Sherpas were negotiating with the locals for a goat and some chickens. When the purchases were complete the goat was tethered and the chickens placed under a basket. Unfortunately the chickens knew exactly what was coming so at the first chance, an accidental brush against the basket by someone, they were out and running. One of the Sherpas chased them all over the hillside. It was like a scene from a Buster Keaton film as he leapt and ran and dived at the errant fowl. Finally they were caught and placed under the basket again, this time held firmly in place with stones. From this display I surmised that Dinner was Goat and Chicken curry followed by Christmas cake. Afterwards we all drank a great deal, on a par with the previous night and attempted to remember the words to some Christmas carols. Somehow we got all the way through "The Twelve Days of Christmas" with a trivial number of mistakes although the whole ensemble was a lot less melodic than the Sherpas' sing-songs. Afterwards there was a celebration by some of the die hard party-goers with the Sherpas that lasted hours, as indeed did that Sherpa song. I had tried to go to my sleeping bag a little earlier and get some sleep but my tent mate had consumed half a bottle of Jameson's, fallen asleep on his back and was snoring like a train. He was still going when the party broke up and everyone else went to bed. I heard laughter from the next tent and the comment,
"Poor Bob, he'll never sleep through that."
And they were right, but somehow it didn't seem to matter.
