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December 28, 2000 - December 13, 2001
14 Days in Nepal

Into the mountains...
The bulk of my trip was spent in the Himalayas, trekking along the trails. We flew from Kathmandu to Lukla to begin our journey. We had a 7am flight, but the typical Kathmandu fog prevented us from leaving until around 11am. And when we finally did, it was in a plane that had to be like at least forty years old. It looked like some one stapled some folding chairs down. But the best was the airport. It was on a cliff. I'll go more into it later, but it was an uphill, dirt runway in the middle of some tiny village. Here's the first animal I saw. A yak. Notice the crow on his back.
When we landed we walked around trying to find some porters to carry our backpacks during our expedition and also to make sure that we were going the right way. We found one guy who seemed all set to come with us, but he didn't speak a word of English. Andrea was able to communicate a little with him and she told him we needed two porters. Luckily his friend who came along later spoke decent English. Here's a shot looking down into the valley from where we began. It's hard to even describe the feeling of being up in the mountains.
It was nice not having to carry our backpacks. I had enough trouble walking. This picture shows what the typical path was like. These are what we followed as we went higher and higher into the mountains. This might actually be a little too flat than the norm, but it was more or less like that. Some parts were very rocky, some parts were very icy. It surely wasn't a Sunday walk in the park. I regret that I had to concentrate so much on not tripping or falling that I didn't get to look at the surroundings all the time.
We passed a lot yaks along the way. These yaks are truly Nepal's beasts of burden. They strap bags upon bags on top of these animals and then they march them down the narrow paths, up the rocky inclines, across the rickety bridges. I guess they are equivalent to trucks in the US. The bad thing was whenever we got stuck behind the yaks. We had to wait until the path opened up. Because it's not wise to try and pass them. And it's especially not wise to try to touch their horns, as Andrea quickly learned.

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