Tales of the Unexpected

40,429 ft – somewhere east of Budapest.

Despite my current altitude I don’t have the slightest element of a headache as I’m currently onboard the last of my 6 Qatar Airways flights in 3 weeks and heading for Heathrow. I could’ve started this sooner into the flight but quite frankly I decided to prioritise the viewing of the cinematic mast

erpieces that are the 2010 versions of The Karate Kid and The A-Team. I don’t regret my decision in the slightest and if I only had time I’d knock off that other sure fire Oscar winner on the list ‘Marmaduke’ aswell. But all that excitement in one day could finish this rather tired little penguin off once and for all, so to the blog…..

Well the last time I updated this I was in Kathmandu and I knew that what lay ahead of me over the next few weeks would be an unforgettable experience. The anticipation of trekking through the jungle of the lower Langtang valley as the world’s most famous mountain range opened before my eyes had me breakdancing on the spot with excitement. Whilst the details were yet to carve themselves indelibly in my heart and mind, I could visualise what lay ahead. Yes, if I’m brutally honest I knew I was sitting on the verge of many great unknowns, but there were certain ‘givens’ that I was expecting from my Himalayan adventure. By the time I returned to KTM I certainly expected at least the following:

1. To have experienced the sensation of my jaw dropping at the sight of these awesome mountains and to have been privileged to have seen the great mountaineering skills of the Sherpas and famous Nepali porters first hand

2. To have on my camera a handful of spectacular blue sky, prayer flag fluttering, arms around teammates summit photos and probably even more images of small, impossibly cute, and very dirty children

3. To have witnessed spectacularly disgusting toilets and to have been afflicted by some pretty hardcore action in ‘Bots’wana region if you know what I’m saying…..

4. To have learned a great deal about Nepali, Tibetan and specifically the Tamang culture and probably have bought some of those ridiculous MC Hammer colourful trousers which I would believe were fantastic despite the constant reassurances from my boyfriend that they were in fact simultaneously hideous and pretentious

5. To have had at least one personal epiphany which would change the course of the future of my life – perhaps involving a shaven head friendly faced and serene man sporting maroon and yellow robes

Oh and by the time I boarded any European bound flight, I would of course have spent 4 days in Dubai and would be leaving overwhelmed by the excesses of the place, horrified by its lack of authenticity, and vowing never to grace it with my MC Hammer trouser wearing presence ever again.

Ok so that is what I expected, so what actually happened? A lot. Shed loads in fact. Some of it I expected yet to be brutally honest, most of it I couldn’t have anticipated in my most yak cheese fuelled dreams and that in itself has been the greatest surprise of the trip.

Of course I should have known it would never have been predictable. The whole randomness of how it even came into being (touched on in earlier blog posts) rendered it nigh on impossible that this would be a ‘normal’ trip to the Himalayas and beyond. If I had been using the services of the stereotypical UK or US based trekking/mountaineering company, things would have undoubtedly been far more predictable. But normality was not what I was seeking and as a result I was served up large portions of mentalness on a daily basis.

I should’ve known that things were not taking a regular – so to speak – direction when four days after landing in Nepal, I was still to take a Brad Pitt (if you don’t understand I have utter faith you’ll work it out in less than 5 seconds….5, 4, 3….there you go), let alone experience the kind of nuclear fall out I had been forewarned would be nothing less than an inevitability. And so it was that the trip continued along these lines – ie contradictory to what I had anticipated yet full (!) with the lessons and experience that inevitably come with the unexpected.

The Langtang Valley itself is supposed to be the destination of choice for those looking for a more authentic Nepalese trekking experience. With little desire to be route marched alongside thousands of other MC Hammer trouser wearers around the Annapurna circuit, or up and down the staircase of the Everest Base Camp trek, I was looking forward to trekking for hours on end with only yaks, monkeys, red pandas, and the occasional snow leopard for company. While there were elements of the trek that were indeed like this - the initial day from Syabru Besi up to Khangin and the following day’s trek high up the valley before joining the well trodden route at the god awful Lama Hotal – there were far more animals in the shape of Western tourists than I had expected to find in the valley. No doubt an enormous contributing factor was the weather which had grounded flights in and out of Lukla (the airport for all Everest bound travellers) for an unprecedented 4 days and meant that alternative routes needed to be found for hundreds of trekkers pretty damn quickly. It may also just well be that my own idea of solitude in the mountains comes from a slightly different basis than others – as a Scot I have been brought up on a diet of ‘no bugger around’ when heading towards high places and as a result, may be a tad bit spoilt in that area.

Whilst I might have appreciated a little more of the solitude that I am used to in the mountains of Scotland, what I certainly didn’t appreciate was the distinct and rather too familiar Scottishness that the weather began to assume the higher up the valley we travelled. Yup, not only did the weather inadvertently bring more bodies to the Langtang than I had anticipated, it also had a pretty significant impact on the days when we were due to be away from the crowds – ie those which involved the attempt on Yala Peak. Minimal visibility verging on nil. Drizzle turning to snow and ice rain all in the space of 4 minutes. A shifting breeze verging from annoying to menacing the higher that we laboured into the mist. As it was we didn’t make it to the summit of Yala Peak and I for one am not particularly fussed by this – for sure the Scottish weather conditions slowed our progress but had we continued the last few hundred meters towards the summit, they would have undoubtedly have had a far more sinister and longer lasting impact on the trip and quite possibly our lives. It was big boys stuff up there and to play any Highland games would have been quite frankly, nothing less than idiocy.

Ah yes. Idiocy. A word upon meeting my 2 fellow Iranian adventurers I feared might feature rather regularly in my vocabulary when it came to observing their behaviour in the mountains. And so it came to pass. From the minute that Shervin suggested that Mohammad buy a $20 sleeping bag in KTM to spend at least one night at 4,800m in the Himalayas, the phrase utter f**king idiocy (U.F.I) almost became my catchphrase when I watched them go about their day to day business on our trip. To give you an idea, Shervin’s summit day rucksack contained jeans, flip flops and a copy of The Guardian. Exactly. To be fair, Mohammad lives in Dubai and Shervin in Frinton on Sea so I guess their mountain U.F.I is kind of forgivable. What was completely not forgivable in my eyes however was a Sherpa demonstrating any kind of U.F.I high in the mountains and I almost wept with disappointment when Chumbi insisted on leading us in a direction that I instinctively knew was not only incorrect but also ridiculously dangerous. Spending the ensuing 2 hours clambering over 4 foot high rocking boulders covered in snow at 5,000m was not only incredibly energy sapping and a total waste of time, but could have very easily resulted in legs of the broken variety. I have never felt so frustrated, angry, and quite frankly like I was the only one who could observe what we were trying to do and actually adopt the appropriate strategy and go the right bloody way to facilitate any chance of getting near the summit. It appears that Sherpas don’t follow maps. Well you know what? That’s great if they know where they’re going. Otherwise it is as stupid as anyone heading out to try and climb Ben Nevis wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos and Crocs.

A strange set of circumstances indeed and the weirdness foundations were now firmly laid to build a strong set of utter bizarreness for the rest of the trip and this is exactly what happened. Any illness that I had anticipated experiencing in Nepal would surely have resulted in dodgy water induced bottom explosions so enormous that the Richter scale would struggle to record their historically unprecedented levels. But the oddness continued when I began to feel worse and worse, no energy, the occasional totally untactical chunder in front of everyone dining in the Namaste Guesthouse in Kyanjin Gompa, ludicrous headaches and irritability, and enormous swings in body temperature. I would awake in the morning and my sleeping bag would be utterly drenched through with my sweat, my hair would be soaking and heart racing. Altitude sickness? No it would appear that only our Nepali porters would be the ones who would be afflicted by this during the trip. Of course. They are totally unaccustomed to these kind of situations as they only come out into these mountains about 5 times a year. Yeah right. Anyway, as it was when I got to Dubai I was thankfully route marched pretty much straight to the local medical centre by one of my dearest friends and it was a damn good thing that we did not pass Go or collect any amount of Rupees or Dirhams as an infection had made its dangerous little way into my kidneys and I was informed that had I waited much longer, things could have been pretty messy. As it was I loved Dubai. I didn’t even expect to like it, let alone love it but I really really did. Perhaps it was the security of being looked after by someone after the difficulties of the preceding weeks, or maybe it was the utter relief of being somewhere where life was not a minute by minute shit fight. It may have even been the fact that I was shockingly, blatantly chatted up by a very handsome Emirati passport control officer when entering the country but there’s no need to analyse. It’s a fantastic place and I look forward to returning when I don’t feel as if I have only 33 seconds left to live……

So as I sit on this UK bound aircraft, I am returning home with a whole host of memories and experiences, a painful peeing problem and a total absence of MC Hammer trousers. My boyfriend will be pleased with the latter but probably a little less enamoured with the previous acquisition. I may not have put many of the experiences on my ‘must-haves’ list before going to Nepal but I wouldn’t have changed any of them for the world. It is an intriguing place and a land where visitors should suspend any kind of expectation upon hitting the tarmac at Kathmandu airport. From the moment you head out of the relative calm and safety of airport interior and into the chaos and heat of the city and beyond, I advise you to do nothing more than make a pact with your own adventure – smile, open your eyes and your heart and expect only the unexpected. If you do only these few things then you might just have your own unique Nepali experience. And no amount of strange happenings will ever be able to take that from you. Ooh, looks like I may actually have had an epiphany after all…..Kathman-done.