The Downside

After all the uphill trekking and the scarce smoking, it was time to come back down. I was looking forward to some nice, less expensive meals and some cool, even hot nights; also, my clothes would need a good washing or even a nice ritual burning. This is why the next morning I packed really fast and then shuffled around the guesthouse and managed to get going at around 11.

I was already nursing a cold and a pretty strong headache, the miserable remains of a concealed, rather late altitude sickness, which didn’t really get to me in time for the actual climb of higher grounds and resolved itself to irritate me the moment it realised it must have been there before. It also refused to go away and, as I would come to find out, it stayed with me all the way to Kathmandu and after.

Going down proved a lot easier than going up and I had ambitious plans to go pretty far down the valley and reach the main town in two days, mainly because my money had dispersed really quickly and I would have preferred to look for the proverbial ATM in Syabru Besi, the one everybody talked about but nobody had actually seen. And, although I had some 5 to 6 hours of trekking, I took my time and stopped for tea, and then for yak curd and sea buckthorn juice, two of the many culinary wonders of Langtang valley, and, on the whole, I took it rather slowly, tripping over rocks as I gazed upwards watching yaks, horses, birds or the odd squirrel gracefully displaying only its backside. I reached my boiling point and refused to go any further than Woodland Guesthouse, a nice place that, I figured, would be halfway down the mountain, but I would later give in to the fact that it was closer to the top half than the lower half of the valley. As I prepared for yet another cold evening with my stuffy nose refusing to cooperate and making it hard for me to do the normal human thing and actually breathe, I was surprised to see that the weather had changed according to the lower altitude: no longer did I need to put all my measly possessions on myself, I could do with only half of the content of the backpack and it didn’t really matter which half, as everything had already acquired a certain odour that you get when you only pack two t-shirts and one blouse for a weeklong trek. I had already decided in Kathmandu that I would travel light, really light, and it was the best choice, as I saw from the envious looks of other trekkers that carried all their worldly possessions minus their grandmothers up and down the valley.

Still, I was impressed to find out that my aforementioned impossibly clogged nose was still able to pick up the incredibly strong bouquet of other hard-core trekkers and, whenever one would raise their hand to wave or point to something, a little part of me died… and then jump-started again because even the dead could be brought back to life with that particular garland of odour hanging around like persistent moths around a light bulb.

The Woodland woman was really nice and friendly and had a lot of fun without anyone’s assistance. She laughed and grinned all the time and, of course, seized every opportunity to shout something to someone. This last bit was usually done by the cordless phone propped almost in the middle of the trekking path, the only place for good reception:

The following day I flew down the mountain, although my kind of flight was more on the leisurely side, stopping to take photos every ten steps. And, if we’re on the ‘steps’ subject, just look at what the people around here did with the trekking path:

This is how most of the path looks like all the way to the top. That’s right, the locals put all the effort into building a gigantic stairway to the top because they reason that, if they have the stairway, they’ll all end up looking (and, regrettably, acting) like Rocky. Fortunately, the porters look nothing like Rocky, although their training might involve a lot more strenuous work…

When I finally arrived to Syabru Besi in the late hours of the afternoon, I was completely drenched and worn out, so the really lovely bucketful of hot water for a shower was the best present I could have received. Also, to my everlasting surprise the legend of the ATM turned out to be true!