The next morning we embarked on possibly the easiest hike I had done on the Annapurna, the trail to the Annapurna High Camp. It was in short segments and the steepest part was only five or ten minutes long. Also, on the way there we had stopped at a pastry shop at the Annapurna Base Camp and eaten cinnamon and chocolate rolls. When we got to the top, we met up with the Swiss woman and her dad. I sat down and worked on two or three more bracelets and talked with the woman, whose name is Lea. After a while, we headed inside and played UNO with Lea and a man called Hui. Hui was from Vietnam and we’d spoken with and walked with him a couple of times on the trek. He was very fun, and together he and Asher teamed up to win about five rounds. Lea was also a very good player and she won at least three rounds in a row. Hui’s friend had been mentioned earlier because of his BB-8 droid and he played with him again. Everyone ate lunch, but at dinner I was the very very very very very last person to get their food (very). We all talked a little while longer, but at eight o’clock we went to our room to make room for the porters who were beginning to eat their dinner, but then we decided to go back inside because Aba got cold. However, after five minutes we got kicked out so that the porters could go to sleep in the kitchen and dining area. We got ready for bed and blogged in the bedroom. Aba and Troy had one room and Asher, Ganesh, and I slept in another room. Before we went to sleep, Asher played a video game on his kindle and made an odd noise at some point so Ganesh freaked out because he thought that Asher was having trouble breathing at the high altitude! After that laugh, the next morning we woke up at five am and ate breakfast. While we were eating, we saw an Israeli that we had met a couple nights previous wearing Tefillin and reciting his daily prayers, which was interesting. His girlfriend hadn’t seemed to be in the best of health or moods since we met her, and that morning wasn’t any different. The night before she had looked grey! At the moment she was trying to scoop some frozen Nutella out of a jar… Who would have thought that Nutella freezes? In the beginning, the hike was cold and my face was numb, but only for ten or twenty minutes. After that, we saw the sunrise in the trail and everybody warmed up.
We got to the pass without incident and we all smiled so wide that our faces hurt! It was a very easy trek that day and we achieved our goal!
I’m especially happy to have made it to the pass because when I was five years old Aba had gone to the Annapurna with my cousin, Oran. We printed out the Annapurna mountain on a piece of paper and moved a printout of Aba’s head up the mountain every day. I had wanted to come, but when Aba came back he promised me that we would climb the mountain together. We hiked down the mountain and encountered many bicyclists carrying their bicycles. When we returned to civilization we all drank fresh juice and then continued on to a village called Muktinath. We went to a hotel that Aba ate at when he trekked here previously, and I ate a Yak steak for the first time. I bought some new string for making bracelets and then met Lea and her dad and decided to go to a temple with them. We showered and then met them and the porters at the temple. There, we saw some tourists enacting a spirit-cleansing ritual. They stripped and only wore underwear and had to run through about 100 cold fountains without any protection! Then, they had to submerge three times within two pools of freezing water, still almost naked. We walked around the temple and saw a giant black Buddha statue with its head covered because it was going to be unveiled in the following days.
We then walked across a beautiful hill to the actual temple and saw a man welding what looked like a very skinny throne. However, when he finished he attached an exercise bar and Ganesh and the porters did pull-ups and tried to impress Lea, failing miserably. However, one of the porters, Banu, managed to do a couple of pull-ups using only one finger! The porters and Asher and I laughed a lot because we had a hilarious inside joke… We then went inside the temple and saw a lot of art on the walls.
Then, we walked back to our hotel and worked a little. Lea joined us for dinner and we all played UNO again. We learned that aside from his two-year-old daughter, Ganesh also lives with and educates four orphans in his home! He has a bull and milks it and does many other things. We all thought that this was amazing. Then, we said goodbye to Lea, so hopefully she’s reading this blog! I went to sleep soon after dinner.
1 14-3-19-6 22-3-21, 14-6-1-4!
Ella