Step Into My Shoes..

(Disclaimer: Not in Annapurna Area anymore) October 28th, 2018 I woke up at 6 in the morning with the sound of a faint knocking somewhere in the room. It sounded like rain but not quite. I looked outside my window just to be sure - it was clear outside. The sound continued on for a while; I tried avoiding it as much as I could but the sound wouldn't stop. I realised the source of the sound was from the window on the side of my friend's bed. I drew the curtains open to find a little bird pecking at the glass. And the funny thing is that even after it noticed me noticing it, it didn't stop. It kept on pecking until we decided we couldn't go back to sleep anymore. We didn't have the heart to shoo it away, so we let it do its thing. We were told that we would be picked up from the hotel at 9:30 am, so we got ready and went out for breakfast at 8:45 am. We went to the same cafe we had gone the previous night and ordered tea and sandwich. It was just after ...

(Disclaimer: It's a long ass article) October 27th, 2018 4:00 am - excitement The morning was dark and freezing. And the six companions had decided, "we have seen the same mountains from much closer for far too long already" so there was just the two of us. I left my room with much apprehension and I was actually holding my breath when I made my way to the stairs. I took the first step down, only to find out - hey it isn't so hard after all. So with a pep on my steps, I made it downstairs and out the hotel. The time was 4:25 am. We had a torch with us but my friend is an owl - he doesn't need anything but the moon to light his way. We were told the Poon Hill tower was an hour long uphill climb and sunrise was forecasted (by me) to be at around 6:15, so it still doesn't make sense why we woke up so damn early. But turned out, there were people who must've gotten earlier than us since we passed so many of them on our way up. The trail is well o...

October 26th, 2018 We woke up for the last morning at Dobato. Breakfast was normal - roti, tarkari, boiled egg, tea. Honestly speaking, we were getting bored of it by then. I tried changing my breakfast to a western one, but the hotel dai said breads were hard to get by and we should've informed them earlier. Too bad we were busy resting our exhausted bodies. After viewing the morning sun hit the Himalayas from so close for one last time, we started off towards our next destination - Ghorepani.  We had to descend from 3426 m to 2874 m, but descending in the mountains doesn't necessarily mean just going down. It is an adventure full of walking downhill, climbing and sometimes treading on a straight path. Sometimes when we would get tired of all the walking, we would just look at Ghorepani, which we could see from most of the path we were walking on, we would always joke, if only there was this bridge between here and there (Ghorepani). I mean how ...

"Mountains have a way of dealing with overconfidence." - Hermann Buhl October 25th, 2018 16:09 - Pode, Chauri Goth. [scared] As I sat there under the rock, the speed with which snow was gathering on the ground was no match with the thoughts that were running inside my head.  What if there was a blizzard? What if someone with bad intentions came to get me? What if a snow leopard came? What if my friends did n't come back?  And at the same time, I was wondering if it was such a good idea to leave the place. What if my friends came back and didn't find me there? What would they go through? Would they waste any more of their time trying to find me? Those were very intense two minutes, because my head hadn't finished processing these questions when I heard my friend come running - shouting my name. I had never felt such relief in my life. My legs had almost started to feel gelatinous. Apparently they were forced to retreat immediately as the snowfall ...

Continued.. The instructions weren't very clear but we were in a great hurry to go somewhere, do something, climb a mountain! For about an hour, all we did was walk either downhill or straight with zero difficulty and remember, we were travelling light. At the end of the first hour, we reached a place which was like the base of the mountain that we were going to have to climb. We had only just reached there that it kinda started snowing. At first, we weren't sure what was happening. We had seen cloud forming at the tip of the mountain but we were definitely not expecting it to snow this far down. But lives don't work alongside our expectations. Some of us hesitated but the rest wanted to carry on. So majority won and up we went.  It wasn't the first time for some of us to witness snowfall, but immediately after we started walking, we sighted a danphe - the national bird of Nepal, definitely a first time for all of us. It felt like a good sig...

October 25th, 2018 After a disorderly night, at exactly 6 am I woke up, partly because of the cold, partly because of the excitement of waking up so near the mountains and partly because I had to pee. I tried to see the mountains from the window of my room but the whole glass was frosted so I was compelled to go out in the cold. And since my phone wasn't working in terms of network and the Internet, I couldn't tell what the temperature was. The day seemed clear enough in the morning. Only a few of us managed to get up to witness the golden morning light that slowly seeped into the mountains so beautifully spread out in front of us. But I'm glad I could be alone to breathe the crisp mountain air by myself. My friends started stirring out of their sleep (just as uncomfortable) slowly and we decided to walk about 20 minutes to a view point called Muldai View Point that was located right behind our hotel (Hotel Dobato View Point). We left our bags at the hote...