Haha! Fireflyr, I ignore if it's leveling the field. it could well be that I'm part of the small percentuale of women who is completely unable to use that kind of machines. and who never had a manicure, to tell one!
About the trip....it's a quite long history, but...a professor at the university used to organize a trip to Nepal and India every year, in order to study the economy of the places, and how to improve it. I aggregated. So, there was: the prof (a piece of.......with whom I had several heated discussions and before the end I sent him to hell
), two of his assistants, one prof who teaches in the US (who had nothing to do with the expedition but was invited) and 4 students, me comprised. the expedition was a month long, mainly during the month of December. I'm used to say it's Nepal, but to tell the truth we spent just some days in nepal, and the remaining in India (Sikkim). We left Gangtok, a "city" there, and headed from there for trekking in the "unaccessible" zones of the mountains, in what I believe is the region of the Kanchenjunga. To give you the names of the places we visited (when a name exists) during the trekking is quite difficult: I remember just some: Dzongri (one of the tops we visited) and Tshoka on the road to there. (For the others......I wrote during those days a sort of diary, but I left it to my former boyfriend. He was writing one during my absence, and I was doing the same, in order to "cover" the time during which we were to be apart. to tell the whole truth, the diary also was a sort of "recovery" idea, since when I decided to go there, I did not discuss about it, just told the professor yes, and did not take neither a minute to discuss about it with my at the time man, but put him in front of the decision, already taken, that our vacations had to be cancelled, since I would not be there, but away without him…and the relation was quite strained, because of my decision, if you see.
We almost split at the airport, before I was to leave….Well, I’m not easy to live with!).
Back on track.
The max altitude we reached was around 5500 meters, just before you have to start using oxygen. Now, I will add something else. I’ve no idea why I decided to go, apart from the fact I badly wanted to see if what everybody was just too prone to call a spoiled girl, me, was able to live without technology, and well, without any minimum comfort (and yes, I will add I had never gone camping before….
). It was something I really hated, that label I was always being put on, and still do. Everything I achieved was normal if not due, everything I failed in was because I was spoiled and did not apply as the others do. And I have to add a second thing: I love to go running, I love to go walking, but I’ve always hated walking in the mountains, and one of the reasons is that I badly suffer from vertigo. I went anyhow.
How a typical day was: get up when the sun is coming out. Dress, wrap the schlafsack, prepare the backpack. Go to the bushes, relieve, go to the river, somehow wash the face and teeth, get a cup of tea and maybe some pancakes, and start walking. The caravane was formed that way. I was to walk with the pathfinder, together with the US prof., and another female student. Even before the pathfinder, the sherpas, who run. Gosh, they run! We usually walked around 15 / 25 km per day. We usually had a short break in the middle of the road, where the sherpas prepared a tea and sometimes boiled eggs and pancake. Until a certain altitude, around 3000 a dog was following me, and I used to give him my egg, something I hate, and eat some energy bar instead! I still remember him: white, with black spot, long flat ears and an incredible intelligence. I called him Free. Well, it was also full of fleas and badly needed a shower, but I wanted to bring it home. I cried when I left him
and one night, during which the weather was incredibly cold, I put him in the room of the camp I was dividing with the only other female of the expedition, who started yelling he was full of fleas and god knows what else!!!
) All the others were on the back, with the sweepers. The ones that closed the caravan and sometimes we had among one or two km of distance, and some others they just arrived some minutes later. I used to spend the hours walking listening to the music (I had an Ipod and a battery adaptor, with a kg of batteries in the backpack!!), talking with the other two with me, and dreaming about the 24th of December, and my beloved pilot at home that I missed like oxygen under water
. When we used to arrive to the “camps” we somehow washed in the rivers, before the sun going down, and the sherpas prepared to eat. It was always the same damn thing: rice, vegetables and a soup that’s called dahl. At that time I usually started writing the diary (And I used to steal candles before they were put on the “table” in order to be able to keep writing later in the night!
Without using the torch that was not so resistant to cold! and no,there was no electricity). Since we were inside a naturalistic reserve, the main part of the time, it was not allowed to make any fire, so when the night fell, it was freezing cold.
And well, you hate to have to get up in the middle of the night to go out to pee. The contact with the population was almost non existant, either for the places we were, or because everything was anyhow channelled by the sherpas. Some evenings, by the way, we tried what is the “beer” of the place, a kind of hot drink, alcoholic, highly alcoholic, specially since you drink it with the cane, called tongba. And the real last evening of expedition, after I could use a whole bucket of hot water (Ohhhhhh GOD!) , with which I was also able to wash my hair
, I got badly drunk, probably because of the tiredness….
Well, those are the most vivid memories. But you probably will want to know a lot else. In that case….just shot! I will answer everything I can!
AND IN THE MEANTIME, SINCE THE 2006 IS ALMOST OVER (LUCKILY!!!!) MY BEST WISHES TO YOU ALL, FOR A YEAR THAT WILL GIVE YOU SERENITY, AND UNFORGETTABLE BEAUTIFUL AND MEMORABLE MOMENTS, FULLFILLING ALL YOUR DREAMS!
PS. And....G-man, the hint is really good, but no man want a yeti waiting for him, right?