Nepal | Meg Noble Peterson

Just getting to my home-away-from-home was high adventure! Try thirty-two hours and three layovers, and a bus ride from one Toyko airport to another for starters. Then picture me curled up on a bench, in a semi-coma, hugging my pack and hoping someone won’t lift my duffel with all my trekking equipment, and then hoping they will so I won’t have to carry it. I have to say that I’ve never met more hospitable, helpful people than in the grand Tokyo airports or the even grander Bangkok edifice. It was being completed when I was last there, and the only way I can describe it is to imagine yourself in the belly of a huge glass whale with intersecting ribs and fins shaped like torpedoes.

I had to laugh when the pilot on my first United flight came on the intercom to laud the grand new Boeing 777 with its multiple engines and luxury appointments. All I could do was wonder why such an enormous piece of machinery could decrease the seating space for the tourist class to the point where anyone with knees would soon be an endangered species. Never before have I so envied first class! I will say that the food during my flights was awful, until I boarded Thai Airways. Now that was fabulous…the food as beautiful as the stewardesses.

For three days my daughter, Cary, and her friend, Christy Korrow, have been staying at the Norbu Sangpo Hotel in the town of Boudha, which is famous for its enormous stupa around which devout Buddhists do kora morning and evening. There is a much more relaxed pace than in Kathmandu, and nowhere near the smog and dirt that is becoming so prevalent in Asian cities. Temperatures are in the 80’s, since we’re in the Indus Valley, and poinsettias and bougainvillia abound. It’s spring all over again.

Yesterday Chisty and I did a grand tour of Kathmandu, starting at the famous Swayambunath Temple, swinging through Thamel, the student area, and ending up in Durbar Marg with all the Hindu Temples. Next time I’ll write more about my sentimental return, but right now a car is waiting to take us to the mountains. For two glorious weeks we’ll actually be incommunicado, something I’m looking forward to after the hustle and bustle of the city.

I’m thinking of you as you approach Thanksgiving and will be with friends and family in spirit as you celebrate.

Many of you, like me, read in the Travel Section of the NYTimes this week that they’re building a road into the beautiful Annapurna Circuit, which I traversed in 1999. Here is the link if you wish to read it. The lead photo is exactly like one I took on Poon Hill facing the magnificent 26,795 ft. Dhaulagiri peak.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/travel/21nepal.html?ref=travel

I must say, at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, that I’m glad I laid eyes on Nepal and on Kathmandu, and trekked into Annapurna, Kangchenjunga, and Everest Base Camp before it turned into an out-of-control haven for tourists. Those were the days when you went there to be IN the mountains, not just to look at them from a jeep. There were the broken-down buses with their hangers-on that labored over treacherous mountain passes to get you to a trailhead, and there were well-worn trails to get you into the wilderness. You struggled, you huffed and puffed, and you grooved on the excitement of a possible snowstorm as you climbed up the Thorong La (17,500 ft) at 3 AM and ran down the other side like a mountain goat, so relieved to have made in over the top and survived.

M.P. on top of Thorang La

The only way you got to Muktinah, the Kandiki Valley, Manang, Chame, or Tatopani was on foot, just as the Nepalis did. This was even more so on the difficult 30-day Kangchenjunga trek where you could look down on the Jannu Glacier from Kampachen and risk a “yak attack” from thundering mountain herds at sunset. Sometimes our small group walked on paths the width of a single foot, tamped into the side of mountains, right after the original trail had been washed out by an avalanche of falling rocks. We walked through isolated villages and used the footpaths of the locals. We slept in our own tents, since there were no public teahouses at that time (1996). We made friends with local policemen and children and grandmothers. It was joyous! We felt part of Nepal, not an isolated group of tourists.

As Ethan Todras-Whitehill, the author of the disturbing Times article put it: Trekkers want places where only their own feet can take them.

Here, just for old times sake, are some of my happy memories of Annapurna and the pristine Himalayas in days of yore.