Day 4: Marpha to Ghasa
This was the hardest day yet.
I awoke at 5:40 a.m., slipped my headlamp on, and snuck out for a solo morning climb to the Marpha Meditation Center, a hilltop sanctuary with sweeping birds-eye views of the mud huts and rooftop firewood piles of Marpha. Even the monks weren’t awake yet, so I lay down on the floor, arms folded behind my head and eyes cast upward at the sun-bleached prayer flags whipping in the wind. I fell asleep, and woke a half-hour later to the sound of a sole monk chanting in the distance as the crimson glow of sunrise lit up the valley.
The five of us left at 8, meandering back and forth across the broad Kali Gandaki river valley to stay clear of the road. At several spots, we had to take our shoes off and wade through the knee-high frigid water, our 20-year-old porters carrying our gear and holding our hands as if we were children.
The views were unreal as we walked in silence through the world’s largest gorge, a lush wide valley dropping 4,000 meters between the soaring 8,000-meter summits of Annapurna I on one side and Dhaulagiri I on the other. Views of the Dhaulagiri icefall, a massive frozen slab capping the top third of the mountain, came into view at the town of Larjung, a bucolic creekside logging town that reminded me of Oregon.
I stopped and watched as a group of men slit the throat of a yak and cut it open for meat next to a roaring fire. It would feed them for three months, they said.
Two out-of-shape American mountain bikers whizzed by. They’d been dropped in Jomsom for a jarring three-day downhill cruise to Pokhara with a guide. “Slackers,” I said to Kim, who had grown increasingly green and shaky from food poisoning. Exhausted, we stopped for hot tea and pasta at a roadside bakery in Kalopani, where Nepali men huddled around a table watching an American bowling match on TV. Outside, an old woman squatted on the ground, cutting grass with a sharp blade and packing it in to an overloaded basket she carried on her back. Food for the cows, which, in this country are worshipped, not ground up for burgers.
Two more backbreaking hours and we reached the fairly nondescript town of Ghasa, just in time for the sun to go down and the power to go out. Kim slept while I stayed up talking politics by candlelight with two women from Botswana. The food was awful and the sound of dogs barking echoed through the valley. Nonetheless, by 8 p.m. I was out.
Tomorrow: Tatopani.
