Day 126 - 1270 Metres Elevation. Pokhara to Bahundande

And that's about sea-level for Nepal. Today we began our trek around the Annapurna circuit. See those mountains? Yup this was the view from the Pokhara bus depot. We'll be acquainted with them in the very near future.

The town of Besisahar is the official starting point of the trek. We had reserved seats on our bus from Pokhara to Besisahar. A good thing since we are in the middle of Desain Festival, which is one of the biggest festivals in Nepal, and also the heaviest travel days. (It's a festival about family, so sort of like American Thanksgiving, everyone is going to Mom, Dad, or Grandparents' houses from all over the country). Desain is also marked by animal sacrifice, and is one of the few times a year that many Nepalis eat meat. 20,000 goats were brought into Pokhara to serve the festival, and there were many families with goats, water buffalo, and chickens in various states of dress along the road. Even our bus included as a passenger one very hairly, very large, grey billy goat (who fortunately (for us anyway) disembarked with a family shortly into the trip.

We arrived in Besisahar an hour earlier than expected. Furthermore, a bus was waiting to run all the way to Bhulbhule, well into the day's walk. (We had expected to have to bus to Kundi and then walk from there. Bulbhule was another 8 Kilometres further into the trek.) We decided that rather than wait for the next day to start trekking and catch said bus, and walk on today.

It being Desain, there were no seats left IN the bus, so Cz and I climbed up ON the bus. As in on the roof with the packs, porters, and about 10 other trekkers. The bus was designed to hold about 24 people. About 40 were crammed inside with another 20 or so on the roof plus luggage. This is fairly typical for Asian buses.

The road was described in the guidebook as "rough". This is an understatement. It was a pitted, pockmarked dirt track hugging the side of a mountain. My white knuckles on the luggage rack often were often suspended over nothing but air and trees. This wasn't so bad though. It was relatively easy to ignore the dropoff simply by not looking at it. It was less easy to ignore the tilt when the bus would rock over onto two wheels as it lurched over a particularly large rock or pothole. I was convinced that the top-heavy load on the roof (that included me and Cz) was going to flip the bus right off the road. It didn't though - clearly, as I am now typing and not lying in a mangled mess in a Himalayan valley.

We arrived in Bhulbhule shaken but unharmed. After a quick lunch at the noodle shack (the 'town' of Bhulbhule consisted of said noodle shack, a stall selling bananas, and an outhouse), we shouldered our packs and walked off towards our first destination, Bahundanda.

It ws only 8K, but after two harrowing busrides and an early start, it felt much longer. It was very pretty though, winding its way up through rice paddies and semi-tropical forest.

Nepal and Nepalis won my heart once again when a porter coming down the mountain with a cabinet on his back - not a small cabinet either - stopped to throw huge rocks across a stream which he had already forded so that Cz and I could cross without getting our feet wet or taking off our hiking boots. He wouldn't accept anything for his help, only smiled and bowed and wished us a good trek.