Yes, we are back in civilisation after seven days of pure trekking in the Himalaya! Our legs hurt so much, no, actually everything somehow aches, but we are very happy!

One week ago we flew from Kathmandu to the nice lakeside town of Pokhara to start our trek, as we had decided to hike up to the famous Annapurna Base Camp, also called ABC trek. As we are still traveling with handluggage only, we obviously were not prepared and equipped at all for such a hike. Hence, first of all we went out to buy cheap Chinese copies of everything…hiking boots, rain jackets, hiking trousers, warm underwear, gloves etc…and hired sleeping bags & warm down jackets. In Kathmandu we had also organized one guide and one porter for our luggage. Both, Ai Singh and Bikram, were really nice Nepali guys. Even though we understood that being a porter is a very normal profession in Nepal, we have to say that we felt very bad watching our porter carrying 24kg up and down the mountains. An incredible hard job. We came across many, many porters transporting anything you could imagine- sometimes, as we learned, even up to 100kg with a strap across their forehead.

We started our hike with a 4 day detour trek called “Poon Hill trek”, which was a great introduction, as the landscape was stunning, but still at low altitude. The first highlight was hiking up Poon Hill for sunrise on our third morning! At the top (3.200m) we had this most stunning panorama of the Himalaya mountain range literally in front of us – we counted eight 7.000m high and two 8.000m high mountain peaks. Not only we were lucky with the weather but also with the Rhododendron blossom season. Imagine a sea of red and pink Rhododendron flowers around us and snow covered Himalaya peaks in the backdrop. A once in a life time view! Accommodation-wise the infrastructure on the trek was pretty good. All over there are “teahouses” – very simple cottages – which offer mattrasses to sleep and food. They mostly cannot be reserved in advance, hence first-come, first-served. Still, the accommodations with zero heating were everything else than luxurious and visiting the shared “bathrooms” was definitely a most avoided experience. A good thing though- teahouses are a great place to meet fellow hikers and all serve warm apple pies. Delicious!

Now- the first four days we took it really easy and walked for a maximum of four to five hours each day. But somehow we always ended up at our final teahouse destination already very early around lunchtime…hence, on the fourth and following days we decided to simply continue further and further and walked daily around five to nine hours, as there were so many teahouses on the way. Then, day 5 was the day! After a very, very cold night (we actually slept with all clothes plus caps in our sleeping bags), we got up at 4:30am to climb the last bit to the Annapurna Basecamp in the pitch-black darkness using our head lights! That day was a tough one! Legs were hurting already so much in the morning and the way up was steep and tiring, as we still had to ascend 1000m difference in altitude. After 3 1/2 hours we reached ABC, felt extremely happy and toasted our arrival at 4.130m altitude with the best Masala-tea of all times! 🙂

The way back, mostly walking down, was so much easier and felt like an easy stroll. Instead of the programmed ten hiking days, we virtually made it back to Pokhara after only seven days in the mountains. We have to admit that dreaming of our next beach destination Thailand and the idea of extending our forthcoming stay there by three more days definitely accelerated our hiking speed!

Next morning 9am back in Pokhara: After a very nice hot shower and good night sleep, we treated ourselves in a very different way for the hard, hard work. While my feet got a most deserved foot massage, Florian’s feet were already up in the air! He went for a tandem paragliding flight with a 45 minutes long fabulous view onto Lake Phewa and the Himalaya mountains..