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Annapurna Circuit Experience
By Mark Moxon Published: 07/30/2010
Nepal freaked me out instantly, in much the same way the cool, silent night air does as you leave the rock concert, ears still ringing. Compared to the hustle and bustle of India, Nepal felt like a quiet backwater: the fact that I had to put my watch forward by exactly fifteen minutes at the border only emphasised the differences between India and the kingdom of mountains to the north.
Even the long bus ride from the Indian border at Sunauli to the mountain town of Pokhara was easy, and the loud horns so ubiquitous in India were conspicuous by their absence. As I recalled the admonition that after India anywhere would appear mundane, I realised that mundane isn't always so bad; after all, sitting in a comfy chair in front of the fire and flicking channels is pretty mundane, but after a long day trekking through the fire and ice of the real world, it's a dream.
Indeed trekking was my goal in Nepal, and that's why I headed straight for Pokhara instead of Kathmandu. The Annapurna Conservation Area to the north of Pokhara, itself in the western half of Nepal, contains some of the most dramatic trekking on this planet, and I had my sights firmly fixed on the three-week Annapurna Circuit, a circular route that crosses a very high pass, trundles down the deepest gorge in the world, and provides mountain views to stifle breath that's already short in the high altitude of the Himalayas. After beaches, rainforests, deserts, volcanoes and glaciers, it was time for the big cheese.
The Himalayas are, of course, huge, but reading about them is considerably different from experiencing them first hand. On a trek like this there are not only the usual walkers' concerns of blisters, twisted ankles, upset stomachs and sunburn, but also Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), an ailment brought on by high altitude that is fatal if unchecked, and still claims trekkers' lives today. On the surface, the Annapurna Circuit sounds like the biggest challenge of them all.
It isn't all challenge, though, and this is a major part of its appeal. Unlike most of the trekking I'd done up to this point, you don't need to carry food because you stop in villages along the way, staying in the local hotels. This also means you don't need to carry a tent, cooker, fuel or any of the other niceties associated with self-sufficient tramping, leaving the pack pleasantly light and the accommodation comfortable. On a three-week trek this is a godsend: the thought of a pack laden with 21 days of survival gear is enough to make most people's knees spring a leak in sympathy.
It also meant that I had to reappraise my attitude towards tramping. So often I have been on tramps that require serious effort and long days to get to destinations – Taman Negara, Hollyford-Pyke, Gunung Rinjani to name but three – that I've developed a bit of an attitude problem. I like to go fast, to push myself, to get fit, to be first at the destination, and in Annapurna this isn't just a waste of the ambience of the village inns and the beauty of the mountain views, it's foolhardy. One way to avoid AMS is to acclimatise slowly to altitude, so hooning up the peaks is simply dumb. Altitude soon altered my attitude.
Annapurna Statistics
Relaxing along the way – there's absolutely no point in rushing
The Annapurna Circuit is basically a loop, normally walked anti-clockwise, that circles round the east-west Annapurna mountain range, starting and ending at Pokhara to the south of the range. These mountains are huge, the tallest, Annapurna I, reaching 8091m (26545 ft), a height approaching that of Everest's 8848m (29028 ft). The track doesn't quite reach such dizzying heights, but the 202km (125 mile) walk has a fairly hefty high point at its northern tip: the Thorung La pass, at 5416m (17769 ft) just under two-thirds of Everest's altitude. The highest I had ever been before tackling the Annapurna track was 3726m (12224 ft) on Lombok's Gunung Rinjani, but the Thorung La pass is nearly half as high again, and it feels it.
The pass neatly slices the track into two halves: from Pokhara to Thorung Phedi, which takes you up to the east side of the pass; and the track from Muktinath back down to Pokhara on the west side of the pass, popularly known as the Jomsom Trek and commonly walked by those unwilling to tackle the pass.
In 1993/4, 5898 walkers headed up the eastern side; in the first half of 1997, 18.1 per cent of those walkers were from the UK, 11.4 per cent from Germany, 11.3 per cent from the US and 9.7 per cent from France. Conversely, on the western side there were 15822 walkers in 1996/7, of which 13.7 per cent were from the UK, 12.7 per cent from Germany, 10.5 per cent from France and 9.2 per cent from the US. The pass sure puts people off, and because the west side is more luxurious than the east, hardly anyone just does the east, as shown by the fact that there are three times as many walkers on the Jomsom as on the Circuit.
And those walkers doing the whole Circuit will pass through 73 villages in 90 hours of walking, with 540 hotels to choose from with a total of 5218 beds. Annapurna means business.
Annapurna Trekking and AMS
Nepalese prayer wheels, which you spin round to send a prayer up to heaven
'A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all' read the poster in the tea shop a few days into the trail, and the total nonsense of the message seemed quite in keeping with the contradictions I saw around me. Slashing a route through the deepest mountain valleys, the Annapurna Circuit passes through villages that used to be almost invisible, but which now sport signs in English, shops selling western luxuries, hotels with hot showers and even international telephone booths for those people who can't resist intruding on the outside world. The Annapurna Circuit isn't known as the Apple Pie Trail and the Coca-Cola Circuit for nothing.
This type of trekking has its ups and downs in more than just the literal sense. The impact of tourism on this erstwhile netherworld is plain to see: piles of bottles lie cracking in the searing sun, candy wrappers litter a number of the paths and the local culture is hard to separate from the service industries of hotel and restaurant. On the plus side, though, income is higher, ecological awareness is increasing, and the litter problem is nothing compared to India or Indonesia, an impressive feat when you consider the sheer numbers of people involved.
The Circuit also has an image problem among hardcore trekkers, who see it as more of a long stroll than a serious challenge. Trekkers who are more at home in waist-deep swamps and leech-infested tropical rainforests call it the 'milk and honey trek' because of all the luxuries you encounter on the way – shops, real beds, bottled water and so on – and indeed Peter, with whom I'd trekked in Sulawesi, had described the Circuit as more of a collection of day walks than a real trek. In a sense he was right because most of the days are fairly short in terms of time and distance, but I would dismiss the comments of the walking junkies completely: I found the Annapurna Circuit a phenomenal challenge, though perhaps for different reasons than normal.
With such a walk one doesn't walk alone, even if one initially sets out on a solo trek. The groups I joined kept changing as various people went at different speeds or succumbed to the demands of the trek, but the main people were spot on. There were Clare and Anne, sisters from Vancouver; Jakob from Denmark; Bob from Cleveland, Ohio, a veteran 13-year traveller; Sheldon from Australia; and a whole spectrum of other characters to liven the mix. Sharing walks, something I tend not to do, is a good thing when your nightly stops are in hotels, and it struck me early on that Annapurna was made to be shared.
Another thing to share is paranoia about AMS. If you could take a man from sea level and transport him to the top of Everest1 then he would be in a coma after two minutes, and dead after four. The reason is a combination of the lack of oxygen and the low atmospheric pressure at that height; on Thorung La the atmospheric pressure is half that of sea level, and the partial pressure of oxygen (i.e. the amount of oxygen in the air) is a third of that at sea level, as oxygen is heavier than nitrogen. The result is that without slow acclimatisation people can die from AMS on the Annapurna Circuit, and they do, although not in high numbers (about one in 30,000 trekkers).
This sort of challenge provides an astounding amount of food for thought for trekkers whiling away the hours in their hotel restaurants. In a display of group psychosis that is rarely seen outside village gossip groups, AMS became the subject of the moment. Every other question seemed to be 'Do you have a headache? Are you on Diamox? How many acclimatisation walks have you done today?' It would have been boring if there hadn't been so many conflicting opinions as to the truth behind AMS.
AMS is still a bit of a mystery, even though scientists know exactly why it happens and how to prevent it. The difficulty is that everyone seems to react differently to increased altitude: some might be able to go all the way from 300m to 5500m in a day without any symptoms, and some will die if they do the same. The guidelines are simple, though: when you get to 3000m you should only ascend 300m in each day, you should try to go on an acclimatisation walk to a higher point than your sleeping height, and at the sign of any symptoms you should stop ascending and, if they don't go away or get worse, go down. Descent2 is the only cure, and the recommended drug, Diamox, is only an aid to quicker acclimatisation, not a cure.
It's even trickier, though, because the symptoms of AMS are a headache, reduced appetite and nausea, a loss of good humour, a congestive cough, and in serious AMS, ataxia (wobbly legs) and vomiting. These symptoms are fairly common on all long walks, with their exhausting days, uncomfortable beds and dubious food, so the paranoia runs rife, and with the temperatures well below freezing on the higher parts of the track, you have to wonder if your headache is from the icy blasts of wind freezing your ears off, or genuine AMS.
But what a beautiful place to walk...
1 This is currently impossible because helicopters don't have enough air at that height to operate and aeroplanes can't land on craggy peaks.
2 Thanks to Milton Lever, who posted to my Guestbook to say, 'There is a dusty road to Jomsom now, used daily by a few jeeps. If you get sick, you can escape by jeep.' That's good news for AMS sufferers, just as long as they're on the western side of the pass.
Initially I was less concerned with getting AMS1 and more worried about an old friend. On the fourth day into the trek I felt a familiar stirring in my stomach, got those old eggy-belch blues, and realised that good old giardia had come back.
I took an extra day loafing around feeling miserable, before managing to walk up to the village of Chame where the hospital – a rickety old building rather mysteriously perched on top of a steep hill that would put off all but the most determined of the sick – gave me a week's course of metronidazole, the third drug I'd end up using to try to kill off the bastard (the other two being Secnil and Flagyl).
The metronidazole certainly seemed to work, stopping the symptoms, but it had the added side effect of knocking me out; metronidazole is firmly in the 'don't operate machinery' category, and as the week's course lasted until just over the pass, I spent a lot of the ascent buzzing from something other than altitude.
We also lost Jakob to a mysterious stomach illness, and heard plenty of other stories of people getting ill on the trek. For some reason the Annapurna area is home to a bewildering array of nasty ailments, and this is why I class the track as difficult: trekking with a dodgy stomach and AMS is a bloody nightmare. And irrespective of whether you get trekker's stomach or AMS, the high altitude means you get out of breath after just a few steps and have to rest a ridiculous amount. It makes the hardcore trekkers quite depressed: hills they would normally conquer before breakfast take all morning to walk up, however strong they are at sea level. Man just wasn't meant to fly.
But the trek is well worth all this medical trauma. From the lush lakeside town of Pokhara you travel along valleys that become increasingly steep and desolate as the altitude lowers the temperature and the treeline approaches. Every day the huge peaks of the various ranges lean closer and closer, looming over tiny settlements where houses are cobbled together out of yak dung and shaky cement.
On the Track
Sights along the way are uniquely Nepalese. Lines of grey donkeys wend their way along the thin footpaths, each decorated with garish bridles and low-toned bells, swiftly followed by wiry men wielding split sticks and yelling, 'Ho!' A little boy points cow eyes up at us as he points to his badly cut toe, which we dutifully clean and bandage, suggesting to him in English that he really should wear some shoes while it heals, a piece of medical advice that disappears into the language barrier. Further along the trail is the town of Bagarchap, home to two disasters of recent memory: a landslide that destroyed the town in November 1995, taking a number of trekkers and locals with it to whom there are memorials dotted around the town; and my explosion of giardia. Here the locals are still rebuilding what once must have been a beautifully picturesque little town, and I spent a recuperative afternoon riveted to the veranda table watching the women carry huge baskets of stones on their heads as the men broke up massive boulders into smaller, more manageable rocks for rebuilding their porch; throughout the whole job the workers smiled, laughed and joked in a way that's worryingly absent from the western workplace of today.
And if I thought my backpack was a little too heavy as we scratched our way up yet another steep mountain path, Nepalese porters kept plying up and down the track carrying incredible weights in baskets suspended on their backs by a strap around the forehead, supporting the whole weight with their neck muscles. I thought the porters in Indonesia were pretty impressive, but the Nepalese are even more iron willed. The amazing energy of the locals is most apparent in the hotels and footpaths that form the Annapurna Circuit. Gaping yawns in the mountains have been filled with row upon row of flat rocks to form pathways; sheer granite cliffs have been chipped away or blown up to give a clear passage; stone steps have been set into the mountain sides to ease the ascents and descents; suspension bridges arc across steep-sided gorges from towers built from rock and cement. But the hotels are even more amazing, with their restaurants, dormitories and hot shower systems; although the food is pretty lame compared to places like Pokhara and Bangkok, it's a refreshing change to have to live on a potato and porridge diet after such a long love-hate relationship with rice and noodles.
Actually, the impressive thing about the food isn't so much the taste, it's the fact that so many ingredients have to be carried in. There are no roads around the area, and yet hotels manage to feed up to 70 hungry mouths at a time, which might not make that potato soup the most thrilling culinary experience in the cosmos, but it does deserve a round of applause. I still fantasized about steak and beer and had to make do with a lot less, but it had to be better than the awful crud I normally cook for myself on the trail. Another interesting result of the porters carrying everything in is that prices go up as you get further away from Pokhara. That Mars bar you paid Rs40 for in Kathmandu is Rs80 just before the pass; a cup of hot lemon from the last tea house before the pass, shivering well above the snowline, will set you back a princely Rs40 compared to Rs5 down at more atmospheric restaurants; plain rice rockets from Rs10 to Rs50, because it's so heavy to carry; even Coke, the universal price index, leaps from Rs15 to Rs60, which sounds outrageous until you consider how far it's had to travel.
This price change seems to mirror the trip itself; the pass is such a momentous occasion that the Circuit naturally falls into the days before the pass, and the days after the pass. As you approach the pass the prices go up, the temperature goes down, the trees shrink and eventually disappear, the snow gets closer, the air gets thinner and the landscape gets bleaker and bleaker. By the time you reach the first acclimatisation town, Manang at 3535m (11597 ft), life is getting harder: mild AMS, which affects most people at this stage, creates an ache at the base of the neck, makes breathing more difficult and walking up the street a serious exercise, and the temperature at night means sleeping is that much more unpleasant.
I found that a major portion of my AMS paranoia was taken up with a serious increase in cynicism: I began to have a major problem with walkers who weren't in my small list of Excellent People (though, of course, I kept this to myself). The silly Canadian whose Calgary accent made my eyes roll to the ceiling and my air-starved lungs let out an exasperated sigh; the know-it-all Englishman who came up with useless idiocies such as, 'I've had giardia three times and all I do is miss a meal and it goes away,' and who earned the nickname Jesus from the other walkers, a sarcastic comment on his seeming omniscience; the Squeaky American who reminded me of that pathetic character in Police Academy; the girls from North Carolina who didn't know the rules of chess ('Tell me y'all, how many of these liddle pahwns do y'all start with, now?') and who had an incredible lack of knowledge when it came to accents of the rest of the world ('Are y'all Australian?' 'No, ve are from Germany'); the doped-out American college student who kept exclaiming how cool the Diamox hit was, buzzin' fingertips 'n' all, man; the insane Rasputin clone from Switzerland with his zany sense of humour2; they all made me think of a particularly far out episode of the Twilight Zone.
But there was one thing that bound all of us together, weirdoes and cynics alike, and that was the continuing group psychosis. As mentioned, AMS was by far the most popular subject, but other obsessions cropped up with increasing regularity: the height of the current town (in dispute because every map has a different figure on it); the times for walking a certain portion of the track (also at variance, depending on your source); the quality of the food; the pros and cons of Ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory; the advantages of a genuine Gore-Tex jacket over a fake one from Kathmandu; the amazing price of a pot of coffee in that last village; the best way to treat blisters; and so on and so on. You can approach anyone on the Annapurna Circuit and enter into an instant conversation on aches, pains, drugs, food and gradients, but try to delve too deeply into politics or finances and you'll soon find yourself drifting back to the subjects of aches, pains, drugs, food and, let's not forget, gradients...
The local culture, tainted though it obviously is, changes markedly through the different regions too. From the touristy lower regions of the east side and the rugged wind-ravaged desolation of the northern reaches to the holiday-home mentality of the Jomsom track on the west of the pass, it's possible to peer into a way of life that is as authentic as Schrödinger's cat: your very investigation changes things. The monasteries dotted around the valleys dispense Buddhist and Hindu blessings to walkers, be they Indian sadhus or Australian accountants, and although the gompas are undeniably authentic, their collections of dusty Dalai Lama pictures and meditating Buddha statues ensure a continuous tourist trade, fired up by the antics of Richard Gere and a continuing mysticism surrounding Tibet.
I was blessed in two gompas, once in Braga on the east side of the pass, and once in Muktinath just after the pass, and although it was a fascinating insight into the surreal nature of the eastern religions – idolatry meets nihilism – it felt like I was encroaching on territory reserved for true believers. As the mumbling monk in Braga chanted mantras that sounded more like the contented sighs of an old man sitting by the fire, the prayer wheels whirled and the incense smouldered, but did the wisdom of Lord Buddha fill me with foreknowledge of the passage through the pass, for which I was receiving blessing? And did the whirling dances of the Hindu priest in Muktinath make the whole experience of puja any less theatrical? Of course not: I watched, listened, washed myself in the 108 taps round the temple (a guarantee of going to heaven, by the way), received the forehead markings and ate the crystalline sugar, and left with pictures rather than puja. Even the eternal flame of Muktinath turned out to be a scientific event: natural gas escapes through a vent that's always lit, not so much a Light that Never Goes Out as a Gas Bill that Never Gets Charged.
Over the Top
For crossing the pass I teamed up with Bob and Sheldon: the Canadian girls had forged on a day ahead, but we wanted to take our time acclimatising and stayed longer at lower altitudes. Jakob had already fallen by the wayside, but apart from that we'd managed to make a good team, and as such we'd been bouncing the paranoia off each other like a prism magnifying sunlight. By the time the altitude reached the point of AMS, I was riding high on a wave of hypochondria.
We'd done our acclimatisation walks, where you walk 200m or so higher than the place where you will sleep, thus aiding the metabolic changes that need to take place in acclimatisation (such as lowering body acid levels, which means excessive urination as the acids are flushed out; an expansion of lung volume and a deepening of lung capacity; and a loss of appetite followed by slight nausea). But nothing prepared me for the sheer panic of altitude that made my last night on the east side a nightmare to remember.
It is simply freezing up there on the side of the pass. Sunlight helps, but as soon as the sun dips below the horizon the temperature shoots below freezing. Snowfall is not uncommon, and winds whistling through the cracks are a common feature. AMS, by this stage, has become a familiar friend, the slow pale throb of white noise at the back of your head, a migraine in the making, threatening to turn into something more serious at any time; appetite has all but disappeared, and every meal time is a struggle against instinct; simply walking up a short flight of stairs is an exercise in breathing steadily and resting frequently; and dehydration from the diuretic effect of acclimatisation takes its toll, especially late at night as the symptoms get worse. On my last night before the pass, up at around 4400m in Thorung Phedi, I slipped into sheer misery.
Tossing and turning, fully clothed and stuffed into my sleeping bag, I froze my way through a dreamscape of confused and contradictory images. In glorious Technicolor I dreamed I had severe AMS and had to be taken down to the next town on the back of a donkey while the headache split my skull and I was copiously sick, despite my low food intake. I woke up in the nearest approximation to a cold sweat that you can have in sub-zero temperatures, and spent the rest of the short night dreading the crossing and dreaming of home.
We set off at 5.40am, Sheldon, Bob and I shuffling slowly through the snow onto the roof of the world. We had all popped a Diamox pill, the recommended prophylactic and treatment for AMS, and I assume it helped: we all managed to get over the top without incident (if you ignore the severe shortages of breath, a nasty headache in my case and a general malaise caused by high altitude exertion) and although the views of the top of the range and the surrounding landscapes were unique and unlike anything I've ever experienced – the silence on a snow-smothered summit is eerie, to say the least – the effort was severe. Was it worth it?
Of course it was. I learned what it is like to exist in an environment that makes every rule of existence seem like a vindictive headmaster's revenge. Breathing is constantly laboured, mealtime becomes a psychological trauma, the head aches in cycles from dawn to dusk, sleep patterns are ravaged, toiletry functions become more insistently regular than after the five-beer mark, and conversation becomes truly one-track: AMS, AMS, AMS. Then there are the ailments of snow blindness (you have to wear sunglasses constantly to avoid becoming blind, literally), windburn (lips and nose beware), sunburn (the sun is distressingly close up there), muscle strain (from carrying a bloody pack up to 5416m) and trekker's knee (from the long, long descent). But nearly everyone makes it, and the sense of achievement is totally different from exploring rainforests or trudging deserts. When I finally collapsed in Muktinath on the west side of the path, I swore I'd never do anything like that again. I probably lied.
The west side of the Circuit is a completely different experience. The track leading down from the pass, the Jomsom Trek, has high quality hotels, comparatively incredible food, a warm climate and fairly easy downhill walking. I felt like I'd arrived in paradise: I had trekked the eastern path, I had struggled over the pass, and when I hit the other side I reverted to character. I didn't so much walk the track as travel it.
From the pilgrim town of Muktinath (where we spent two days), through Kagbeni (one day), Marpha (two days), Kalopani (one day) and Tatopani (two days) we loafed around, ate too much, drank the pleasantly priced beer and totally failed to take the walk seriously, considering the length of the challenge. My writer's block, which had set in along with the AMS in Manang, completely failed to lift and I spent hours sitting around reading, relaxing and thinking. It was a holiday. It was luxurious. It was fattening. But it was ultimately relatively boring, and I found myself, not for the first time, wishing I was in India, back where the madness is mundane, the insanity inbred and the lunacy legendary. How strange.
But Nepal's landscapes more than make up for any lack of incredulity. From the dizzy heights of the pass to the sheer valleys of the east side, the mountains never ceased to amaze me, with their wispy cloud vents, snow-blue peaks and sharp contrasts with the sky. But statistics, of which there are millions in Nepal, can be misleading in making the mountains sound out of this world. For example on Sunday 19th April I read the following in my guidebook: 'It's at around this point, the bend in the river between Kalopani and Larjung, that you're at the bottom of the world's deepest valley. The two highest peaks in the area, Dhaulagiri (8167m/26794 ft) and Annapurna I (8091m/26545 ft) are 35km (22 miles) apart on either side of the valley. You're standing at an altitude of about 2540m/8333 ft, which is 5.5km or 3.5 miles below the summit of Dhaulagiri.' This sounds much more interesting than it really is: the reality is a wide valley with a couple of distant peaks on each side. Deep doesn't mean steep.
And then there is the dubious help offered by the various hotels around. Take this quotation from the Kalopani Guest House Menu:
FROM GUEST HOUSE DAIRY
Kalopani is a beautiful place to be spent for short trek. This place is popularly known for spectacular Sunset view over Mt. Annapurna I & Nilgiri. You can enjoy with the changing colour of the Himalay's. From here you can make 2.5 hours. Titi lake for splendid view of Mt. Dhaulagiri. For the peasant lovers you can visit the Dhungang Area. Kalopani Jungle has lost of wild life. For resting a day, you can visit the Bhudurtsho lake wich can cost 5 hours. From here you can organize Dhaulagiri Ice fall trek as well Dhaulagiri & Annapurna Base Camp. For more detail please contact the management.
Thank you!
Grammar is evidently an optional extra when you're writing in a second language (though I can't be too critical, seeing as that's the philosophy I use with French, and it works fine for me).
At least the hotels on the west side had good standards of food, which more than made up for the less inspiring scenery. In Tal, on the east side, we had discovered bugs in the tomato ketchup bottle; when we complained to the lady owner, she examined the bugs and said, 'It's OK, these clean bugs from ceiling, not dirty bugs from floor.'
On the west side, we got our food in sizzling platters. It mirrored the east-west divide rather well, I thought, as I trundled on to the end of the track in Beni before boarding the bus to Pokhara.Trekking in the Himalayas
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