Annapurna Basecamp and the End of Trekking
The mountain gods smiled down on us and gave us crystal clear skies for the culmination of this trekking experience: Annapurna Basecamp!
Annapurna means “giver of food and nourishment (derived from Sanskrit)— (अन्न) means "food" or "grains" and pūrṇa (पूर्ण) means "full, complete and perfect”—and is the 8th highest mountain in the world. On the way we had amazing close-up views of Machapuchre, aka “The Fishtail,” a mountain so holy it’s illegal to climb.
In case you didn’t notice after two months of reading these emails, we are into trekking. But after the clouds and rain and so many up-and-down stairs and just a lot of being cold and perpetually smelly, we were all ready to finish this phase of our travels. So instead of doing the sane and normal four-day plan to see Basecamp and finish trekking, we condensed it to two days like the absolute champion hikers—desperate for a shower and a good pizza—that we are.
We sped up to Basecamp early Saturday morning, beating the clouds and taking some amazing pictures of the closest we’ll be to an 8000m peak in a while, then headed back down the way we’d come. Fun fact: the higher in elevation you go, the bluer the sky looks!
The following day we powered all the way to Motkyu, where we could catch a Jeep that very afternoon all the way to Pokhara, the biggest city in Nepal outside the Kathmandu Valley. Let me tell you, it’s some kind of whiplash to spend a morning at the foot of one of the world’s highest mountains and then the following night enjoy a legitimately good pizza in an Italian restaurant after a hot shower listening to the nightlife on the main drag.
Though it’s somewhat bittersweet to finish trekking, I feel fully saturated in mountains. Plus, we eased the transition by spending a week in Pokhara, where all imaginable luxuries are available but on a clear day you can still see insane views of the Himalayas.
This concludes our trekking for the foreseeable future. Over 45 days we hiked nearly 400 miles in three regions, crossed five mountain passes (between 16,800 and 18,250 feet high) and walked amongst seven of the ten highest mountains in the world.
Next stop: India!