Annapurna Base Camp Trek Diary

When I loaded this page, everything was written in Thai!! Waii! Luckily, we have reverted back to English now so I can actually write whilst I'm here.

You lucky people, you. :P

Our trek started in Phedi Pul (960m) and ascended to Annapurna Base Camp (4145m) before a descent to Naya Pul (1070m). It took 7 days to complete - four days to ascend to A.B.C and three days descent.

03 March 09:
Our guide, Santos, amused me with several tales, one in which he nearly died in an avalanche and one in which he was kidnapped and beaten up by Maoists. Neither scenario really tickled my fancy to be honest. Ascended 500m in 1 hour, in the blazing midday sun, which was pretty intense. I wondered if I was up for this trek. I told that sneaky little 'You can still turn back, you know' to Shut The Feck Up and marched on. Had a tasty dal bhat halfway up a mountain, very scenic.

04 March 09:
Disaster! Diarrhea! (which I still can't spell, goddamit). But 3 loperamides later I am able to keep walking. We pass a group of porters carrying HUGE packs of luggage (and I mean, HUGE, probably about 50kg per pack). Unfortunately, it seems the 9kg pack was too much for my knees to cope with and my left one packed in. As it only hurt when I put my foot at certain angles I was able to carry on for a long time without too many complaints, just focused on putting one foot in front of the other 'Oo shite, not that way then...now that only hurts a little...hmm...ow!....bugger!...' etc. etc. However, once we started climbing the steps I was holding everybody up and they became aware that there was something wrong. We continued at a slower pace. I made up for this by not resting, as stopping seemed to make my knee freeze up and it hurt a heck of a lot more when I started moving again as opposed to just walking continuously at a slower pace. My body was complaining pitifully but we came to a kind of truce; Body: 'Oww, it hurrrts.' Louise 'Well look now, we're not stopping and that's all there is to it, so get moving mate.' And so, we did. Body gave up on complaining after a while, just a dull thudding throb that was quite easy to ignore.

Really made me realise just how much I wanted to reach Annapurna Base Camp; a 360 degree view of the Himalayas was just too good to miss.

Stayed at a hostel with some very noisy and inconsiderate Korean businessmen (who, unsurprisingly, were the ones who'd given their emaciated porters 50kg packs and were only paying them 4 quid a day to carry them).

05 March 09:
We overtook the Koreans today, even though they set off an hour before us and I had my bad knee. They looked a little pissed off and picked up their pace. They overtook us on one of our rest breaks only to be overtaken again 20 minutes down the trail. Tee hee. We were able to move quite quickly as Santos had kindly agreed to carry my pack and we had all packed lightly; even with the porters carrying most of their equipment the Korean group were still ridiculously weighed down and overdressed.

We had to cross two rivers and an avalanche today. Soaked my feet in the river and then crunched over the huge icy boulders that frightened the cr*p outta me. You'd probably be better off being hit by a landslide. Most people die in avalanches because the snow forces its way into your orifices. I always think drowning would be a nasty way to go. 'If you feel a big wind, you run, okay?' so sayeth Santos. We move quickly and quietly over the area. I can tell he's a little freaked out because he's singing in a very high pitched voice.

We reach our destination, Deurali, earlier than hoped, which gave us some daylight in which to prepare for the cold night ahead. Chatting to some trekkers at our tea house, we discover that an avalanche occurred just beyond Deurali at 8.30am this morning. 3 people had headed out that way - a lone Korean and two young English blokes. The two English guys literally had to run for their lives back to Deurali. The Korean was unaccounted for. The English lads had lost their nerve and headed back down the mountain. I couldn't blame them. The atmosphere that night was tangibly tense. Avalanches don't normally occur so early in the morning, so it was a bit of a shock to everyone; you can do everything the book tells you to do and still get it wrong.

Once again, I realised just how much I wanted to get to A.B.C. I also realised that this trek was a darn sight more dangerous than the Poon Hill route that we had originally planned. On the plus side, the people we were meeting seemed like determined, sensible characters. Not tourists. That pleased me a lot, despite feeling hideously inexperienced as a trekker.

06 March 09:
We set off as soon as it was light (5.45am) to cross the avalanche zone. Watching the sun rise through the mountains was amazing. The normal route through the pass was covered by the avalnche, so a new path had been forged, very indistinct and difficult to follow. You have to step in footprints that have already been made before you arrive. If you don't, you risk breaking through the snow, which was about 2 ft deep with unknown underlayers of material (sometimes, most frighteningly, hollow). The atmosphere was of quiet concentration until we got held up by a young Korean and his guide. The guide was pissing around, talking loudly and taking photographs of himself in a flashy red ski jacket thinking he was the next Sir Edmund fucking Hillary, whilst we were trying to get past without triggering an avalanche or losing a leg. I muttered some words that I assume were incomprehensible to a non-native English speaker.

The avalanche was vast. It must have been about 200m wide. The path that the English fellows were presumably following was completely submerged under about half a kilometer of snow. We gazed up in frightened but exhilarated awe. It was a truly amazing sight, but it was terrifying to think about what might have happened, had we started our trek one day earlier. I whispered to Santos 'You would have taken us the long route right? We wouldn't have been on that path.' He nodded, but then helpfully pointed out that, although we would not have been submerged in snow, the force of the wind caused by the avalanche would have flattened us onto the rocky, hollow-snowed ground. 'I imagine we would have hit our heads on those' he said, pointing at some rather sharp looking rocks. Probably better than drowning though.

We reached our mid-way point, Machupucchre Base Camp, by 9am. It was very cold here. We stamped our feet and desperately clasped at mugs of hot chocolate until the sun finally hit the plateau. Immediately it was incredibly hot and I had to take 3 layers off and dried my gloves before we continued. Seeing our goal point, A.B.C, so close to hand, was very exciting. The sun hit the plateau with that blinding force that only whiter than white can provide. Crows were gliding eerily across the light, their cawing deadened by the absorbing impact of the snow.

Annapurna Base Camp sits at 4130m, almost half as high as Everest itself. The camp looked deceptively near when there was no point of reference to look to apart from the camp itself; snow upon snow upon snow upon mountains. We were breathless and heavy, even without our packs, although John and I seemed to feel this effect much less than the others. Our arrival at the camp was met with applause from the trekkers who'd set up there. I felt so incredibly proud. And, for the first time in my life, I managed to do it without feeling like my achievement had been somewhat insignificant. The views were breathtaking; the silence stunning. But the unadulterated ravines and glaciers were intensely enriched by that feeling of being one very small person who had done one very big thing. And that, my friends, felt pretty amazing.