I promised to add some notes about the first few days of our trip organizing things in Kathmandu.

Most Westerners who do a trek as ambitious as ours plan things for months or years in advance with an agency in the US or Europe. That is expensive and the results are often terrible, as people end up with unknown guides in a large group with others who may be incompatible. Ironically, altitude sickness is much more common among organized groups, since people developing symptoms feel compelled to cover them up or be left behind on an overly aggressive schedule.

Marcia and I do things differently. We work at the last minute – almost a necessity this time since we only decided to come here a month ago. We travel by ourselves so that we can call the shots and travel at a slower pace that keeps us healthy and happy. And we meet our guides face-to-face before we commit to a trip.

Although we made a few contacts by email beforehand, we delayed any decisions until we arrived. We had appointments with two people – a trekking company named Mountain Tribes recommended by our neighbor Larry and Ngima Sherpa, the brother of the Sherpa guide who led us in the Everest region ten years ago. I spent the better part of two days walking around the tourist ghetto talking with other well-known operators who seemed to have experience with the more obscure area of Dolpo.

By the evening of October 1, we had to make a decision. The only flight to Dolpo was scheduled to leave on October 3, and we needed at least a day to arrange permits and plane tickets. By the middle of that afternoon, we had narrowed the field to three possibilities – the two we already knew and one other operator who initially impressed me. The decision would come on meeting the guides, who are the people who would actually be on the trip (as opposed to the slick office people in Kathmandu).

We liked the guide and cook presented by Mountain Tribes. The guide was shy and had only been to Dolpo once, but the cook spoke good English and had been several times. We knew we would be fine with them. As a sidelight, they mentioned that another group of UK people (maybe Tony Blair?) was considering a similar trip and asked if we wanted to join up, but they were fine when we said no. We later learned that “Tony Blair’s party” was none other than ourselves, as another company had been coordinating with them on our inquiries!

We next went to the operator I had just met that day. In five minutes, we ruled him out because he presented a guide who had not been to the region in 10 years and didn’t know what he was doing. The operator suggested another guide could meet us that evening, but we declined, since he clearly showed bad judgment even presenting the first.

At the very last minute, our friend Ngima Sherpa called to say that he had an excellent guide named Kinna he wanted to bring over. Marcia and I liked him immediately. He was proposing a more ambitious trip, but he suggested enough rest days that we could know we’d be okay. He clearly knew the area, having led many trips there, and we liked his easygoing, personable ways. Marcia and I agreed to go with them, even though it would be a bigger risk going with an independent operator.

The next day was a whirlwind of banks, permits and shopping. A Dolpo trip is expensive because it requires camping and special “restricted area” permits. Because Ngima doesn’t have a real company, he had to take us to the bank to get cash through our credit cards. That proved challenging due to credit limits and restrictions on banknotes, which are currently in short supply due to the dysfunctional Nepali government. Finally we scrouged enough from banks and ATMs to pay the upfront costs.

Ngima handled most of the three permits, but we had to go in person to the Annapurna Conservation Area office. It was interesting to see that the largest number of visitors was from China, from which there had been none ten years ago. Chinese was also springing up on tourist signs around town.

While we waited, I went to look for a boot repairman, because my favorite hiking boots had almost worn through their vibram soles. Surely there would be a specialist at such things in a place like Kathmandu. No luck. Because of a big festival, even the regular cobblers had closed their shops and no one had hiking-boot soles. In desperation, I went to the North Face store and bought new boots, hoping to be able to break them in before the trek gets serious. So far, they are working well.

Apart from the new Chinese tourists, Kathmandu has seen other changes in the past ten years. Gone are the tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled mini-taxis with motorcycle engines that spewed blue smoke all over town. The government of Nepal might be a total disaster, but at least they took this step to improve air quality.

The political situation remains tense but better than a few years ago, when there were shootings in the royal family and a full civil war between the ineffectual government and Maoists in the countryside. The king has stepped down and turned his palace into a museum. “Royal” is eliminated from state-owned enterprises, sometimes just covered with duct tape like the name of [Royal] Nepal Airlines at the airport. And while there are still threats, the Maoists are generally engaged with the other parties on establishing a democratic constitution.

Some changes are less attractive. Thamel, the tourist ghetto, seems more commerical than ever with disco music playing until almost midnight. Some people apparently come to Kathmandu just to smoke dope and party, with no interest in the culture or mountains. We will stay in another part of town when we go back.

We had high hopes of getting out of here today, because our organizer had banded together with the company of another group to charter a flight for us to fly the 30 minutes to the mountain airstrip at Juphal. Our flight was supposed to take off at 8:45 this morning, and we’d be on our way.

Alas, when we woke up at 5:30, we could hear heavy rain, which only got heavier. We packed our bags and went to the airport anyway, but we knew this was just an exercise to let the tourists feel the locals were doing something. Sure enough, the only airplane flying anywhere was the large one flying on instruments back to Kathmandu, and after 4 hours waiting, we went back to the hotel, whose front lawn was now a swimming pool.

More bad news. With more people arriving and none leaving town, our hotel was now fully booked and we had to move to much less comfortable digs. Lunch was pretty basic (dahl baht = lentils and rice for Marcia and boney chicken for me) but probably still better than what we’ll have in the mountains.

Nepalgunj is definitely not a place to be stuck for 3 days (and let’s hope it’s only that). The name apparently derives from the local word for the traditional crop grown in the area – marijuana. The town itself is a dusty, now muddy grid of streets that serves the local farmers and border posts. One traveler suggested the local hotels conspire with the airlines to delay travelers, though they can’t have arranged the torrential rains.

Delays aren’t such a big problem for us, since we have plenty of time at the other end (unlike most other parties who are on a fixed schedule to get back to work). If we have to wait out a late monsoon, we’re better in a humble hotel than in a tent – or an airplane. We do worry, however, that these rains could mean deep snows on the 5,000 meter passes in the mountains. But if so, the snow may still have time to melt or pack down in the week before we get there.

So for now we just wait.

It is late afternoon of our second full day in Nepalgunj waiting for transport to Juphal and the beginning of our trek. Tom and I recall now that “waiting for transport” is an experience we’ve had before while embarked on a rough and ready tour. Most recently in Kaktovik, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean, pinned down by bad weather, we waited patiently for a flight back to Fairbanks.

Even though both the temperature and humidity are high we set out from the refuge of our hotel to have a look at Nepalgunj. It is one of Nepal’s largest cities. The streets are crammed with bicycles, bicycle rickshaws, horse-drawn carts carrying people or freight and tractors pulling loads of bricks or lumber.

Women are wearing colorful saris or the pants and overdress salwar kameez. A few women are in full black burka. Men are wearing a wide variety of traditional clothing. Many, especially younger men, wear western clothing. Though the loose fitting traditional garments appear more comfortable for the climate.

While walking around, we saw one other western couple. But western foreigners are rare here. Even our Sherpa guide and cook are foreigners here. The locals love to stare at us. Only the young and old are brave enough to risk interacting with us. Young boys and girls offer a shy “Hi” or “Hello” and seem tickled to get a response get in English. A very old sari-clad woman made a big point of vigorously waving to us from across the street and gave me a wide toothless grin when I waved back.

As we feared, there were no planes today. Apparently there is a small airplane in a town nearby, but it has engine problems and no estimate on when they will be fixed. And alternate planes are hard to come by because this is the busy season and they are all making more money taking tourists to see Everest. Our organizer in Kathmandu is pulling all the strings he can, but until they find or fix a plane, we will be here with nothing better to do than blog posting.

At least I seem to have found a better internet cafe. The computers actually work and the keyboard is cheap but not bad. I haven’t tried Skype yet, but there’s even some chance it might work.

Our hotel is okay, actually quite nice in some ways (see picture). It is in a large garden with a balcony, though we wouldn’t want to sit out there in the heat. Our room has air conditioning, which works as long as there is electricity, which usually goes off in the evening when we need it most. Hot water doesn’t work in our room, but they happily brought us a couple buckets from another room. Our sherpa guide says it’s a four-star hotel, which is probably sherpa humor (deadpan and never quite sure if he’s serious).

Nepalgunj itself is just a flat, undistinguished town on the Indian border. The map says it’s at 152 meters elevation, though my iPhone’s GPS reads a little lower. It’s hard to imagine it’s in Nepal since we can’t even see a hill, though roughly half the country (and all of the usable farmland) is in the plains. Whatever it is, it’s hot.

I’ll finish this posting here, though maybe later I’ll add another to talk about our days in Kathmandu. As long as you keep seeing postings, it means we’re stuck. Once they stop abruptly, it means we’ve found a way out.

We did in fact find an internet cafe in Nepalgunj, the first overnight stop on the way to our trek. Nepalgunj is a hot, flat city near the Indian border that serves as a transit hub for all flights to western Nepal. This cafe boasts the “fastest internet in the city” which is pretty pathetic if true. The keyboard is so worn that I have to fix one or two letters per sentence.

Last night was a very late night, because we found out at 6pm that we would be leaving at 7 the next morning. We have way too much stuff because we couldn’t ship certain things such as medicines from Tokyo, and we just brought too much stuff period. I finally got to sleep about 4am after filling two bags to leave in Kathmandu.

Kathmandu’s domestic terminal was actually the whole airport until they built the relatively modern international terminal about 30 years ago. It’s what an airport would have been like in the middle ages if they had been flying back then – a single big room with tables for check-in desks, piles of luggage everywhere and locals and tourists mingling with porters jockeying for tips. We were thankful for our guide and cook, who managed moving our caravan’s 10 or so bags, including our backpacks, sacks of cooking equipment, and all their own stuff. The last time we passed through here we were on our own, and it was up to me to navigate the gauntlet.

It was raining all morning in Kathmandu. The locals blame global warming for extending the monsoon, but our guide Kinna Sherpa observed that this was the second year in a row that it had rained the day after the Dasain festival, a fifteen day event marked with animal sacrifices. Kinna is Buddhist like most sherpas, and he seemed to feel the gods wanted to wash the blood off the streets.

Whatever the explanation, it was sunny when we landed in Nepalgunj, and we could actually see the tops of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri. Our plan is to walk for a few weeks in the high valleys to the west of Dhaulagiri, then cross several high passes to the north of that massive mountain and then come out at Jomosom in the Kali Gandaki valley, one of the most visited places in Nepal. It will be people shock for us then, because the previous weeks will be spent on the edge of the Tibetan plateau where only nomads and a few crazy trekkers go. In the past, traders used to bring loads of salt down from Tibet, but political changes and dropping prices have cut that to a trickle (see Eric Valli’s great 1999 movie titled Himalaya – also sometimes Caravan – if you want to know more about life in this area).

Anyway, first we have to get to Dolpo. The only airport there is a short-takeoff-and-landing airstrip with bumps like a roller coaster, and the airlines tend to cancel flights and move airplanes to the more lucrative tourist routes in the high season. Despite our confirmed reservations, there is a good chance this will happen to us tomorrow and we will be back in the internet cafe until we get on a flight. And our cook says there is internet in the next city too, though if it’s any slower than this I may not bother.

Anyway, that’s all for now. If you don’t see any more posts, it means we got on a flight and we are off on the trail. We’ll be back online when we can, probably early November.

We spent our last three days of our Japanese stay in Kamikochi in the Japan Alps, sort of a warm-up trip for Nepal. The mountain trails there are at least as rugged as any we will find in Nepal, and we both found ourselves rather out of shape. I did manage to get to the top of Oku-Hotakedake, the third highest peak in Japan, and one that I’ve tried to climb on several occasions before. Marcia turned back and even so, she felt like the day had been too much for her. I’m sure we will be in much better shape as the treks go on!

We flew to Kathmandu via Singapore on September 29, arriving the 30th. We spent the next day and a half interviewing tour companies and trekking leaders and finally settled on a trip organized by Ngima Sherpa, the brother of the guide who took us around the Everest region almost 10 years ago.

Our planned trip is one of the most remote in Nepal – Lower and Upper Dolpo, the area made famous by Peter Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard. We will be on the trail for about 26 days and no access to cell phones, email, or even electricity from start to end. If all goes well, we will come out at Jomosom, an airport on the much more heavily traveled Annapurna loop. The Dolpo region is of Tibetan culture and very high, most of it between 4000 and 5000 meters elevation. We will acclimatize carefully and be fine, and we will have a good team of locals who can help us if anything goes wrong.

We are packing furiously tonight, because we leave the hotel tomorrow morning at 7am to fly to Nepalgunj, a low-altitude airport hub from which we will fly to Dolpo very early the next morning. With some luck, we will have internet access in Nepalgunj and can add some more notes, but if not, we’ll see you all around November 1 when we get back to something approaching modern civilization.

Take care, everyone, and come back for our next post, whenever that might be.

Tom Blackadar and Marcia Johnson will share this blog to publish notes about our upcoming travels, which we call Rough and Ready Tours. Postings may be irregular, as we may drop off the grid for a month or more in places without electricity or internet access.

I have recently taken early retirement from the company where I have worked for almost 25 years. It’s been a great quarter century, but Marcia and I are now ready to do the many things we’ve been dreaming about but never had time to do. I doubt my break will be permanent, and I already have some ideas of what I might do when I get bored or run out of money. But for now, we’re off to parts unknown.

We have been living and working in Tokyo for a little over two years, and it’s been a great experience. Tokyo is a very livable city and we would be happy to come back (our expat friends predict it will take less than two years). It’s been a little sad to spend our last few weeks saying goodbye to our many friends, but we know we can always come visit.

So now we look forward. We leave our apartment in Tokyo this Friday, September 25 and will spend a few days hiking in the Japan Alps, weather permitting. And then, on September 29, we will fly via Singapore to Kathmandu. We have no fixed plan yet, but we expect to be trekking for most of October, November, and early December, the best season in Nepal. Our current plan is to fly back to the US on December 13 to spend the holidays with our family and friends, and then fly back to Asia on January 23.

We hope to stay in touch with all of our friends.