PT 2 - Up to the Annapurna
BESISAHAR TO JAGAT - 29 km - 908 m climbing - 1,349 max elevation
After a night of bad dreams and niggling uncertainty, I pack my bike, lube up the chain and make a start. An official calls me over to a small office where I sign in at the first of many tourism checkpoints along the route. Almost immediately the rain starts, lightly at first but quickly increasing to a heavy downpour. The tar ends and the road becomes dirt, rock and mud and I’m shocked at the condition, rutted and striped of any surface conducive to riding a bicycle.
landslides threaten from above. A convoy of Boleros (Local Land Rovers) have stopped while rock and mud tumble down from high across the road ahead. They shout at me to stop, pointing above, so I pick up my bike and quickly run across the turmoil to safer ground. They follow close behind, engines screaming, tires struggling to find traction in the soup.
This is hard, harder than I ever imagined. I can hardly ride on the uphill sections due to road conditions and the load I am carrying, while the downhill sections are all but technically impossible. I stop short of my day’s objective by a few kilometers, and book into the first tea room I see, utterly spent. I prepare my bike for the next day’s ride but record on my audio diary that I don’t think its actually possible or feasible to continue like this on the bike, maybe I should just hike rather, its just too difficult.
By evening the rain has stopped, and after a beer and a good meal, I am feeling much more positive. Trekkers have starred arriving in the village, and I realize that I am over reacting, one of the negative symptoms of travelling alone. I decide to stop being a wimp and set a goal to play catch up with my original schedule the next day. I also realize that despite the large FREE WI-FI HOT SPOT signs displayed outside ever tea house, “WI FI connected” and “Internet Access” are entirely separate concepts.
JAGAT TO CHAME - 41 km - 1,412 m climbing - 2,725 MASL max elevation
Today I really put my head down and push hard to make up the shortfall from yesterday. Pretty tough going with loads of climbing and pushing. Slate cobbles have been laid over some of the steeper or wetter areas of the road, and its just not possible to ride on them at all. The weather is clear, no rain and the scenery is just stunning, huge waterfalls, some having bored great holes through the rock, spectacular. The road clings to the side of elevator cliffs where far below rage the peppermint waters of melted snow and ice.
I sign in at two check points during the day where my time and intended destination is recorded. The Annapurna trekking trail, and the jeep track I am following overlap quite a bit on todays route, so I encounter more trekkers, their guides and porters. Mostly, the foreign trekkers hardly acknowledge my greetings, but that’s cool, the guides and porters are always friendly and appear surprised at my progress and at the small amount of gear I am carrying.
I carry my bike up a really steep rocky section of trail and notice a guide watching my progress from above. When I draw level with him, he sais:
“That bike, that bike is actually your friend”
I nod and smile in agreement, but he continues.
“No, I mean, I have seen that sometimes you carry it and then sometimes you walk next to it and help it along, then sometimes it carries you”
He stops, thinking.
“That’s what a friend does, that’s why I say, that bike is your friend”
For the remainder of the trip, I am consciously much more careful and respectful towards my bike, how I handle it, where I put it down and what I expect from it. I know its silly really, but then maybe not.
I arrive at the village of Cheme quite late in the afternoon, booking into a really crummy tea house for the night. I always choose the very first tea house I come across, because after a days riding, even the shabbiest looks so inviting from the outside. Clearly I need to be more selective. Possibly one of the toughest day’s cycling I have ever done, definitely one of the most spectacular.
CHAME to MANANG - 33 km - 812 m climbing - 3,546 MASL max elevation
Altitude is now a clear and ever present factor to be managed and I do so quite well, avoiding sudden bursts of energy, maintaining a slow steady pace and rather walking up technical section I would normally power through.
Its also noticeably colder in the shade. Vegetation has changed from the lush tropical forests of the lower altitudes to Alpine pines and more open bare landscape where the massive faces of the Annapurna reveal themselves briefly from behind the cloud curtain. The final 6 km to Manang is all ride-able leading up a wide valley past an airplane runway which looks a little out of place in this desolate landscape. Apparently we are all meant to have a credit card with $2,500 available for helicopter extraction in the event of an emergency. From what I see during my stay, the rescue helicopter is called out on a daily basis.
I meet a very friendly Korean lady travelling solo (with a guide) who for some reason takes a liking to me and I endure endless selfies with her before heading on my way. For the first time of the trip, I am aware of just how alone I feel up here. I am the only solo person without a guide or porter, and the only cyclist I have seen on the trail so far. I check into the town of Manang, and race around trying to photograph the mountains as they sporadically poke out through the clouds.
Its difficult to contain the emotion I feel at looking on these mountains from so close. In terms of my life, my passion and my work, I suppose this really is my Mecca. By late afternoon, the town is filing up fast with trekking groups arriving in a continual stream. I share a dinner table squashed into the corner with a group of noisy French trekkers, and eat my meal alone.
MANANG - Rest day
I endure a bad night, short of breath and strange dreams. When I awake in the darkness, my mind is overflowing with irrational worries, the chief one being that I don’t have enough Nepalese Rupees on me. I play the record over and over in my head even though, like a full bladder, the solution is simple. When I do finally get up in the morning, I count my money and discover that I have more than enough to get me through to Pokhara, maybe even to the end of the trip.
Manang is an interesting town, ancient stone packed buildings and stables, but then sewn into the fabric of this cloth are small tightly packed restaurants, coffee shops, shops selling trekking equipment and even small tea room movie houses where they play endless reruns of popular mountain climbing movies. This is my acclimatization day, so I hike up to a small glacial lake quite a few 100m above the town. It feels fantastic to be hiking without the bike and I pace myself well in the thinning air now at 3,900 MASL. All around are the mountains of the Annapurna range towering frighteningly above me, their jiggered heads buried in the clouds. Its cold, colder that at any other time during the trip, rain starts to fall.
There are no working electrical sockets in my room, so I need to charge down in the dinning room which is impossible with the crowds of trekkers now filling up the town. I find a small coffee shop and charge all my electronics over a few cups of coffee and cinnamon rolls. Cell phone, camera, Gopro, power bank, kindle, Lap top.
I meet up again with my Korean fan who greets me warmly, a long lost friend, more selfies. By afternoon I am restless, bored, I want to move on now. I study and restudy my maps and elevation profiles. With great difficulty, sleep finally overwhelms my many concerns.
MANANG to LEDAR - 13 km - 650 m climbing - 4,230 MASL max elevation
It’s a beautiful morning, crisp clear skies, Annapurna III and IV just catching the first rays of sun. I cycle off onto the trail, pure single track. Its some of the most exciting off-road cycling I think I have ever done, right on the very edge, free air falling away to the raging rivers far below.
All around are huge walls of rock snow and ice, one particular slope, a terrifying jumble of massive ice slabs broken loose from their parent glacier. Within a few short hours I have already gained over 650 m of elevation reaching a height of 4,230 MASL. I stop at a small outpost called Ledar for some tea, I have a throbbing headache.
A trekking couple and their guide chat with me and are alarmed to hear how quickly I have gained elevation; 650 m is too much they say, and to have reached above 4,000 MASL in 3 days is also far too quick, they say. They say one must not gain more than 300 – 500 m per day. Other than the headache, I feel good and strong, but now I am not so sure what to do, so I decide to stop here for the night. Its only 9:30.
By 11 o clock it is bitterly cold, and I am freezing. I thought that layers, of which I have around 8, should be sufficient, but even with everything pulled on, including my shoes, I am numb with cold. I pull the blanket provided by the lodge over me and tuck it in all around me, but its just not enough. The small outpost is filling up with trekkers and their guides. I go down stairs, order dinner and immediately feel nauseous, taking an hour to force down half a plate of spaghetti.
I endure the worst night of my life, in the darkness and alone, I am buried alive, every breath a conscious effort, a fight. Time moves minute by minute, the glow of my cell phone reading 23:24…….then hours of struggle later, ….00:03. I have doubt. One conscious active inhalation, sleep, then suddenly awake with no air, sit up gasping, control the panic, alone, dark, doubt. Surrounding everything, the cold, not the normal discomfort, but a dangerous unknown monster, waiting to pounce and sink its teeth into my flesh. Clearly I am neither equipped or prepared for this level of cold, and apparently, the worst is still to come.
