Honey: Selected Journals from the Years Away
From Book V: With The Salarymen
6.3.17 to 12.3.17: Annapurna Conservation Area, Nepal (Part II)

Note: Please read Part I before continuing on with this section.

 

The following morning Henry and I took a 7AM bus to Pokhara. Yaz and her mom had booked a flight in advance and were meeting us there. The bus was a tourist bus, meaning it was specifically for foreigners traveling from Kathmandu to Pokhara – not like the one I’d taken from the border to Kathmandu. The tourist buses generally operated in a triangle, the third point being Chitwan National Park to the south. Everything else in Nepal was relatively unknown to travelers – as in Lonely Planet didn’t even bother covering it – but I was pretty confident that there weren’t any artisanal coffee shops out there.

So down the street from Alobar were dozens of buses lined up, waiting to take tourists to Pokhara or Chitwan, all indistinguishable from one another; the drivers took the massive backpacks, with their snaps and clips and drawstrings, and tossed them into the boot, motioning to climb aboard. The buses were full of white people all looking aimlessly out in of front of them; you couldn’t really think of anything but sheep. The whole thing made me pretty uncomfortable. Nothing even remotely close to a tourist bus existed in India. I asked Henry if it’d been like this in Vietnam, where he’d been before arriving in Nepal; he said yeah, it’d even been more touristy than this.

Henry’s real name was Henry; I’d been trying to call him Doc as like a fun nickname but it wasn’t really sticking. He was from New Zealand, and had only six months left of med school before he became a fully accredited doctor. He wanted to work in the Emergency Room because he said it’d always be exciting – which I suppose is true, but it might get really depressing, people coming in with broken arms and legs and gunshot wounds, and you having to constantly stitch them up and send them back out there. I asked Henry if there was much gun violence in New Zealand, and he said no, practically none. So I guess their ERs are different than ours, which I always picture just being full of people with bullets in them. Henry said there was this rule in New Zealand where the police had to keep their guns in their cars, which sounded like a really solid rule.

The roads in Nepal were not of good quality. The bus lurched and dragged and waited long periods of time for other buses to pass along the narrow roads. The route was only 200km, but it was taking a long time because of the conditions; I was mostly nervous because we still had to get our permits before setting off the next morning, and the office closed at 5PM. So Henry and I talked about wealth inequality and health care and capitalism and truth in art – stuff that gets me real worked up – and by the journey’s end my throat was starting to hurt from all my pontificating. I could tell Henry was a good guy, especially when he said he liked jazz but didn’t act like a total dick about it. Anyway, we arrived in Pokhara at around 4:30PM and hustled over to the permit office to purchase a TIMS (Trekkers’ Information Management System) permit and an ACAP (Annapurna Conservation Area Project) permit for Rs. 2000 each – so it cost like $40 USD in permits just to enter the mountain range itself. The office was giving out free passport photos, though, which was oddly nice of them.

Henry and I then began walking north towards the hostel we’d booked, through an area of Pokhara known as Lakeside on account of it being right beside the lake. Lakeside was one long street populated by a mixture of classy restaurants and cheap bars; like Thamel, it was the base for those either heading to or coming from Annapurna. The walk was long and we were carrying all our shit, and Henry had to go to the bathroom real bad but was being a good sport about it – I figured it was a good warm-up for the actual trekking we’d be doing the following day. We turned off the main strip, down an alleyway lined by disfigured concrete walls; the walls were topped with broken glass to I guess keep birds from resting there. A group of local kids were climbing the walls and jumping back down onto the street; their proximity to the broken glass was giving me a lot of anxiety.

We were staying at a place called Pushkar Guest House; the rooms were tiny, packed with seven beds – three bunks and then a single against the back wall – and since everyone was trekking pretty much all spare space was covered in packs and gear and layers and guidebooks and maps. Immediately I began sorting what to take and what to leave behind: I wasn’t bringing my laptop, journals, any of my books – really just a few pairs of clothing, boots, the jacket and sleeping bag I’d rented on the main road for Rs. 100/day, and then the hash I’d gotten from the South Africans and Rapden’s homegrown weed. All non-essentials I stored down in Pushkar’s interior, the living room filled with tagged bags – literally no part of this was ideal, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I still wasn’t entirely sure I even wanted to do the trek, but I figured at this point I didn’t have a choice with that either. Anyway, so Henry and I walked back into town and ate large pizzas like it was our Last Meal or some shit; and then we both took $300 USD out from the ATM and went to bed early. I had a crummy night’s sleep.

The sun wasn’t up the next morning when Yaz and her mom arrived in a taxi that was to take us to the trek’s starting point: Nayapul, 1070m above sea level and 40km from Pokhara. So I was scrunched in the backseat with Yaz and her mom as we set off; Yaz’s mom was small, with shortly cropped brown hair, dark like Yaz but with a fuller face. She seemed pretty motherly almost immediately; I’d been sort of banking on that, having a mom and then a doctor (Henry) around in case anything happened up there. We mostly talked about where all we’d been, which is generally a safe conversational mode to fall into amongst travelers.

After a half-hour, we pulled over so the driver could have a cigarette and the four of us could get a glimpse of the mountain range: you could see them beyond the green expanse: a wavelike formation of snow-capped peaks: Annapurna I, Annapurna IV, Annapurna South, and then Machhapuchhre. The driver said: The visibility is good. Everyone was always talking about visibility. I took some photographs. Then we got back in the car and continued on.

Nayapul was crowded with trekkers, and then several restaurants and shops selling last-minute goods. Everybody was taking off their shoes and socks and putting on other pairs of shoes and socks. We joined the procession across a bridge covered in dirty prayer flags and presented our papers at the checkpoint, getting our permits stamped. Immediately I ate the only three oranges I’d brought along. So we followed a large group of Asians onto the trail; they were decked out in form-fitting mountain wear and poles and snow goggles. They were stopping to take photos of nearly everything: signs, paths, rocks, rivers, each other. It was pretty damn annoying. I was thinking that if this was the way the whole thing was gonna be we might as well just forget it. But we got around them quickly enough, and once the procession spread out it was just the four of us, heading up the rocky track.

It was hot, and Henry was in shorts and a t-shirt and hiking boots with his massive black pack, working his way up the hill; he’d been slower than me the day before, on the way from the bus to the hostel, but I think that was because he’d had to go to the bathroom and was trying to hold it so bad. I was still in my tennis shoes; the boots I’d rented at Alobar were slightly small, and I was afraid I’d blister if I wore them too much. All around us were fields, sectioned off, sitting in the makeshift canyon, the sun beating down in a sandy brown. The hills rose in this uniform green, the kind where you can’t decipher what the ground actually looks like, if this path was once like that before it’d been carved out for us. When I was a kid, on long drives through forgotten terrains, I always wanted to go lunging off into that uncharted earth, clawing my way up – this sense of harsh and steely reality, up there all alone. I still kind of feel that way.

We stopped for lunch in Banjhgara; a plate of momos cost Rs. 350, which was quite high. But the way it works on the mountain is that food is ridiculously expensive and lodging costs nothing. The reason for this is that it’s quite difficult to get provisions up the mountain, because whoever’s bringing it up has to do the damn trek every time. So it stands to reason that it’d be smart to bring food along with you, like power bars or some shit – but I never think of that because I’m an idiot. It also takes a very long time to prepare the food, because the guy doesn’t have plates of momos waiting around for you – he only starts making the shit when you show up. So after we ate we continued up the trail, me feeling really sweaty and uncomfortable with all these random pieces of luggage hanging off me – my camera, water bottle, collapsible Patagonia jacket. Henry was definitely the quickest, Yaz’s mom definitely the slowest – but she had this Tortoise and the Hare mentality where she’d just set a pace and keep going, even when the rest of us stopped for a break. I had to admire her for it, like it was somehow related to maturity and wisdom that she was using such a method.

Eventually we reached Tikhedhungga (1540m), where the itinerary Yaz had gotten from one of her dad’s friends said we were supposed to stop for the night – but per usual people were feeling pretty good and were keen to soldier on. I was an advocate for spending the night and heading up to Ghorepani tomorrow – that going too far on the first day would be detrimental down the road.

I was mostly thinking about Joelle, and her warnings about altitude sickness. I’d encountered it before: back when we’d fly from Pune to Ladakh there’d be a change in elevation by nearly 3000m – splitting headaches and fatigue would knock you out cold for 24 hours up there. It wasn’t much of a concern when you were traveling by foot – you’d acclimate as you climbed – but you had to keep it in mind. Because basically what’d happened to Jo was that she’d rocketed up the mountain in two days and gotten so sick that they’d had to get a helicopter to airlift her out. She’d been fine after some time in the hospital, but it was some serious shit. And more importantly, helicopters weren’t cheap and I didn’t have any form of traveler’s insurance. When I told people that last part they usually looked at me like I’d made some sort of grave and irreconcilable error.

Anyway, so I was always for taking it slow, and the group generally agreed, even though it meant watching several trekkers – including the Asian photographers – trudge on past towards Ulleri, which was sort of a gut punch to the old ego. The only other concern was that those going ahead would reach Ghorepani first, meaning less rooms available when we did arrive after them tomorrow evening; the guy at the lodge in Tikhedhungga said they’d certainly have enough rooms there, but obviously he had a vested interest in the whole thing. Regardless, we decided to stop for the night and just leave early the next morning to try and catch those who’d passed us.

Tikhedhungga was a small village of two-story wooden guesthouses, all painted royal blue and offering hot showers, electricity, western toilets, etc. Since there wasn’t any discernable difference between them, it was sort of up to intuition – so we stopped at the first one and I asked the owner to see the rooms. He led me up this iron staircase and unlocked one of the doors. The room was a small cube made of balsawood slats, and then four latched windows overlooking the canyon; there were two twin beds and a single light bulb hanging from a wire stapled to the ceiling. I was like: Yeah, this is fine. Then I said: So maybe you let us stay here complimentary, and we take food from you? He was like: Yeah, fine. He knew the score. So I followed him back downstairs and nodded to the group.

The sun was setting by 5PM, and the air grew cold; the lodge’s owner brought small candles into the restaurants as we all bundled up for dinner. Yaz started talking about what she’d done back home before starting to travel: she’d worked for the Police Department in the Office of Domestic Abuse. Her job had been to get ahold of the victim during the 24 hours in which the offender was jailed before charges had to be pressed. So basically Yaz had to track these women down and talk with them, provide them with as much support as possible, try to usher them towards breaking the cycle of abuse, etc. – it sounded like a really harrowing job, especially for someone so young. And then right before she left, they’d consolidated her department, which dealt specifically with the victims, in with the department that also handled the offenders; so obviously resources had been stretched rather thin, often favoring the offenders and leaving the victims in the lurch, especially when the detectives didn’t reach a conviction and the offender returned home royally pissed about the whole thing. And so Yaz had left, unwilling to be complicit in something she saw as so morally impermissible. We sat drinking our tea post-dinner as the candles receded into themselves, a circle of vision slowly collapsing, until we headed up to bed at 8PM.

Back in our balsawood room, I folded a photocopy of my passport in half, breaking up some of Rapden’s weed and the South African hash; I poured it down the paper’s crease into a bowl I’d purchased for $4 USD back in Kathmandu. I was realizing I hadn’t packed a bowl since college, maybe even since freshman year, back when I’d do my handiwork in the dim light of my desk lamp while Cory lay in bed. Then I’d text Joe and Mitch, and they’d come by as I finished; I’d put the bowl in my North Face pocket, my thumb over to the top; we’d take the back stairwell out of Trever, follow the dirt path down to the woods. And then the three of us would stand there as I lit up, the small flame of some cheap lighter throwing a warm glow onto our faces for a moment; we’d look out into the nothing before us, on the precipice of this shadowy decline, listen to the rushing of the Fox River, night after night, as the seasons darkened.

Henry and I lit up, and the stuff was smooth – no burn at all. Then we revealed our ages to each other, which people are often hesitant to do. Henry was 23, and I was 24 – so we both relaxed a bit. Henry had thought I was older, mostly because of the beard and because I’d say stuff like: “Back in University,” which made it sound like that was a lot further back than it actually was; we both had a good laugh at that. So we turned off the hanging light and lay down to bed. Since we were both high, one of us said that we needed to start sending people into space again, and the other agreed adamantly. Henry said we probably had the technology to send a man to Mars, but probably wouldn’t be able to bring him back. I said it’d be a pretty good headline: NASA Sends Man to Die in Space – and we both laughed for a long time at that. Then we had the obligatory conversation about how even out here the government, and Google and Facebook probably, still knew where we were – and were most likely selling our information to the highest bidder for advertising purposes – and out the window was this deep darkness of isolation, away from roads and life and all things known to us, here in the mountains. We were only going higher. We put our headphones on and fell asleep.

~~~

We awoke the next morning at 6:15AM, and after breakfast shoved off across a steel bridge that wound its cables over the canyon. The track led uphill, a steep and rocky staircase crisscrossing the mountainside; we’d been warned about this, which was partially why we’d saved it for the morning as opposed to pushing on the previous day. It was a wall of earth, practically vertical; the steps were crumbling and disorderly; it took two hours of traversing until we could finally see the wide berth of it all descending below us. Climbing alongside us was a group of schoolchildren in red sweaters, their plastic Minion backpacks dirty with dust. They arrived beside us effortlessly; Yaz’s mom – who we’d taken to just calling Mom, for practical and familial purposes – stopped to give them each a Jelly Baby, this sugar-covered gummy from the UK. There was a horn sounding off in the distance, and one of the little girls started crying. It was a funeral procession, on its way to the burning pyre. A group of men came up behind us, carrying the body wrapped in an orange shawl; we stopped and watched as they moved the corpse on a stretcher made from tree branches. After they’d passed, Mom started talking to the children – she spoke a bit of Hindi, as did they. They told Mom that they went up this hill daily to get to school. They tumbled on ahead of us; we stood there with our packs and poles, watching them go.

It was the next leg of the journey, though, up to Ghorepani, that was the real bitch for me. Because now there wasn’t even much of a defined path, just rock formations resembling staircases, leading up and down through this ominous forest that appeared to be slowly decaying and generally didn’t want us there. Henry said it reminded him of New Zealand – and it did look like something from Lord of the Rings, like a part where Frodo and Sam are very far away indeed from the Shire or whatever and shit is getting very real. Today Yaz was in front, Henry and I keeping up behind her, and Mom coming along with her incredible pace in the rear. The thing I was realizing about trekking was that oftentimes there was never a full-on leader: it was whoever felt best that day, was willing to take it on. Originally I’d been somewhat nervous, this competitive nature rising up in me; but after 24 hours I started to feel as though I had no reason to compare myself to these people – that we were a unit, a team, more than anything else – and so that faded away. We reached this spout, a piece of bamboo cut in half protruding from the moss-covered rocks, water spilling out of it; Henry and I filled our bottles, wet our faces with the freezing water.

We stopped for lunch at this large building that looked like an abandoned saloon. Everyone was sitting outside at unpolished wooden tables, the sun beating down. There were white kids running around; they’d chase each other for a while and then go sidle up to their parents who drinking tea in massive outerwear. I couldn’t imagine doing something like this as a kid, but then again I guess they’ve got the energy and also they don’t know what’s going on anyway. So we all sat in the sun and for some reason discussed drugs, with Henry and I fessing up to smoking the previous night and mostly likely smoking again that night. At first I felt sort of weird admitting all of this in front of Mom, but she seemed genuinely interested and receptive to the conversation. We’d ordered spring rolls – which turned out to be these big greasy patties stuffed with vegetables – but it was taking so long to prepare that we ended up sitting there for an hour and a half. It was becoming clear that these involuntarily long lunches were always going to mess with our projected daily distance.

It was overcast by the time we reached Ghorepani (2860m), nearly 5PM. The village appeared empty, this wide plane of Swiss chalet-looking lodges surrounded by smoky green hills. Ghorepani serves as something of a base for those trekking up to Poon Hill, an hour-long jaunt directly north that offers a solid view of the Annapurna range; many trekkers just head back from there, or circle around to Chomrong and then descend. I felt a bit foolish for thinking there wouldn’t be room for us; the place was a ghost town. So I arbitrarily chose this one faux-chalet, See You Lodge, and conversed with a sleepy-eyed man in the restaurant. He led me upstairs to the balsawood rooms and I proposed the Complimentary Deal; he said fine, but only if I kept quiet about it. So I was like: Sure. I went back downstairs and nodded to the group.

So that night we were all sitting in the restaurant lit by candles once again. It was a large square room with a perimeter of plate glass windows blacked out by the night; and then an old timey iron furnace in the room’s center with a thick black pipe running up through the ceiling. On the back wall was a framed photograph of a wedding party. The picture seemed oddly airbrushed and enhanced; it looked as though the bride and groom had the exact same face, as if someone had created a portrait in which they’d married themselves. I couldn’t tell if this was a side effect of altitude sickness or if I was losing my mind – or if some Nepalese man/woman had actually consummated a more perfect union. The restaurant was shared by a large group of the Asian photographers who were all sitting around the furnace rubbing their hands together; and then this guy from Holland in Crocs and skintight leggings who was bragging about how he’d made it up in one day and seemed to expect some sort of medal for it.

And so after we’d eaten and were having a late-night ginger honey lemon tea, Yaz started talking about her boyfriend. All I knew about Yaz’s dude was that they had this vague plan to move to Canada together. This guy’s name was Dan, and she’d met him while working at a bar in New Zealand, trying to raise funds for future travels; Dan kept coming into the bar and telling Yaz she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and asking her out until Yaz finally agreed to go. Dan was from Wales, but was working in New Zealand for an unspecified amount of time as a fencer. So then basically they’d spent seven weeks together having the time of their respective lives, with the understanding that it was going to end with Yaz left New Zealand; but it was going so swimmingly that Dan wanted to keep on after that, and I guess was so persuasive and Good With Words that Yaz said: Yeah, alright. Except also concurrently Yaz had met this guy Nico from Argentina while at a hostel in Queenstown and was about to travel through Indonesia with him, the attraction between them always being very much present but only coming to fruition during their mutual sojourn. And so meanwhile Dan becomes something of a jealous prick (maybe with reason, admittedly) and is really pressuring Yaz to move to Canada with him and start a life. But then also Dan is being somewhat emotionally abusive now, oscillating between shitting on Yaz relentlessly and also professing his deep and unadulterated love for her in some classic psychologically-manipulative relationship shit. Sounds like there was something of a narrative climax when Dan flew to the Philippines to meet Yaz and Nico, and the three of them actually had dinner together – along with Mom and Yaz’s dad, who clearly chose in inopportune time to visit but were keeping mum about the whole thing and letting Yaz figure it out on her own. And so shortly thereafter Nico leaves and Dan and Yaz continue on together in Thailand, except now Dan is being even more emotionally abusive, in person now, which has Yaz calling home – and actually calling Nico up as well – crying about how terrible and manipulative he is, until she’s finally able to escape to Nepal. Like a week back. Anyway, the Current Situation was that Yaz couldn’t really get the break-up to stick because Dan was so Good With Words and Manipulative – and was honestly so insane that he was filling out Yaz’s Canadian immigration papers on her behalf, without telling her. At which point the advice from Henry and I had to obviously be: Get rid of this guy quick.

It was strange, discussing all of this while so isolated, away from sound and light. I suppose it made it easier, for all of us, here in the mountains, to look at ourselves, clearly, to understand our trajectories and ourselves. The irony wasn’t lost on Yaz that she’d worked so closely with victims of domestic abuse and now found herself in this situation. The irony of my own endless situations wasn’t lost on me either. It all felt categorically cyclical. And out here, with such space and time, you could feel a silent hopelessness to it – as if you’d paused the action but couldn’t affect the outcome. Like floating above yourself. I suppose we technically were, at this height.

And so we went upstairs to bed. Henry and I smoked up, and talked about what’s going on inside the minds of cats and dogs. One of the Asian photographers banged on our door and asked us to be quiet. We lay there petrified in the darkness until we eventually fell into sleep.

~~~

The next morning we woke up early to go watch the sunrise on Poon Hill (3193m), along with pretty much every other person staying in Ghorepani. The bizarrely named Poon Hill offered views of Annapurna I, IV, South, and then Machhapuchhre. Travelers knew Machhapuchhre by its English translation, Fishtail Mountain, on account of it looking like a fishtail; climbers weren’t actually allowed to summit the mountain since it was considered a sacred site and purportedly Shiva’s home. Anyway, Henry and I waited outside in the dark with the Holland guy while Mom and Yaz got ready. Both Henry and the Holland guy had headlamps on. I was relatively anxious to get going, because I knew the Asian photographers would be coming along shortly, with their poles and cameras and selfie sticks, and it’d be a real pain in the ass trying to get around them on the trail. Up above you could see new magnitudes of stars, but it was relatively hard to appreciate them because it was so damn cold. Shortly thereafter Mom and Yaz came out, and we set off.

Poon Hill was not a fun climb. There was no warm-up, just an immediate uphill zigzag thru pure black, punctuated only by various headlamps and flashlights. You couldn’t really rest, at least not for the first half, because the trail was so thin that if you stopped you’d clog up the procession following closely behind you. I was feeling a bit of a headache coming on – Poon Hill was 300m higher than Ghorepani – but I kept on. We reached a plateau with a wooden ticket booth; everyone paid Rs. 50 and continued up the wider steps. Henry and I paused beside a satellite tower on the next landing, waiting for the girls. An Indian girl and a Nepalese man, presumably her guide, reached the landing and the girl sat down on the steps. “It’s fine,” she was saying, “I can see the sunrise from here. Beautiful view.” The guy was saying: “No, no, we’re close – it’s five minutes more.” The guy sat down beside her, and she put her hand on his shoulder. He reached up and rubbed her hand. “Here is fine,” she kept saying; and he kept saying it was only a bit further; and then she vomited all over the ground and the guy said: “Oh shit.” The girl kept vomiting, repeatedly, onto the steps before her. A white lady passed her and said, absentmindedly: “I think there’s a trashcan up there.” Henry and I moved on.

On the next landing we sat beside two girls who were pretty cute; I said: “It seems like there’s always another hill.” They were like: Yeah. I was short of breath, flushed in the face. When they set off we followed; they seemed to be setting a good pace. It seemed almost imperative to focus on one of the girls’ snow-panted ass before me, not the physical pain. When we reached the top the sun was just starting to light up the horizon. It was really fucking cold. Out in the distance, to the northeast, you could see the four peaks, the general range; the sun was coming up in the east. People were wandering around the pavilion, taking photos, talking casually – loads of people, people I hadn’t seen at the lodges or on the trail, all congregated here. The view looked like a postcard. Mom and Yaz arrived, and Mom bought us all coffee; we took some photos, and then went back down.

The day consisted mostly of traversing the ridge of a high hill, on and on, like the spine of some massive animal we were attempting to tightrope across; and then downhill, into the forest – we took it running, jumping between rocks. By lunchtime we’d reached this small village; thunder and lightning started up, and then it began to rain, or hail, or snow, or some combination. An old woman in a headscarf appeared in the doorway of a shack and waved us over; so we ran to her and took shelter inside. She began lighting the old timey furnace. I had literally no rain gear: my reversible Patagonia was maybe waterproof, but otherwise I was way out of my element. We’d been trying to make it to Ghurnung that day, but now it didn’t seem like we’d make it past Tadapani. Out back a girl was trying to herd donkeys into the barn, but they weren’t listening and you could tell she was really frustrated. We all stood at the window watching, cringing as she slapped them with a thin long stick and screamed.

In from the rain/snow/hail came these three German girls, panting. We all stared at each other. The Babushka Lady got the furnace going, and so everyone crowded around to warm up; Yaz started waving her butt back and forth against it. Two of the Germans, sisters, had been working at an NGO their uncle ran in some village, and had decided to trek afterwards; I was positive they were the cute girls Henry and I had seen that morning, one of whose snow-panted asses had led me up Poon Hill. The third German was traveling solo, and started listing off her countries like a grocery list; I’d seen her early on the Spine with her poles – she’d looked angry. It seemed as though the weather wasn’t letting up, so we all ordered lunch and tried to decide what to do. It felt, for the first time, as though things were as they actually were: that we were stuck in some abandoned cabin, in the middle of nowhere, with only a furnace to warm us, the modern world having no chance of helping us even if they’d wanted to. I felt, for the first time, the immediate realization that this was actually a dangerous undertaking – that we were closer to death than I’d understood, that any semblance of a safety net was now non-existent. That you could slip and fall and bust your head open and die and no one would even know. It was theoretically a lot more terrifying than it actually was; in reality, it didn’t change much.

We eventually set off, thinking it wasn’t going to get any better. The Germans came with us. We trekked on down along a river, as the rain/snow/hail became proper rain, turning the accumulated snow into mush and making the rhododendrons hang heavily on their branches. Monkeys swung between the thin trees: real ones, not the fucked-up ones from the Monkey Temple. The rain was coming on so hard now that my hair was drenched; my bag had to be too. The trail diverged from the river and started on an incline; I peed something hot, yellow-orange, behind a bush. Henry and I discussed the Germans. I called the older blonde, Charlotte; he said he was fine with the younger brunette, Henrietta.

Uphill got rough. The place felt like a jungle, like it was sagging, weighing down on us, trying to crush us. Up ahead were some old folks, with their guides and porters, decked out in neon gear, breathing heavily, this look of pure despair clouding their faces. We all took cover under a large rock nestled into cliffside; I went up ahead, trying to see how much further we had, looking back down at everyone. They all appeared ragged, spent, desolate, fighting nature, currently inside whatever this was. I felt some sort of loose power in my hands, a reckless mania, a sense of abandonment I couldn’t reconcile. I called down: “There’s a McDonald’s!” Everyone laughed. “And they made too many fries, so they’re giving them away free!” People laughed less at that.

Eventually we ascended up to Tadapani and the Angry German broke off for the night while the rest of us trekked on to Chuile (2245m). Now the path led downhill, opening up into fields of green and ramshackle farms, like something out of the Scottish countryside, surrounded by massive darkening cliffs. We passed through a wooden gate and came upon the one lodge in Chuile: a motel-style building with two floors of doors and windows, and then an adjacent restaurant; the compound sat on a large swath of perfectly green grass, as if it’d been leveled, before tumbling off into the wide sprawl below. There was a singular horse with a bell around its neck that clanged as it shuffled around, and then four dogs chasing each other and barking. Everything felt strange to me, as if the place had been plopped down here randomly, already built and existing – there was no village, nothing surrounding it except empty farms. So I went into the restaurant and found a group of Nepalese men playing cards and drinking; I said we needed three rooms – the German sisters had fallen behind, but I wanted to be sure they had something for the night. One of the men lifted himself from the table and showed me the accommodations while the others stood on the grass staring at the horse. So I tried my Complimentary Deal and the guy was like: Yeah. It seemed like maybe he didn’t understand, so I explained it three times slowly, touching his arm and all to emphasize that we were making a Deal – and he was still like: Yeah, whatever. He went back inside to his card game.

So after we’d put our shit in the rooms we went into the restaurant to have a tea. Inside there was this dark-skinned guy with glasses drumming loudly on the tabletop with his hands and looking around shiftily to see if anyone was paying attention. He heard Henry talking, and yelled across the room that he’d lived in Christchurch for four years. It was nice, because after we’d parted ways with the Holland guy there’d been a vacant position re: someone to hate – and this dude seemed to be sliding in quite easily. Through the windows I saw the German sisters trudging across the field – so I went outside and told them I’d sorted out the rooms, figuring they had to be impressed by my negotiating skills. When I got back inside Yaz rolled her eyes theatrically. I said: “You’re just jealous.” The drumming guy and his buddy, this amorphously good-looking European dude, went outside for an opportunely timed cigarette. Turned out they’d stayed at the same lodge as the German girls the night before and had played cards. Henry said: “That drumming guy is working on your girl.” I said: “I can’t be bothered.” Yaz said: “Yeah right.” I said: “I can’t just flirt with everything that roves into my field of vision.” Yaz said: “You can try.” Mom was smiling.

What ended up happening, though, was that I was sitting there writing shortly thereafter, and hadn’t made it but a paragraph in when Charlotte sidled up next to me. Outside Drum Man was doing some faux-yoga poses with his vague friend to no avail. She asked what I was doing, so I told her. She was a nearly graduated psychology student, training to be a therapist; I didn’t feel like it was necessarily the time to announce: “Hey! I’ve seen many therapists!” so I just asked if psychiatry was stigmatized in Germany, which sounded like a pretty intellectual question. She said it was about the same as in America. She was 25 and had big beautiful eyes and the sort of defined cheekbones that Vincent Cassel is known for, and then this amazing long blonde hair that seemed to be naturally braided by some supernatural force. Soon her sister came over and slid in across from us where Henry was reading George Saunders and started talking with him – and so now there were these two conversations going, like kismet, with Henry and I occasionally snatching glances at each other like: Can you believe this shit? Yaz’s eyes were rolling so far back into her skull that I was afraid they were gonna get stuck there and we’d have to airlift her out.

And so the sun came down and we all ate dinner, the Germans and Mom and Yaz and Henry and I, here in this ominous chateau in the Himalayas. Drum Man was sat in another booth with his companions; it turned out he was part of a tour group, replete with guides and porters, also heading up to ABC. He’d brought along a 1L water bottle full of whiskey, and kept trying to get others to drink with him but no one was really biting. I assumed it was quite difficult for him to see the Germans with us and not drinking whiskey with him – which gave me this warm feeling that I assume good whiskey attempts to give you. It turned out Henrietta had lived in New Zealand for a while as well, and her and Henry were intimately discussing this Walmart-esque store there called the Warehouse. Yaz and I were yelling animatedly about how I’d never thrown up except from drinking and she hadn’t thrown up since she was two, except from food poisoning this past New Year’s in Thailand – which I said meant she could no longer claim to live a non-self-induced vomit-free lifestyle. She completely disagreed. Henrietta said you weren’t supposed to brush your teeth after you threw up – and we asked Henry’s opinion, as a doctor, and he said: Well, vomit is an acid and toothpaste is a base, so it figured that they’d cancel each other out; and then Henrietta said her boyfriend was a dentist and he’d told her that. So that really threw us all through a loop, Henrietta having a boyfriend, and I felt sort of bad for Henry but I suppose that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Charlotte and I ended up over by the furnace alone, while Drum Man tried to get a card game going and Henry went back to his book and Yaz and Mom went to bed. We were sitting very close. The heat was drifting off the furnace, this small halo of warmth we’d stepped into. Charlotte said she’d worked in various hospitals during her studies, interacting with people experiencing psychosis – and how after spending so much time with them she’d sometimes lay awake at night wondering if she herself was psychotic and didn’t know it, the way her patients didn’t either. There was something very German and serious about her use of the word “psychosis” that took away some of the ambiguities we circled around back home. I was surprised by her candor with the thing, drawn in by it. I could feel the rough edges of whatever empirical attraction I’d felt towards her being sanded away, towards something – for lack of a better word – deeper. She said I had very beautiful, very intense eyes – eyes that intimidated her, eyes full of life. I believed her. She said I had a habit of blinking with one eye at a time, like a wave across my face – something Henry had mentioned too that I guess I’d picked up somewhere along the trail. She asked what my friends and family thought about all this, about me being so far out here, all alone, not telling anyone anything. I said that it was just something I had to do, and that they understood – and that even if they didn’t it wouldn’t change anything. She said she was impressed that I carried everything on my back for so long, that I didn’t wear any winter clothes up here.

I realized, somewhat abstractly, how she must view me: wild, untethered, perhaps mad. The part that remained unclear, that perhaps she was trying to figure out – that perhaps I was trying to figure out as well – was whether I was walking the string of the thing, or if I’d fallen off into the abyss. It was like she saw it, and I saw it, but we both didn’t know.

So we walked outside, presumably to bed. My stomach was tightening, convulsing, and there was that weird acidic taste sprouting up in my mouth; I was realizing I hadn’t kissed someone for the first time, sober, since maybe my first year of college. The dogs were walking around, and we realized that they had socks in their mouths; “I hope they’re not mine,” she said, going to fetch them. The horse was nowhere in sight. It had grown so cold: I was freezing, shivering uncontrollably. My mind was running through all sorts of various scenarios: I am cold, snuggle with me; come to my room for a bit; come here. I just wanted her in that vague way you want something, anything, but you don’t really know yourself. You’re just some rough shell of what you assumed you’d be. But instead she’s just collecting socks from the mouths of dogs, and I’m standing there watching her in the cold mountains.

Eventually we said goodnight and I went into the room, where Henry was curled up in his sleeping bag. I took my contacts out and went to the bathroom down the hall. Drum Guy and his amorphous friend were running around the field, giggling, lighting something with their cell phones. I washed my face; the water was cold. I headed back towards the room, where I could see something unclear moving in the distance; I went towards it, blind, foggy, trying to find our door, my arms outstretched; I heard a voice: “Trying to find your room?”

It was her. “I took my contacts out, I can’t see anything,” I said. We were standing before each other. “I’m wearing my glasses now,” she said. “See?” Her face appeared out of the darkness, suddenly so close. I realized I didn’t even know what she looked like, couldn’t conjure an image. I didn’t even know this woman. “Help me get back?” I said. She took me by the arm and led me. We stopped outside the door. I said thank you. She said you’re welcome. Our arms unclasped, tracing out to our hands, holding on softly for a moment, looking at each other, her just this fuzzy image – I, I whatever I am. I don’t know what it was. Why any of it mattered. There was no ground beneath our feet anyway. We lingered, her fingertips grasped before me; then there was a click, and she slipped. Her hand fell from mine. And then she was gone, off into the night.