It had been 100 days now since we had left Boulder and were living out of suitcases. An amazing milestone for us to reach! We got up early in the morning and were headed up the at 7:30 am in the shadows of the mountains. We were excited to be out of the room and hiking but the days had kind of dragged on us and seeing the helicopter flying up canyon the day before had not inspired boldness.
It was cold hiking up and I was feeling a little bit of a fever still but thought I could manage it.
Anja was moving slow behind me and I headed up trail into the sunlight to wait.
When Anja reached me, she was dragging her trekking pole on the ground behind her and looked exhausted and cold. We stopped and discussed continuing up. We had 9.5 days until we flew out from Kathmandu. We’d need a day to get back to Kathmandu and a day in Kathmandu to get our luggage and flyout then throw in one buffer day and that left us with 6.5 trail days. I was calculating it would take us 4 days to hike out if we had to and maybe a day to get a bus to Besi Sahar so we had a 2.5 day window of freedom. However, as we discussed it Anja just did not seem to get rested. We thought maybe we can go on and finish this but it would just be miserable for Anja and I was becoming concerned she might have real altitude problems as we went higher. We decided to turn around and see if we could catch a flight out of Manang to Pokhara.
At 8 am we snapped a picture of our high point on the trail before turning around.
It was great to be hiking down, it felt easy and fast for me but Anja was still moving a little slow. Anja moving slow made me feel we’d made the right choice about going out as it must be altitude she was having a problem with.
Heading down we were excited talking about getting Tongba in Kathmandu, checking out Pokhara, and what the flight out might be like.
Goats.
A view of the landslide section we gone across to get to Khangsar (take the new trail if you ever go).
At 11 am we reached Manang. The walls of Manang were big and the path was gross as the paver stones were just covered with donkey poop.
Safe Drinking Water project in Manang.
Views up from Manang.
Manang main street.
In Manang we found out we needed to go back to Hume to find out about flights, another 2 hours down trail.
We stopped and got some apple pie in Barka. People kept walking buy with rocks and we heard there might be a festival going on so we assumed it was related.
We got to Hume at 1 pm and found the ticket office. It was Friday and they said the next flight was not until Monday and we might only maybe get on that. Tuesday there would probably be a flight. If you remember we had 6.5 trail days left, if we waited until Tuesday for a flight and didn’t get out we might be in trouble so we made the choice we’d hike all the way down and out. Anja said if you had told her we’d be hiking all they way out she might have been so fast to chose to hike out.
I disagreed with Anja’s thoughts that we could have kept going as we were hiking at this point at considerable lower elevations and it was cold and windy. It would have been a chilly night up at higher elevation camps.
We continued on and made Lower Pisang around 3:30 pm. It had been a big 8 hour day and we were tired.
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