Suselbukenikharka

It ‘s been a lovely couple of days of rest in Pokhara. My initial plan was to do a visa run to India and back to Kathmandu to start my Everest Basecamp with a friend. However, the German dude, Johan, I met in the hostel managed to convince me to go to Mardi Himal Basecamp. Another trek in the Annapurna mountain range. Which this time probably turned out to be one of the craziest adventure I have been through. Not because of the difficulty of the trek itself. But on how much surprises it took me to realize a lot can happen in the matter of minutes.

So I did all the paperwork of my visa extension and the trekking permit in Pokhara and canceled my trip to India. All done within the matter of minutes. I love the Nepali bureaucracy. Still have my supplies from Annapurna Basecamp trek, so I didn’t go for shopping much apart from buying a ton of snacks and of course Tiger Balm.

We went pretty late in the morning to get a bus to Kande, the start of the trek. The ascend was pretty steep with almost 4000 meters of elevation gain in the course of two days. The first day went pretty okay apart from me having a severe knee pain which slowed me down a lot. We stopped by a lodge in the Lower Camp and saw a few student doing school trip around the neighboring lodge. It literally took my attention that they were doing small craft making bracelets out of wool threads. We chatted with the teachers and they were happily taught us on how to make it and gave us some wool thread to work on. It was a nice experience seeing lot of enthusiasm in the high schoolers faces.

We went back to our lodge and sit by the fireplace (yes, they have an actual wood fire inside the lodge) to have dinner and started making our bracelets. For me it didn’t work. While Johan was doing pretty good.

We woke up pretty early in the morning after taking care of our bloody clothes from the leeches’ bites. We managed to reach the High Camp, the last camp that actually has accommodation, 4 hours away from the basecamp, which is a little strange since they will normally have the accommodation until the end of the basecamp.

So we put our stuff at one of the lodges hoping to reduce our load to ascend to the basecamp. But the weather just took the turn for the worst. We were trapped in a severe thunderstorm with almost zero visibility, we managed to reach the lower basecamp with our drenched clothes. Yes, 8 forgot my raincoat since it didn’t look like it was about to rain a couple of hours ago.

At this point, I decided to not continue the hike since the trail looks too sketchy, but Johan decided to go while I waited for him at the only shelter at the lower basecamp. It was broken, it barely has any roof left. I sat inside the shelter trying to keep me away from hypothermia and wait for Johan to come back so we can do the descend together. It’s almost been two hours and I didn’t see anything sign of him coming back, I started to get worried since I know it shouldn’t take more than an hour round trip to the higher basecamp from the lower basecamp.

Miraculously a few minutes later, i saw a glimpse of shadow walking through the thick fog and rain and I couldn’t be happier to see my friend came back alive. We started our descent after he gave me his warm sets of clothes replacing my soaked clothes.

The storm stopped about half an hour into our descent and we couldn’t be happier to see blue sky and rainbow for the first time in high altitude. The descend was rewarded with a beautiful sunset, clear night sky and magnificent sunrise.

We descended back the morning after to get back to Pokhara, a drastic loss of elevation from 3500meters to 800meter in one day. We could manage to get a shared jeep. So we walked for two more hours in heavy downpour to catch the last bus since it was pretty late in the afternoon, we manage to catch our bus and ended our day coming back to our hostel.Read more