Dec 31, last day of trekking and happy birthday

Last day of trekking, and A.'s birthday of some-year-old, we rose early,fairly excited and half frozen,to the great expectation of a final liberation and then celebration. Joking about Y's special raincoat pajama and loud snoring, we washed our faces with the icy cold snow melt water and then joined the Japanese group to wait for the sunrise, against the freezing valley wind in fairly darkness.

The sun did shine behind thick clouds, and its golden ray lit the snow mountains dazzlingly, while the wind drifting away the clouds strongly. We joked about our waste of our strength the day before for the climb of Poon Hill for the sunrise. Why we slaved that hard, if we knew we could enjoy here at Tadapani a much easier way.

After a quick breakfast, at 8:20 am, we departed. When, and only when asked, our silent guide released some news to us, to be more exact, through A.'s painful guess and then translation. Out of us three, I was the most impatient. Starting from the very first day of our trek, after some fruitless conversation tries, I gave up talking to him totally and obviously. Y. behaved much nicer. And our friend A., the birthday girl, was declared as our' ambassador and interpreter'. She tried hard to talk to the poor boy to bridge and soften embarrassment and tense around. Anyway, for today, News one: all the way down, except short small sections;News two: again, 7-8 hours' climb and walk.

I expressed to my friends I was feeling bad and guilty for possibly hurting his esteem the day before and seriously promised to go and have lunch at the only place he wanted. When the sun was higher, it became a little warmer. And during the descent, we didn't spent too much time resting, thinking of finishing the damn trek as soon as possible. We tried to move on, steadily in nice golden sunshine from behind tree leaves, and hummed together with birds chirping and waterfall singing.

Even it was way down, it was not easy walk. First, the steps were high and not even. The paths, laid out with stones, were not paved at all. Carefully we stumbled past several villages, like Ghandruk (1940 meters above sea level), where we were kinda surrounded by some kids, begging for sweets and medicines. Yes, medicines! And several minutes out of them, we heard loud music from 10 meters lower the terrace, where villagers were excitedly welcoming American doctors' arrival.

We saw more haze down in the valley, in the distance, the terraces making a great picture, even though there was not much green crops on them. And in the trees, we happened to find a large tribe of white fur monkeys, wilder, more hard working, more independent than those at the monkey temple,for sure!

We came across a big quarry, where large rocks were being mined. Picked two pieces, one large, and one small, both shining beautifully with its high content of dark mica. We were followed by two big teams of horse caravans, carrying heavy loads and gas bottles.


We finally came to a place where we were permitted to rest and have lunch. On the edge of high terrace with a great view of the whole valley, but among some odor smell of dung from passing-by horses, we had a precious rest, and lunch. According to the owner of the restaurant, we got to know that our guide had worked for four years. 'He is a good guide, isn't he?' he asked in smiles to our nods and smiles too.

We felt much better and then hurried onto our way, which had grown more bumpy and uneven even when were closer to those villages. I invented my way, that is, to hop down, without fighting more against knees to locate good locations. And there, out of our great surprise, a big black dog began following us from high to lower villages, lasting more than 15 minutes. When we stopped it halted to wait for us, until a loose buffalo guarded in the way. When it saw us sided past, it began to bark at the buffalo and had a slight fight, till it was allowed to pass, too. When we arrived by the river side, it stopped, partly because we used our sticks to prevent and partly because there were other black dogs around there.

More and more trekkers appeared, but strangely this time, seemed only Asians showed. There were a large group of Koreans and there were Japanese too. Only at the opening of the village, our last rest place, we met a young American man with his guide. Since he was climbing up and going to do the trekking loop in the opposite way,I gave him very helpful advice about the trekking, but that must have sounded too stupid to him, that was:
'Think it again. Turn around and don't do it.' He and his guide thought I was joking. But was I?

We walked along the river and met several more kids asking for sweets and many students back from school. Everything when we inquired, how many more minutes. There was only one answer. Twenty minutes.
When many twenty minutes passed, we came finally to the check point to report our safe departure. We had another long walk, before we really came to the roadside, waiting to be picked up. We were telling ourselves: All right, finally everything is over. We are now liberated!

But that was only a dream. Our car was not there yet. Our guide made some calls and around twenty minutes later, he went to a taxi parking on the roadside, showed to us let's go. He didn't explain anything, even in his broken English, or to his best friend A. But strangely we kinda figured out the reasons and we even didn't get angry.( Why?)

It was about one hour and half's drive back to Pokhara. The sky was turning dark. It was already 6:30, the time when we planned originally to start our birthday dinner. But we were still on the way. When only about half an hour's drive ahead of Pokhara, we came to a large crowd, which turned to be an accident. Tired, hungry, held up by an accident, we sincerely hoped that A. was not feeling too bad for all these.

The guide grabbed some money out of the car, explaining nothing still. We were beginning sharing biscuits and chocolate from A. and Y. collections and stocks. I got one each of them but determined to swallow them only when the mess was cleared.
Roughly forty minutes later, the taxi driver ran back with the guide, started the engine, drove on, and then exchanged us to another car ( our own car driver) before he turned around to drive back.

It was already 7:20 pm when our car finally was entering Pokhara. And since the city was having a street festival, our car only stopped us our of the pedestrian street. There we hastily said goodbye and tipped some dollars to him, before we searched our way back to Hotel Meera.
We were lucky, as many hotels, and guesthouses we tried, were either full or charging three or four times higher room rate, when we found a neat small Noble Inn deep in the alley. Clean room, hot water, only 300 for single, and 500 rs for a double, inclusive of taxes. ( The house wife a really nice lady kept explaining her rooms clean)

We dropped our stuff and had a quick wash,then immediately hurried out to the busy streets, with crowds of locals and makeshift shelters and dinning tables, luckily found a empty table at Hotel Meera and began our small celebration of the damn new year and A. 's birthday( , like it or not), after all much trouble.