To the Mountains
After a few days exploring Kathmandu by myself, my brother and his wife finally arrived. We spent the day meeting with the tour guide for our upcoming trek, buying last-minute items that we’d need on the trail, organizing our bags and enjoying dinner together. The next morning we left bright and early, 7 of us (including the driver) crammed into an SUV with our bags tied to the roof. We quickly learned that road travel in Nepal is quite slow, as traffic is thick, many of the roads are one lane in each direction, construction appears to be constant, and the roads are windy. In their defense, there’s no such thing as straight roads when you’re crossing mountains, ravines and rivers. But, after probably 7 or 8 hours on the main roads, we stopped for lunch and switched into a different vehicle that would take us up the even more treacherous mountain roads. This happened to be an even smaller vehicle than our first, and we also gained an extra person during our lunch stop, so we now totaled 8. This was the last stretch of the drive, but it ended up being the most intense. Not only were we comically crammed in like sardines, but the road was rough and long. For about 4 hours we climbed upwards on skinny, rocky, dusty backroads, through mountain streams, sometimes on a cliff’s edge, all at speeds that made me nervous, but that, in a weird way, reassured me that the driver knew the road like the back of his hand and could be trusted. Or at least that’s what I chose to tell myself. To his credit, he got us to our destination safe and sound, and the nerve racking drive just ended up being part of the experience. We spent the night in the tiny village of Chame (located 8,694 ft. above sea level), where the walking portion of our trek would begin the following morning.
"Because the greatest part of a road trip isn’t arriving at your destination. It’s all the wild stuff that happens along the way."
-Emma Chase
