Annapurna Circuit — Manang

Coming from a country surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, my only experiences with mountains came from BBC documentaries and one or two small winter trips for skiing or snowboarding.

Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) sounded to me like a slight buzz in the ears — the same kind of noise you get after spending a couple of hours at a very loud concert. Motion Sickness (MS) followed the same pattern as AMS, though in my case it was caused by some magic mushrooms bought on the streets of Bairro Alto in Lisbon... Still, I felt that trekking in the Himalayas would be an amazing experience, and although I hadn’t the slightest idea what to expect, I went for it like an 18th-century romantic.

Carsten and I started the trek on the 9th of October. The ride from Kathmandu to Dumre was a crazy six-hour journey along dirt roads and deep cliffs. From Dumre, we traveled on the rooftop of a local bus that took four hours to reach the trek’s starting point: Besisahar. On October 10th, we packed our backpacks and left for the mountains. The following five days had more or less the same routine: wake up around 6 a.m.; coffee and apple pancake for breakfast; trek between four to seven hours; reach the next village; find a place to sleep; eat around 7 p.m.; sleep by 8:30.

As we ascended, food prices skyrocketed — while a Coke costs 35 rupees (around 40 cents) in Kathmandu, in the mountains it reaches 150. Accommodation was always easy to find; there are plenty of lodges along the way, and prices follow the opposite trend of food (sometimes they don’t even charge for a room if you promise to eat there). Nature-wise, it was breathtaking. The higher you go, the better it gets. You go “Awwwww” all the time. Everywhere you look, you find the perfect picture. You desperately try to capture in pixels what your eyes perceive, only to realize later that what you’ve seen isn’t on the camera display.

On the sixth day of trekking, we reached Manang, in the Mustang District, near the Nepal-Tibet border. “The Bible” (also known as the Nepal Lonely Planet Guide) says, “You have to spend one day acclimatizing here before you move on.” Manang sits at an altitude of 3,500 meters — the highest point Carsten and I had reached so far. It is a wonderful Tibetan village that has served as a trade center for centuries. Its gray-neutral houses, the dry surrounding mountains, and its nomadic traders make Manang the perfect place to take a break and enjoy a day without carrying a backpack.

On our acclimatization day (to make sure we weren’t suffering from AMS), we visited a monastery at 4,000 meters and met a 94-year-old lama who had been living there for 40 years. I must confess I thought this would be an amazing spiritual experience — to sit down with this holy man… but the disappointment couldn’t have been greater.

A few seconds later, we heard the first of the two questions he knew in Enlgish: “Photo?” followed by: “Money?”

As we reached the monastery, we took off our shoes, left our cameras outside, and entered a small dark room carved into the mountain. The walls were covered with hundreds of passport-sized photos of white men scattered among Buddhist paraphernalia — not a single free space on the three walls. A few seconds later, we heard the first of the two questions he knew in Enlgish: “Photo?” followed by: “Money?”

“It can’t get worse,” I thought… but it did! We paid 100 rupees for a handmade raksha (supposed to bring us luck for the Thorung La Pass at 5,416 meters) and for his holiness’s permission to take a photo. “It can’t get worse,” I thought again… but it did! After a few minutes, we were offered a cup of black tea brought by an old woman who lived in a small wooden house near the monastery. As we sat there, tea cups in our hands, the lama stared at some invisible point ahead of him and didn’t move for several minutes. We finished our tea and were about to leave when he showed us another raksha, pointed to a 500-rupee note, and said: “Money? Photo?”

I laughed out loud. Carsten said, “No thanks. I don’t want to live forever.” We left, reading each other’s minds: What the fuck was that?! In high season, more than 200 trekkers visit Manang every day. If just half of them visit the temple… “Nirvana, Nirvana.” I’d rather pay for the album.