Greetings from Kathmandu.
After a whirlwind tour of the local temples, I’m heading for a 7 day
hike into the Himalayas. You need a
6-hour jeep ride to get to the trailhead then I’m ascending into what the
locals call ‘hill country’. The max summit
I’m going to in ‘hill country’ is 5001m (16,400 ft). By way of comparison, the tallest peak in the
continental United States is Mt. Whitney in California which is around 15,000
ft. I think having Mt. Everest in the
background really distorts what you end up calling a mountain.
Thailand was great fun, although I can’t say I roughed
it. Except for 3 or 4 days in the
Bangkok, I spent my time scuba diving or staying in beach resorts. Normally, I’m not a beach resort kinda guy,
but when you couple the experience with amazing massages on the beach for $8, I
just could not leave. (BTW, these were
public beaches – so no happy endings :)
When I was on the Island of Ko Tao, there was the Thai new
years festival and a full moon party.
The new years festival is a celebration of water … which translates now
to a drunken street battle with high powered water guns. It was amazing good fun. People did not think twice about blinding someone
driving by on a moped with a water cannon … it was safe by burning-man standards,
but not by any other convention.
I’m now a certified Rescue Diver – this means that I trained
to assist people with all sorts of Scuba related mishaps. My instructor informed me at 9am on the first
day of training that he just woke up 2 hours earlier naked in a bar with no
memory of how he got there. It turns out
that an average dive instructor in Thailand can really party!
During the training, tragedy kept striking one of the assistants. In just a few days she was electrocuted in
the compressor room, had panic attacks in open water, choked on a cookie on the
boat, had decompression illness, and drowned at a depth of 30 feet. The dive master meanwhile was having nitrogen
narcosis most of the time and was trying to attack me underwater with a spoon
and managed to pull my mask and fins off whenever I turned my back to him. All the while people were yelling HELP, but
so as not to confuse people between a pretend emergency and a real emergency,
the word PIZZA was yelled instead of HELP.
It was a very unique experience, I will probably get jittery if I sit
next to a wood-stove oven at an Italian restaurant anytime soon :)
OK, I have to get my bag ready for my Sherpa now. I will likely not have internet until I make
it to Darjeeling, India around April 29th or 30th. Hopefully I’ll have great photos of a Yeti to
share then.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Into thin air, Tony
