First Day of the Trek (3/12)

The beginning of my hike was inauspicious to say the least, it was a dirt road where commuter buses outnumbered the trekkers. While the trail was full of Nepalese, it was nearly void of trekkers. During the entire day we passed only six.

As a whole, the trek on the first day was not that magnificent. No ocular fest here. The villages were dreary, broken down and had little charm. This is a huge contrast to the first day of the Everest hikes or even the poor villages of Burma. I hoped it would improve, it had to. In addition, another growing problem was the speed of Padam and our porter Seba. We hadn’t walked more than four hours at low altitude and Padam was unable to match what I considered a comfortable walking pace of just over five kilometers / three miles per hour. Before the trek, we explained to Seba our pace and were careful not to overload him. Maybe he didn't believe us. We got to the proposed destination before noon and I definitely wanted to continue to walk through a few more towns.

We had lunch at a town called Bahum Danda and Padam and I decided we would continue farther. However, Seba was walking extremely slowly and we had to wait hours for him to catch up. Once on the trail again it started to pour. I wasn’t too happy that I wasted all the good weather waiting. We hid out at some family’s house and waited for it to stop. After half an hour the rain ceased and we decided to head to the town of Syange. It was grungy, but at least it had electricity. I really wanted to go farther, but we worried about Seba and called it a day.

The story continues...