Around Annapurna, Part 1: Into the Wild

Before we left on our trip I met exactly one person who had hiked in the Himalayas.  That happened to be Baroon, our dear friend whose family we had just spent a week with in Kathmandu. I was green with envy when he told me about his adventure; just imagine! The person sitting in front of me had trekked around the Annapurna range and seen the exact things my eyes dreamed of seeing.  Our discussion had the sealed the deal, I was going there, damn it. Somehow my mind was even able to skip over the minor details, like the part about the hike being three weeks long.
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The Kingdom in the Clouds

Crossing India had consisted of two thousand kilometers of pancake flat driving on the worst roads in the world. Now the roads were well maintained, and within a few miles of crossing the border we began winding through foothills, and then climbing into the mountains. The terrain rapidly transitioned from low, hot plains to grassy valleys, to alpine meadows with crystal clear meandering streams and evergreen forest. Sheena and I were ecstatic. This was the place we’d looked forward to the most when we left our driveway two years ago. We’d made it to the Mountain Kingdom of Nepal.
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Pit Stop Varanasi

We reached Varanasi terribly late on the fourth day of our drive to Nepal. Varanasi was to be our much needed intermission point; a place to stretch our legs, build back our endurance, and wash off the caked dirt plastered on our skin. At some point in the evening the plan was to reconnect with Regina and David at a hotel in the city where past overlanders had supposedly camped. We had lost contact with them earlier in the day, but given the state of the roads and their higher clearance vehicle, we were pretty sure they’d beat us to Varanasi.
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Fork Me: A Drive Across India – Part 2

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Every morning on our trans-India drive started out the same way; we awoke from fitful sleep by our talking phone alarm clock to the suffocating weight of reality pressing down on our chests. It was a terrible feeling, as if we had accidentally burned down the house with the entire family inside. We were damned to this fate, and there was nothing we could do to change it. After oatmeal and coffee we would tidy Nacho’s insides and then pull away from our petrol station camp spot to rejoin the decaying ruins of National Highway 7.
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Fork Me: A Drive Across India – Part 1

The distance from Hampi, India, to the Nepalese border is 2,200 kilometers, approximately the distance from Phoenix to Seattle. The plan was to drive to Nepal for the short trekking season, and then return to India later to explore the North.

“It’s only 2,200 kilometers,” I reassuringly reported to Sheena. “We’ll be yodeling in the Himalayas in three days, tops.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. If we had the power of premonition we would still have Lennon, the Pontiac Aztec would never have seen the light of day, and I would still have the will to live. But we don’t, and so we began the drive across India, blindly walking straight into the field of rakes.
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Hampi Campers

A few weeks back when we went to our friend Santhanam’s house for coffee I brought along my India map, and he offered his advice on the must-see destinations in South India. While we sipped on coffee in his bedroom we worked through the map. He highlighted several places on the map that I had never heard of.

“The Thillai Natarajah temple is there, dedicated to Nataraja, Shiva, the Dancer of the Universe…”
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The Onam Food Babies

Over the course of a few days we crossed the subcontinent from the Indian Ocean west to the Arabian Sea. We left Pondicherry, first stopping in Madurai to celebrate the birthday of the elephant god Ganesh, and then to the hill station of Munnar to escape South India’s heat. The ground rose from the desert plains like a strange goose bump until we were in the middle of a Van Gogh painting with fluffy clouds and Assam tea fields manicured in rows of stripes and swirls. The air smelled of freshly cut tea leaves and at 5,000 feet it was actually cold. I strutted around smitten with happiness in my sweater while Brad removed Nacho’s starter and reshaped its mounting surface with a file to fix some starting issues we’d been having.
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