Today is my birthday, and I am spending it all alone. In fact, having spent all day on a motorcycle out of Kathmandu, I have found myself in a very desolate place indeed. My abode for the night is a cabin on the peak of a windswept and pine-scented mountain, part of a facility aptly named 'The Hotel at the End of the Universe'. The sun is just going down, burning up the dusty atmosphere and lightening the silhouetted bulk of each successive range until the most distant merges with the pale lilac sky. To my right by the window, two waiters play chess, one quietly humming a folk tune as his partner contemplates his next move; to my left, the cook sprawls on Moroccan style cushions, absolutely horizontal and absolutely silent save from the odd atavistic and self-satisfied yawn.
And all the while the wind howls through the stooping pines.
Desolate it may be, but this is exactly what I craved all afternoon as I battled with the madness of the Kathmandu traffic, the sickening stench of the Bagmati river, the potholes, the dust and the scorching sun, all the way that is until I turned off from the highway at Bhaktapur, and fell into the cool, scented embrace of these rising hillsides.
Just the right place to say goodbye to Nepal.
For with the exception of the last few nites in Kathmandu, I have got very intimate with the elements of this country. On a three day climb up to the Annapurna base camp, I ascended viewless through relentless mist and drizzle, unable to see past the rhododenron forests of the lower slopes. On the final day as I passed 3000 metres, I entered thick cloud and the rain simultaneously turned to heavy snow. As the white out thickened, many were turning back, and a steady stream of defeated walkers loomed out of the void, skidding around like dogs on rollerskates, and full of incredulity that I was pushing ahead.
I told each one my secret: that I had strapped on a pair of instep crampons and was both firm and fleet of foot. And I needed to be. As the steep mountains sides closed in around me, constant avalanches thundered down the slopes behind the veil of cloud. From a chance meeting with a guide a few days before, I knew that this was normal given the fresh snowfall, and I was in no danger. But still, it is difficult to rein in your pulse when you are alone and a cloud's thickness away from something so powerful and so utterly indifferent to human life.
But the crowning glory to all this drama just had to be the appearance of the sun as I reached the end of my journey. Annapurna base camp is situated at the back of glacial valley, cradled on three sides by 8000 m peaks. Already as I passed through the avalanche zone, the cloud was becoming thinner and no air was moving in the throat of the canyon. All the solar radiation that could make it through the cloud was trapped between the gleaming white snow walls and the clouds themselves. I felt my face burning first and exchanged a fleece beanie for a sun hat. Then, when I could stand it no more, I stopped to remove my thermal underlayers which had been so essential in the freezing hours of the early morning. At the same time, I removed my thermometer keyring from my belt loop and swung it for a while in the free air. After a 5 minutes it registered 28 degrees, which I thought impossible until I reached the base camp and found Nepalis in t-shirts, lounging in the first bursts of sunlight I had seen in three days.
And it held. That night, the thin mountain air was spangled with a canopy of stars, and at five o'clock, as the gray fingers of dawn were just beginning to reach out across the sky, I teamed up with a lovely Chilean guy to climb a minor peak and watch the sunrise over the most spectacular mountain scenery I have ever seen.
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