Crossing the Thorong La Pass
You always
hope for the best when traveling alone, and oftentimes you are blessed with
just that, but good things come hand in hand with bad things and you must
accept that. My prediction was correct. I had AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness),
and it only got worse. When I made the walk back to my room for the night I was
starting to feel terribly bloated. I ended up being kept awake all night, first
with a terrible stomachache, then at risk of TMI, I was blasted with terrible
diarrhea. Diarrhea sucks by itself, but the situation only made it way worse.
About five times during the night I
had to get up to go to the toilet, the process being first feeling the sudden
alert of being jerked awake, then unzipping myself from my warm sleeping bag,
wriggling out from under my many blankets, blindly groping for my boots and
jacket somewhere in the dark, feeling for my toilet paper and flashlight, then
diving out into the freezing night. I would then proceed to scurry down the
slick frozen path down to the toilet shack. This toilet was possibly the
grossest I have ever experienced. It was literally just a few planks thrown
carelessly over a hole, but the pervious occupant has evidently also been
similarly sick, but missed the hole, covering all of the boards in a nice layer
of well, forgive me for being profane, but shit. I continued to repeat this
nightmare of discomfort until my alarm beeped 5:30am.
I was exhausted and in pain and the
last thing on my mind was walking the ten-hour pass. I packed up my stuff
anyway, just in time for Chandra to come knocking at my door to help me carry
it up to the dining room, a slick climb up the cliff. I told him that I thought
I was sick and he told me that I would feel better after some tea, the Nepali cure-all.
I then found myself shaking at the dining room table, surrounded by tired
trekkers leaving to walk the trek bright and early. Chandra, like all guides,
has progressively been becoming more and more protective of me, and this
morning his nursing kicked into full gear. He brought me a large steaming cup
of ginger tea, a stomach settler, then hunted down some medicine from a nearby
guide, then brought me a bowl of hot rice pudding when I wouldn’t touch my egg
and chapatti wrap. He sat there nervously beside me, telling me that I just
needed to push through for a few hours then I would be all better. “We walk
aslowly,” he kept repeating.
Eventually I knew he was right, I
couldn’t stay in this freezing mountaintop hostel another night, I had to make
it over the pass. Chandra had me then buy a metal water bottle that he washed
for me then filled with hot water to take over with us. Then we set off with
about seven other people that were also feeling sick. I am not over
exaggerating when I say that walking those three hours it took to get over the
pass was probably the most physically painful thing I’ve ever forced myself to
do. I was terribly dizzy, my stomach felt like it was going through the spin-cycle
of a washing machine, and on top of that I couldn’t breath. It literally felt
like I was trying to breath through a straw, and because of this I could only
take a few steps then I would have to stop because I was so winded. Chandra yet
again pulled through, force-feeding me his water and tea, not letting me turn
it down.
Finally we struggled over the last
small hill and there it was. In the magnificent form of a tangle of prayer
flags and a smoking teahouse I saw my Eden. After a big cup of black tea I already
began to feel better. The descent was steep and rocky, immediately changing the
climate and environment once again. I began to be able to breath again and just
had a headache which I resolved with a few pills of ibuprofen. We ended up
still beating a lot of people that had set off at four to six in the morning, which
was quite funny considering I had gone through hell and back to get there.
We stopped at Muktinath for the
night where I got a nice hot shower, for the first time in about four days, and
a delicious meal at our nice guesthouse. I also got to talk to my family and
Jake, now being in Ncell range, which was also amazing. I haven’t been this
warm in a week, and am so proud of myself for making it over :]
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