Motorcycles in Mustang

After finishing SIT - I'm a senior in college now, which feels incredibly bizarre - four of my friends and I headed West to Pokhara. Transportation was challenging; I had some GI issues and a fever on my way out to Pokhara and the way back the bus was stopped by a strike. And in Pokhara, we tried for three days to take a plane north to go trekking in Mustang. A 72 hour wait with two delays, all for a 15-minute plane ride. But unbelievably worth it. Mustang is one of the most incredible places that I have ever been: dry and windy and eroded like the Southwest, with green oases of wheat fields surrounding villages that seem medieval. The houses have flat roofs rimmed with dried firewood and crowd along narrow alleyways. Electric wires and the occasional motorcycle are the only sign of the twentieth century - the twenty-first is nowhere up there. I had to rush back to meet Kate in Kathmandu, so I took a motorcycle for an hour, during which the landscape changed from the Southwest, to Alaska with pine hills and giant braided riverbeds, to the lush Pyrenees. Then an hour of walking in the pouring rain through fields of wild marijuana and a night in a tiny porter's lodge. Up at six, hours of hot walking against trains of donkeys 80 animals long, fording rivers, and then back to motorized transport just before my legs gave out.
And now Kate is here and I'm back up trekking in the Everest Region with her and my friend Sarah. Tomorrow there is a marathon from Everest Base Camp to Namche Bazaar, a 42 kilometer race from hell - I plan to watch the finishers struggle over the hilltop and then lounge around acclimitizing for another day. Then up higher into the hills to the Gokyo Lakes, at 4,800 meters, before descending all the way to Jiri, a ten-day walk up, down, and over the ridges and valleys of the Solu-Khumbu.