ABC Express
Just after our short stay in Lumbini, we luckily reached Pokhara, where we had an appointment with Yoguesh, our freelance mountain guide and yoga trainer, to prepare our twelve days trek to Annapurna Base Camp. We found eachother at an ‘Aloo Parata’ restaurant in the center. Most of food is vegetarian, and I ended up missing eating meat, but Is true that Aloo parata at the end became one of my favourite dishes. It is very popular in India, these are delicious potato stuffed flatbreads, served usually for breakfast with lots of raita, chutneys, curry and curds. I couldn’t figure out what would follow next. Indeed, I was repeating the ABC trek experience, I had already been there during my first trip to Nepal in 2013, so I was sure that I knew where I was going. It ended up being very different from what I remebered. The purpose of this trek was to be the closer we can to the local customs. It meaned not eating any meat or sugar during the trek. I started to freak out. I remebered this trek being a little physical, so for me the proteins were very important. Anyway too late again, I was concerned about the respect of the local culture.
Even if I was familiar with the trail I lived the experience on a totally different level. The team was composed of my mum, Suzeeta, Yoguesh, me, Sanjai and Surya, that helped us to carry the stuff during the journey. This configuration created a friendly-familiy like environment in which the difficulties of the trail dissolved. I had to admit that trekking in this area then adding the daily practice of yoga, meditation and outdoor photography, with great company, has been a magical combination. Sharing this moments together definitely strengthened our ties and left an indelible print in our lives. The places we visited were personal relations of Yoguesh, and the way we took to attain ABC was very different from what I had done before. I remebered the route I took the last time to attain Chomrong village was very arid and steep and that we couldn’t see the end of it. This time it was lighter, and we added stops in mountain villages that made the adventure softer, allowing us to meet lovely people, observe the luxuriant nature, the faces on the rocks, and chill all the way.
As we were going up, the weather was becoming fresher and the air less oxygenated, we had to drink a lot of garlic soup as a remedy for this, but we were having definitely a lot of fun. When we finally reached the last stop, Macchapucchre Base camp, right before Annapurna Base Camp, we took a small tea and kept going.
Waking up on the Annapurna is a surreal experience. It looks like being on a lunar landscape, and the colors of the sun rising on the mountain is a paradise for adventure photographers. It’s hard to keep the batteries full as they discharge visibly quickly with the cold. It starts on blue, then becomes golden, and at the end immaculate snow white. The natural sight scene lasts only for a few minutes.
After that, we took a good breakfast and left. The reward after the effort was reaching the sooner the natural hots springs of Jhinu Dhanda, before an extra stop, that our guide had kept secret. We stayed almost all the afternoon chilling there, without our backpacks, it was totally renewing. We could then start our walk again.
The surprise was spending the last night in a place called ‘Little Paradise’ before coming back to Pokhara. This special night’s date coincided with the fullmoon. At Little Paradise we could finally eat nice home made pizza, drink the house rice wine, and have our favourite ‘fried snickers’ for desert. As indicated by it’s name, it’s a paradise hidden in the mountains very hard to reach, specially after spending a whole afternoon chilling in the natural hot springs. We felt so relaxed after, that it became difficult to climb up again to reach this place. But it totally worth it. The weather was super clear and the light of the full moon offered us a magical atmosphere.
At the return from this adventure, I have had the honour of being given a Nepali name : ‘Purnima’ that means ‘fullmoon’. I obviously had inked it in Pokhara, and decided to use it to give a name to this adventure and transform it into this website.