Share:

Earth, a beautiful place, a perfectly balanced planet filled with the beauty of nature. We all have once thought of going to this place or that place after seeing a picture of the place, I think most would want to go abroad to somewhere like France, USA, UK, Canada, Bali, Singapore, etc but I honestly want to travel all of Nepal first. There is a saying that goes “ Searching for something elusive, mysterious, something that would be considered very difficult to find when it is right under our nose, hidden in plain sight.” by Bethany Butzer. I mean Nepal has so much to offer starting from the thousands of beautiful waterfalls, lakes, ponds, rivers to the ice chilly mountains.

I always loved hiking and whenever I heard someone say that Nepal is polluted and this and that I would always think of the places that I have gone on hikes everything was so beautiful and now that I have gone on 3 treks, I honestly love Nepal even more. Gosai Kunda, Tsho Rolpa and Langtang are the 3 treks I have gone to and all of them were adventurous and fun. Gosai Kunda being the first and Langtang being the latest.

Imagine Dashain has just started, you are enjoying your vacation and then you suddenly get the news that tomorrow you are going to trek to Langtang with your mother and sister. I was in that situation when my mother called me to ask if I was joining for the trek that was the next day. The plan was sudden, simple yet the trek was going to be fun. So, I said yes to my mother and I started packing my bags immediately. It was around 11 am when I received the news so I was kind of overwhelmed that it was so sudden but I was excited. Around 7 pm I received the news that my father wasn't going as he was sick, now the real trouble begun as the treks I had went before were with my father and other relatives or my fathers friends or even the whole family but now that my father wasn't going to be there I felt kind of scared but honestly I didn't have enough time to think as I went straight to bed. As I woke up in pure excitement at around 4 am, everyone was ready so I hurried and got ready and went to Balaju in my fathers car and we waited for the bus to arrive and the bus came around at 5 45 am and after getting on the bus I started thinking if I had forgot something only to realise in the hurry I completely forgot my trekking shoes and now it was me, my bag, some clothes, 2 legs and some air jordans and a whole trek to complete. I didn't think much of it and just talked with my sister and mother the whole way. My sister is 2 years younger than me but she has no trek or hiking experience but my father who has been to Langtang assured us that it was a daily easy trek but still I was kind of worried not for me but for my sister. My mother has been on a few treks so I knew she could easily complete the trek with ease. The bus takes us from Balaju to Syapro Besi and that's when the real trek starts after a long awaited lunch at 2 : 30 pm in Syapro Besi.

The first steps that I took after having my lunch had me worried if I was going to be okay, if my mother or my sister were going to get hurt but I just kept going and I believed in them and me. My mother and sister walked quite slowly so I was quite further ahead from the start and the more I walked the more undergeared I felt after looking at my shoes. The shoes had me worried that I would slip and ruin my clothes on the first day. After walking for quite a while I reached a dam and decided to wait for my mother and sister on the dam. They reached it after 30 minutes. When I decided to take a sip of the warm water in my bottle there was a leech in the bottle cap so I couldn't drink the water. My mother and sister reached there and waited for around 15 minutes for drinking water and resting. The slippery road started after the dam so I slipped for about 30 minutes continuously on the slippery roads. Then we reached a place called Pairo after about 2 hours of walking, we thought we could reach a place called Lama hotel by the end of the day but after reaching Pairo it was still about 4 to 5 hours away so we decided to go for a place called Bamboo that was about 2 hours away from Pairo. We had booked the hotel in bamboo from Pairo. I reached the hotel in Bamboo after just an hour of walking but the woman in a hotel in Pairo told us that it was 2 to 3 hours away, which made me think that maybe Lama hotel isn't that far away but I still had to wait for my mother and sister to make a decision. While waiting I got quite thirsty so I bought a coke which they cooled in a Matka with cold water, which was quite amusing for me but I had heard of it before. Bamboo was located in a quite dangerous place right beside the langtang river, you could hear the river’s sound even in the room of the hotel but it was manageable for me at least. There was another group with us sharing the hotel, a foreigner, a cameraman and a guide. The foreigner had a viking look, a long beard, a kind personality, he had tattoos and piercings all over him. While the 2 other guys were very plain looking and hard to remember. When my mother reached the hotel I had already cooled off and was just resting with the other group. My mother was very tired while my sister wasn't tired at all then another group also arrived right beside my mother and I immediately recognised the group as the group that I went past right after Pairo. We immediately ate and went to our room to sleep but the river’s noise that was as if it was trying to eat us didn't let my mother sleep, right after I laid down in bed I realised some kind of insect was in my stomach and it was itching, when I took off my jacket I saw a pool of blood making a circle in my t shirt. That scared my mother right away and when I took off my shirt all I saw was a leech sucking all my blood. The leech went right away and I threw the leech out the room. Then sleeping was impossible for me and my mother but my sister slept without a care in the world. The first day of the trek a jacket and a shirt was compromised and the wound was still bleeding, how will the rest go??