Alone on the Annapurna Circuit - Nepal

Ok, maybe I was alone on the circuit, but I didn't feel lonely, but the title fit better with the previous blog post ^^.

It almost seemed like an omen when, on the first day I hiked alone, the clouds gathered in the morning, the sky became grayer and the surroundings darker, and the first snowflakes fell. The light snowfall slowly became thicker and the snowflakes grew larger until the wind swept them chaotically in whirls through the air and towards me. I enjoyed running through the snowfall and initially felt strong, warm and confident. Unfortunately, when the temperatures slowly rose at midday, the hardest day of the hike began. The snow was cold, but it didn't melt and I stayed mostly dry. However, the snow, which was now turning into rain, began to completely soak my winter jacket and shoes and didn't stop. The temperature remained at just over 4°C and the wind continued to increase. After just an hour of rain, I was freezing like never before in the mountains, not even at -26°C.

The uncertainty about the weather, when I would arrive in a covered house and, above all, whether I would still be able to dry my clothes took a lot of motivation and strength away from me, but my experience told me that there is always a way and that is how it was. Soaking wet, I reached a small village where I was able to sit down in a small family house next to a bowl of hot coals while the woman in the house prepared a huge and warm portion of Dahl Bat for me. After some of the clothes had released their moisture through the rising water vapor on the hot coals and I felt somewhat warm, I continued walking, had to jump over several rivers in the still-continuing rain and once twisted my ankle violently and lay next to the river in my wet clothes again Clothes on the stones and moaning damn the rain. And just then the precipitation stopped, the cloud cover slowly opened up and not a single drop fell until I arrived at a teahouse in the evening, completely exhausted. 10 minutes after I got there the rain started again, even harder, but I was now sitting dry in front of the fire with my book and a hot chocolate. It was a tough day physically because of the cold and wet, but the psychological effects of the cold and wet are ten times stronger than the physical ones. But when you put your headphones in your ears and listen to the music from the film "Into the Wild", you feel so authentic and like an outlier from Western society that it fills you with an adventurous energy and strength accept the inconveniences of nature.

The next few days were pleasantly warm and for the first time in two weeks I was able to let my thoughts wander in nature throughout the day and think about the encounters I'd had recently. I was almost always followed by stray dogs who accompanied me for hours on the now jungle-like hiking trails and received petting attacks from me with wagging tails. After almost two weeks of daily hiking, my calves were burning and my back felt like that of a 65-year-old disc prolapse patient. In short, I needed a break and what place invites it more than a mountain village with natural thermal springs. In Tatopani I took a rest day for the first time and spent the day trying to compensate for my calorie deficit and repair my clothes with needle and thread. The rest of the time I dreamed of more food and climbed into the boiling pot of the thermal spring as a hard German potato and vegetated in the steaming mineral bath until I slowly dissolved like rice pudding and slipped into a trance state of serenity. The lesson of this day was that there is no better treatment for any consequences of long-distance hiking than thermal springs and pizzas with extra cheese.

In the last two days of the Annapurna Circut there wasn't much that was exciting or worth mentioning. The scenery was still beautiful, passing through bamboo forests, trail villages and lianas, giving me a fantastic farewell to this hike. The last day was a really intense and strenuous day in which I hiked for 12½ hours, breaks had already been taken, got into a pretty tricky situation that I don't want to go into further here, but I definitely learned from it, and again in the middle of a thermal spring at night Naked and exhausted in the forest, I looked at the stars.

Even though I was now finished with the Annapurna Circut, my hike shouldn't end here, as the end point of the Circut Trek is also the starting point of the Annapurna Basecamp Trek. Another 5 day hike back up to 4,150 meters and temperatures down to -9°C, so a piece of cake for me after the Circut Trek. The destination: the Annapurna Basecamp, from which you can see the over 8,000 meter high Mount Annapurna, which is the deadliest mountain in the world with a fatality rate of 25%, even deadlier than K2.