The adventure started in the jungle. Surrounded by bamboo, palm trees, dense bushes, linanas and monkeys. Due to increasing tourism, the area of the Annapurna region even got a kind of road, which I would rather describe as a rodeo gravel road and many trekkers therefore skip the first few days of the route, as the parallel hiking paths here are often destroyed by landslides and you are therefore forced to to wander on the street. I can't fully understand it because the condition of the "road" is more reminiscent of German hiking trails and you would completely skip the tropical climate zone of the trek. It is precisely the change in vegetation and climate from the tropical to the subtropical environment, which then changes into a landscape with pine trees until the environment turns into barren and lifeless high mountain ranges with tundra-like high plateaus, which makes the route unique.
None of us were in our best shape due to the long visit to India and first had to get used to the 8 hours of hiking every day and find our rhythm. Nevertheless, I quickly noticed that I had developed a certain basic level of fitness over the last few years and that my natural pace was therefore much faster than that of the other two. For me, the next two weeks became a challenge to master the art of adaptation. Here I learned to more or less put aside my German instinct of punctual alarm clocks, fixed breakfast times and quick backpack packing. Nevertheless, Lance wasn't entirely deterred from having to stick to a certain schedule outside of the actual hiking, as it gets dark early and with the darkness comes the Nepalese cold and the chances of getting lost increase greatly. It was the only point that we discussed casually from time to time, as Piotrik followed a very laissez fair schedule (the word plan is actually wrong because none existed) and didn't let anything or anyone bother him. On the one hand, a quality that I admire very much, but on the other hand, due to the certain necessity, it is also exhausting. Nevertheless, it never led to any kind of argument or conflict and taught me how to adapt to a completely different pace.
We told each other a lot about our private lives at home, our travels, but also philosophized a lot and shared our worldviews and listened eagerly to each other's views. We gave advice and asked each other for advice, and since everything is going pretty perfectly at the moment, I mostly listened or tried to give sensible solutions. 23 year old Lance considered quitting his job and pursuing his dream of self-employment and decided at least ten times whether he should actually take this step and he actually told me today (two weeks later when he arrived back in the Philippines) wrote that he quit his job today. Piotrik, on the other hand, left Poland a few months ago at the age of 28, after he also quit his job because of the desire for self-realization and left his difficult family relationship behind. He's currently trying to figure out where he's headed, but he's on a very good and beautiful path there.
The best thing about the hike together was all the nonsense we did. Even though we always arrived at the teahouses pretty exhausted in the evening and woke up freezing in the darkness in the morning, we were still the group among all the other hikers who had withdrawn into themselves due to exhaustion and cold and were drowning in their cell phones who started laughing in the morning and stopped at night and always found a topic to talk about or invited people to play board games with us. After a short while we were known to the other hikers as the three international boys who trudged through the cold in an amateurish but humorous way and that's exactly what we did.
The temperatures in the jungle were a pleasant 20°C during the day and then went towards 5°C at night. With every day and with every meter of altitude we climbed, we felt the temperature drop until after 4 days we had an average of -2°C during the day and -12°C at night. We learned pretty quickly that it wasn't necessarily the number of items of clothing or hot tea that kept you warm. The only thing that really helps is to keep moving, there is no more effective and targeted method. I didn't have much of a problem with the cold because on the one hand I invested a bit more money on a good down sleeping bag than the others in Kathmandu and on the other hand I was a bit more resistant to the cold thanks to my cold shower, but it still wasn't pleasant. Only when you arrived at the tea houses in the evening, ate your noodle soup and sat by the fire with a hot chocolate and lost yourself in your book, did you briefly forget the cold.
On the fourth day we exceeded 3,000 meters in altitude and I felt mild symptoms of altitude sickness for the first time. I read up on the pathophysiology, prevention and therapy of mountaineering sickness in India and told the two of them with interest and almost excitement that due to the lower oxygen content from around 2500m, the blood vessels in the brain sense the deficiency and widen so that more blood can flow through , but as a result the vessel wall becomes more permeable and blood plasma flows from the interior of the vessel into the brain tissue. However, since the brain is located in the bony skull and therefore cannot expand indefinitely, the pressure in the brain increases and the tissue begins to suffer damage, which can be manifested by dizziness, nausea, headaches, drowsiness and behavioral changes. The increased breathing rate and exhaustion are mainly due to the lungs, which receive disproportionately less oxygen. The drug, acetazolamide, which can be taken preventively or therapeutically, is a simple diuretic that increases kidney excretion and therefore causes you to pee out more water. However, the best therapy is always descent and the best prevention is good acclimatization through a slow ascent. The two of them took in all of this with semi-interest and snorted the medication like TikTaks. I wanted to find out when my individual ability to adapt to the lack of oxygen ends, which is also recommended in order to better assess myself and since the medication only treats symptoms and not causally. Luckily after that day I didn't have any problems with the altitude once. We met others who went downstairs like drunks, vomited or pumped themselves full of Ibus for headaches. But we were fine :)
We pulled ourselves out of our sleeping bags at 3am on the sixth day to take an acclimatization day to Lake Tilicho, located at 5000m and surrounded by a winter wonderland. It was a challenging day, but the climb was 100 percent worth it. When we left it was snowing and Lance was freaked out because it was the first snow he had seen in his life. It was really nice to watch his enthusiasm and be animated. When we got to the top, the sun warmed us up and we looked at the 7000m mountains around us in a fascinating way and trudged across the field to get as close as possible to the huge glaciers that flowed into the river. You could hear the resounding cracking of the ice melting in the sun and see huge blocks of ice breaking off the glacier and falling into the lake. I had decided to go swimming in the lake but was unfortunately prevented from doing so because the only way to get to the shore of the lake was to fall about 100 meters high to certain death. It wasn't worth it to me after all.
However, I stubbornly continued to stick to my habit of taking cold showers. However, on the one hand it wasn't really pleasant and on the other hand it wasn't that easy, as the pipes in Bergen were frozen for 19 hours of the day and you had to use the narrow window of sunshine to take a shower, which you usually did during that time . The showers were actually half-hearted cat showers, where I sat stark naked next to the outhouse with a vat of half-frozen water and washed myself off, freezing, and rubbed my goosebumps off with soap. I don't even want to start talking about my hair, just saying that I once washed it in the kitchen sink while the owner next to me was preparing my noodle soup. Hygiene was about as important as the Kardashians in my life. In my defense, or rather ours, I have to say that the cold also reduces the metabolic processes of bacteria, fungi and viruses and therefore the olfactory consequences of the non-existent hygiene were not really noticeable. Except for Lance's feet, the smell of which reminded me of the wound healing problems of smokers' legs in the operating room. That was really disgusting :D
On the ninth day came the literal climax. We climbed another 900 m over the 5,450 m high Thorang La Pass at -26°C, at 4 a.m., at 50% atmospheric pressure. We were as happy as little children when we reached the top and made snow angels and a snowball fight at the top until the temperatures forced us into the small hut where a Nepalese man lives and proudly told us that he hadn't showered in three months (but he smelled just not because of the cold!!!). There I drank the best cocoa of my life so far, not because the milk powder in the water harmonized so well with the expired, oversweetened cocoa powder, but because the cup held 500ml, the hot drink warmed me up at -15°C and the sugar warmed me up brought the energy I needed after the climb. The hot chocolate tasted like the special red wine aged in oak barrels that you only open at your wedding and enjoy every drop as if it were an all-healing elixir.
The following 1800m down saw many pain-filled faces of other hikers internally cursing their knees. To celebrate the day, we ordered pizza, yak burgers, cinnamon rolls and lots of cocoa in the evening and played black stories by the fireplace with other hikers. I turned on the internet on my phone for the first time since I began my hike to let my family and friends know that I was still alive and to tell them about the adventures of the last week. It was wonderful to talk to my family again and tell my friends about all the nonsense of the hike. Piotrik said goodbye here and took a jeep to Kathmandu because it was enough cold and exercise for him, which I could more than understand. Lance hiked with me for another beautiful day, where we talked about God and the world all day and said sad goodbyes in the evening. He also took a jeep to Kathmandu the next day because he was flying to Taiwan the following day. The verbal changes were touching and we looked back over the last 1½ weeks. I really loved them both and had mixed feelings about the idea of hiking alone for another 1½ weeks. But that's just how it is and since I didn't get to think as much as I thought during my time with these two great people and had 0.0 privacy for 11 days, I was looking forward to the days to come. And I could finally hike at my own pace!!!! Whoop whoop
