I spent much of last night going ballistic at Laurie. As calmly and courteously as I could (i.e. not at all), I suggested that perhaps she should have cared a bit more about what others thought was going on between us if she knew her boyfriend was joining the trip later. I suggested that I would have been more careful to mitigate against the rumour mill if I had known, and that perhaps she should have too, if only for my sake. Still, by this morning I had exhausted my spleen.
That was until Laurie announces within the first couple of hours of hiking that she doesn’t think that she can go on. It is apparent that she is not in any way fit enough for this trek. Seeing as I was only here because she wanted someone to join her, and also given the fact that I had gone through all the hassle and expense of getting to this point, I was less than sympathetic. She was also the one who insisted we didn’t need a porter. I made it clear that if she was going back down that she was going to do so alone. The hard school of motivation technique seems to work on her though, and after an hour break we start hiking again.
However, the tables turn as the day goes along. The trail is easy to follow, although there is potential for confusion in the villages in these early stages of the trek. At this point, the steepest slopes have steps which are not too worn down. However, there must be thousands of them and there are a lot of long steep parts we journey on today.
I calculate that we have to get to a place called Chomrong if we are to make Annapurna Base Camp in our planned five days. We have to go down a valley to Komrong Khola (Chomrong River) and then back up the other side of the valley again. By this time I am completely knackered. In fact, it is only Laurie’s expressed willingness to keep going and my potential embarrassment after having balled her out earlier that keeps us going. We finally get up to Chomrong by sunset at five pm, this probably having been the hardest physical day of my life (so far...).
There are a handful of lodges here, but we opt for the on furthest in the distance just because I wanted the accomplishment of getting to the furthest point we could. When we enter the foreground of the lodge, we are greeted there by a Polish couple sitting on the bench outside and the lodge owner, both of whom are taken aback when we tell them where we started from today.
The Polish couple have been in Chomrong all day as one of the woman’s shoes needed repairing, which they do in an unconvincing manner with Sellotape.
At dinner, in the heated hut at the front of the lodge garden, I order some ‘Rakshi’ which is the local wine. It is much like Saki, which I don’t really like either and I only take a couple of sips. I had been brought a full carafe, when really I was only expecting a glass, so I share some with the Polish and leave the rest. I was tempted to put it in a plastic bottle to carry with me, but decided it was too dangerous a temptation as we got up higher into the cold.
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