Trekking in the Himalayas....

Phew! After 12 days of trekking, our butts are firm, our legs are strong, our feet are blistered, our eyes are still full of the amazing views and our bag is slightly lighter from losing our camera. Sigh. But not to worry, we still have half a trip's worth of photos, thanks to an old style camera we bought from an old style Nepali couple - it has been renamed our super-dooper camera, due to its lack of zoom, constant flash, sliding shutter, manual wind-on and rewind, and dodgy photo quality. But we love it. Luckily we still have Shell's camera that we left in Pokhara, so there will be more photos soon, but no photos from this trip on the blog sorry unless by some miracle we find a scanner round here. You'll have to wait till we get back to Australia to look at them.

But you can take our word for it - the scenery was amazing. Stunning. Gorgeous. Huge snowy mountains all around us, pretty flowers, little villages, smily people. Lots of tourists too and little stalls trying to flog the same things to you, but they weren't nearly as hassly as the Indian equivalents. We started off at 1100m and climbed to 3200m over a few days, only to descend back to 1100m (admittedly at a town with hot springs so we didn't mind and took the opportunity to have a day off!) and then climb up to 3700m, with a side trip to a tea house at 4200m. It's harder to climb at that altitude, and you start panting as soon as you start moving, but the air is crisp and pure and there's lots of snow and yaks to look at. We were quite proud of ourselves on our longest trek ever (shelley especially is proud anyway, cause she wasn't even going to go initially and was, don't tell anyone, a bit scared) and we're planning another one before we leave Nepal.

Some of the best bits were:

- the yak who waited for us to move to the side of the track until he would go past
- the many coloured spring flowers all around
- snow! yaks! yaks are so cute in a kind of scary looking way.
- shelley getting blisters and doing half the trek in the oh-s0-sexy combination of thongs and socks. Either tough or stupid.
- climbing to our highest at the 4200m tea shop, only to decide to try the local Tibetan tea, which turned out to be salty and almost undrinkable even with 3 spoons of sugar, but both of use didn't want to offend the lady so we drank some, making horrible faces, and then tipped the rest into the bushes
- having homemade apple cider in Marpha, the Apple Capital of Nepal (again, mainly shell's opinion here)
- food tasting sooooo good after a whole day's trekking
- our cool walking sticks we're going to try to bring back to Aus
- sunrise over the mountains from Poon Hill, a gorgeous panorama that was spoilt a bit by the 200 tourists up there for the sunrise.
- meeting lots of different people and playing lots of cards with an English couple
- the poor porters carrying 3 or 4 bags each. We carried our own, though i have to admit sometimes we would have wished for a porter....
- just the mountains everywhere, the quiet and the trees and the desert and the birds.

So you'll have to imagine! It was a great trek, but next time we want to do the whole Annapurna circuit and cross the Thorung La pass like a lot of the people we met. Have to come back to Nepal one day then....

Oh and by the way we've uploaded some new movies and I'll be uploading some more over the next few days. Take a look at the link to our movies in the right hand column of this page, inparticular check out the ones at the end of Scott and Shell feeding the baby elephants and playing with them in the water, plus Scott climbing up one's trunk..... (if myspace tells you it has an error, just refresh the page)