Up, up, up: Annapurna, part I

My trek into the Annapurna Conservation Area started with a one-hour bus ride from Pokhara to Phedi, during which I had the pleasure of sitting on the floor since there were no more seats. As soon as we got off the bus, we started climbing. The vast majority of the trail was paved with stones, which mostly meant big stone steps, as flat is a concept they don't really have here (I asked someone about Nepal's soccer team, and they said there aren't very many flat places big enough to build a soccer field).

I traveled with Tul Devi, a guide/porter from Three Sisters, a trekking company with almost all women guides and porters. I would highly recommend them, especially for any solo female travelers. It provided a very different perspective from the 20-something guys who you usually get on a trip like this, and I never once got asked if I have a boyfriend. For the first few days it was just the two of us - we ran into a few people on the trail, but we were the only ones in our tea houses the first couple of nights.

Tea houses. Lest you think I am more hard-core than I am, I should clarify that trekking in Nepal is not exactly a wilderness experience. Guesthouse/restaurants litter the trail - we never hiked more than a few kilometers without seeing one. All offered very cheap beds (around $1.50) as long as you ate in their restaurant, which I was always happy to do. The luxuriousness varied depending on how remote we were, but I had more nights with hot water (usually solar) and electricity than without. And they all offered things like beer and Pringles, but they had a very understandable "we carried this up the mountain on our backs" surcharge, so I stuck to the dal bhat, a refillable plate of some combination of rice, lentils, and vegetables for around $4.

Because the monsoon is due to start any day now, it's the tourist off-season here, so the trek was rather quiet. I had to ration my 300-page book over six nights, so I spent a lot of time poring over my Nepali phrase book and getting my guide to to teach me a few words. I think the first word she taught me was "up" and it took me until the last day for her to teach me the word for "flat," which of course I don't remember because I never had the opportunity to use it.