Easily one of the most exciting and exhausting trip that I have ever been on up to date! I've never thought of doing a trek before because of how unfit I am, this trip came up and I thought what a good challenge for me. So 3 months in advance I was running, squatting and doing all things to stay fit, I'll tell you what, all the hard work paid off! I smashed the trek with "ease" while I was always "first" to arrive I must admit that I was absolutely stuffed with a few stages of the trek.
I started the trip with 7 hours to spare while the others were making their way to Kathmandu via a delayed Nepal Air flight
The start of the trek was a rather smooth start, it was until day 2 where we scaled over 2500 steps to reach to Ghorepani
Going up to Poon Hill for sunrise at 4:30am with the weather at - 2 was on offer, my sinus infection has started by then, walking up stairs step by step, with eyes that could barely open and having to stop for a breather every 5 steps was the only thing I could do at the time. But being treated to one of the most spectacular landscape wiped all those pains away as we reached the top of Poon Hill at an altitude of 3,210m.
Another tough day of trekking was the Annapurna Base Camp bound, having a big day of reaching to Deurali prior and lack of sleep the night before had a huge affect on me physically. The route was rather straight forward with the usual steep incline and decline steps. We went from an altitude of 3,230m to 4,130m which affected all of our breathing as the oxygen was a lot thinner than what we are used to.
The longest day of walking for the whole entire trek was easily the walk from base camp to Sinuwa, as per usual we were up late the night before taking photographs of the milky way, we hung tight with the weather being close to -15. Yet again another start to the day with a sunrise shoot with The Annapurna range showing off all of its glory as the sun softly brushed against the snow top, with Machapuchare standing tall in the back . The walk took us around 8 hours to complete with over 30,000 steps and roughly 27kms of ground covered.
I'll tell you what though, squatting toilets as the only option during a big trek was something I didn't look forward to after each meals.....
Enough from me I think, I'll let the photos tell the stories
