By Mike Huber
You can catch up with earlier parts of Mike’s Nepal adventure here.
With the inability to reach Lukla Airport due to weather my guide and I were feeling defeated as we bounced along the bumpy road back to Katmandu. We each had a couple of beers along the ride to kill the boredom and try to determine what next steps would be. Upon arrival in Nepal I had the foresight to purchase a 90-day visa to be proactive should things go sideways, as they seem to always do.
Upon returning to Katmandu my tour operator Kiran met me at the hotel with a new itinerary. One that would lift my spirits for sure. There was another trek I was contemplating, The Annapurna Circuit. It was a 17-day trek which was more remote than the Everest one. This would now replace the Everest Base Camp Trek. Kiran then added that upon completing the Annapurna Circuit I would helicopter from Katmandu to Lukla as rotary winged aircraft had much less restrictions in terms of visibility. All in all this would fill up a month and a half and allow me to hopefully complete both objectives (Annapurna and Everest Base Camp).
The next day Guyen, my guide and I were on our way on another local bus that would take us to Tribeni Tol, which was the starting point of the trek at a low 738 meters in elevation. The first few days would remain at those low elevation but long days, up to 27k. There were a lot of fires in Nepal and the region we were trekking had the worse air quality on Earth (even worse than New Delhi, India).
Not being much of a hiker and even less of a trekker it didn’t take long before I realized being uncomfortable was part of this hobby. Something was almost always hurting. My previous occupation of falling out of airplanes had me feeling constant pain in my back and constant knee issues. Being used to having pain here or there (or everywhere) I travel with a plethora of medicines. Pretty much a full kit and as needed I reload in countries where most of these drugs are over the counter.
It didn’t take but half a day and my knees were beyond shot. My hiking poles became crutches. It was time to dig into my medicine kit and see if I had anything that could help. A challenge with my med kit is the pills are from literally all over the world so whenever I need something I have to hope there is a cell signal for me to cross reference it and translate it. After tearing the kit apart I found something that I thought may help. It was a powerful anti-inflammatory I picked up in Romania. As I opened the pills they looked a bit odd. They were longer and sorta waxy. Back to the internet I went. As it turns out it’s a suppository. At this point I was in a ton of pain and contemplating turning back as I didn’t want to get into trouble further u the trek due to this injury.
I gave the pills a shot, and with my dinner of chicken momos completed it was time to go to sleep to see if these Romanian anti-inflammatory pills would be able to salvage my trek.
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