Showing posts with label trekking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trekking. Show all posts

Saturday, 18 October 2008

Moonlit procession

This is the view from the top of Poon Hill which is near Ghorepani in Nepal.

For a start the name is a massive misnomer... I didn't see a single poon up there! Probably because it was far too cold for that kind of nonsense...

Getting this photo involved waking up at 4.30 and trekking up a hill for 1 and a half hours.

Of course, this is a pretty famous viewing point, so I wasn't the only person to think of doing this. In fact it seemed like there were hundreds of us, all trekking up the side of the hill, all wearing the standard issue LED head-torches, trudging in single file in complete silence.

It was a kind of strange experience, almost like watching some medieval pilgrimage, it was easy to imagine that all of the lights shining up the hill were from flaming torches, all the hooded and swaddled trekkers were monks.

In fact it reminded me of a scene from an old game that I used to play at my mates house on his Amiga 500. The game was called moonstone, and was basically a glorified fighting game, the highlight of which was the ability to slice off your enemies head from time to time...

Aaaaaaanyway, the point was that in this game there was a scene with a load of monks going up a hill all carrying torches, and the sight of the procession up the hill reminded me of that.

Nice sunrise though.

Thursday, 16 October 2008

Hail to the Addidas...

I just got back from trekking in the Himalayas, and I just have to take this time to praise my trusty footwear.


As you can see they aren't really designed for the task of climbing mountains, but they coped admirably...

For 2 weeks they handled everything that the Himalayas had to throw at them, going up to an altitude of 4130m, over high passes, mountain streams, rickety bridges and all manner of surfaces and slopes.

To be fair they are slightly the worse for wear now... the right one has a hole in the side of it, the left one has a huge hole in the base where it looks like my heel is going to fall out...

In spite of all of this I can't seem to bring myself to throw them away now... we have been through a lot together, maybe i will send them back to England where my mother can keep them (in an odour proof box) for posterity, and when I am famous they can be a site of pilgrimage for the faithful to visit....