Nepal 2002: Kathmandu, Annapurna Base Camp, and a Dutch Woman Named Arielle

Somewhere over the Pacific, around hour six of a ten-and-a-half-hour flight out of Narita, eating Oreo knockoffs from the World Club Lounge, something clicked. Not a revelation exactly — more like a door shutting behind me. There was no reverse gear on this thing. Nepal was happening whether the voice in the back of my head liked it or not (and it did not like it — it sounded suspiciously like every armchair critic I’d ever known, running its full catalog of objections at thirty thousand feet).

The doubt was real. What if the altitude wrecked me? What if I wasn’t recovered enough? What if this was simply beyond me? I kept reading the guidebook and getting fired up, then immediately spiraling. Liz Boback — a Bayer clinical trials rep I met deplaning at Narita, stunning, originally heading to Nepal before deciding it was too cold — had bailed on this exact trip for sensible reasons. I had not bailed. Points to me.

Bangkok at 1:40 in the morning is a humidity that makes August feel like a dry sauna. I sorted a ticket snafu at the Rama Garden Hotel in about ninety seconds of mutual incomprehension before it got resolved, wandered the outskirts of the city in the middle of the night like a completely reasonable person, and boarded the Kathmandu flight the next morning singing Christmas songs out loud to no one in the terminal. Progress.

Then the mountains appeared in the window on the descent into KTM. I stopped. I don’t have better words than that — they just stopped me. The scale is wrong in the best possible way, and no guidebook photo prepares you for it. Immigration took $40 in visa fees before I’d properly arrived, which felt accurate. Welcome to Nepal, here’s your bill.

Outside the terminal: pure, undiluted sensory overload. Then I spotted my name on a board held by a man named Jyoti, who got me into a car and drove me into Thamel. Holy hell. Dirty, polluted, hovels stacked next to hovels, cars and motorcycles playing constant chicken with each other and with any human foolish enough to be on foot. The pollution hit me physically — I had genuine trouble breathing. It’s like the city is coated in a layer of Kathmandu that you can’t wipe off.

Kazi from Eco-Trek got the trekking permit sorted, walked me to Swayambhunath — the Monkey Temple, 360 stairs up, a Buddhist monastery at the top with real monkeys running the whole operation like furry little landlords — and I bargained for pants in the market below. Then I passed out at the hotel and woke up at 10PM in a full panic attack. If there had been a flight home available in that moment, I would have been on it without hesitation.

The bus to Pokhara the next morning was a near-death experience dressed up as public transportation — vehicles playing chicken on mountain roads that have no business being two lanes. Kazi sat next to me, calm as a man who has done this eight hundred times, which he probably has. Pokhara was different. There was air there. Space. A lake. And then Pat showed up, and just seeing a familiar face turned the anxiety dial down six notches.

The trek started at Birethanti. I’m going to be honest: on day one, I did not think I was going to make it. The stairs go on forever — not metaphorically, structurally, these people built infinite stairs into the side of a mountain and called it a trail. Lunch a few hours in: fresh veggie noodle soup and fried potatoes, made by human hands, eaten with burning legs. Probably the best thing I’d eaten since the fake Oreos in Tokyo.

By some combination of stubbornness and Kazi’s calm guidance, we made it to Ghandruk. That evening we met a French girl named Megitte and a mental health worker from Paris, split an enormous chocolate cake, and got roped into a card game called “The Joker is Hiding” — a game I’m still not sure any of us actually knew the rules to. Hot tea, bad French-to-English translation, one girl who only knew how to say “Don’t touch me!” in English, and the whole table losing it. I slept like something that had been recently killed.

Also on the bus to Pokhara I’d met Gregg — an Australian who told us, with complete composure, a story involving a woman who turned out to be a thief going through his stuff, and then casually mentioned he knew Brian Milewski from Lake Shannon back home. Eight thousand miles from Michigan. Six degrees of separation functioning at full capacity like it was nothing.

Day two: we passed a Nepali wedding on the trail. Full ceremony, families, color, happening on a mountain path. I walked past it like a very confused tourist, which is accurate. Then the trail plunged straight back down into the valley. This is the thing nobody tells you about trekking in Nepal — you’re not just going up. You’re going up and down and up and down, and the descents are quietly destroying your quads while your ego is focused on the elevation gain.

Gregg the Aussie caught up with us on one of the descents and blew our doors off completely. Just walked past us like gravity was his personal assistant. We made it to the Moonlight Tea House at Chomrung — an actual hot shower, not a bucket — where we met Helen (Irish, Chicago, Motorola) and Sarah (Irish, Sydney, between jobs). The trail has a way of collecting people. Kazi showed us the next day’s plan over dinner and described it with the calm of a man who has seen many asses kicked by this mountain. He was not wrong.

Somewhere before Annapurna Base Camp, at what I think was Machhapuchhre Base Camp (the days blur at altitude), we met Jo and Arielle. From Holland. We played cards — Bullshit, specifically — for most of the evening. Funny, sharp, genuinely warm, and yes, objectively attractive. Traveling for six months. Six months. They mentioned that if I ever had time, Burma and New Zealand were on the itinerary and there was an open invitation. We drank rum with hot water. They had me singing Christmas carols. Then they requested Mariah Carey and George Michael. I drew a line. Some things are sacred.

We hit Annapurna Base Camp with about thirty minutes of daylight left, temperature dropping like something that hates you, and me genuinely unwell. Altitude sickness — nausea, dizziness, balance gone sideways, the full package. Kazi told me to drink garlic soup. I had zero faith in garlic soup. It sounded like something your grandmother says when she doesn’t know what else to say. But I drank it because Kazi told me to, and Kazi had not been wrong about anything yet.

The nausea stopped. The dizziness faded. I was left with a dull, manageable headache and a new and sincere respect for garlic. 4,130 meters. The mountains were very large. I was very small. Both of these things felt correct.

Coming down was long and leg-wrecking and beautiful in ways I didn’t write down because I didn’t have the energy. The views from Ghorepani were worth every blister, and the pre-dawn hike up to Poon Hill for sunrise over the Himalayas — do it. If you find yourself in the Annapurna foothills with functional legs and a working alarm clock, do it. That’s all I’ll say. Then it was ten hours down from Birethanti to Nayapul, at which point Pat decided to bargain the taxi drivers on price. The taxi drivers had a number. They were going to have that number. The number was not negotiating. Pat bargained with the conviction of a man who has read about bargaining; the taxi drivers accepted his performance with the patience of people who do this every day. We paid the number.

Back in Pokhara: Jo and Arielle were there. Pat went to get a haircut (priorities) and I sat down with the girls over tea and made a dinner plan for that evening. The food at Fewa Park by the lake was a disaster — carbonara in Nepal, which Jo recommended and which Jo cannot be trusted to recommend, plus apple desserts that failed us across the board. The company was not a disaster. We got kicked out at 10:30 and moved on to the Hard Rock, where a man on the dance floor was doing things I cannot describe in print and which Arielle and I found endlessly funny.

Eventually we walked back. Outside her hotel, the Hotel Glacier, we stood there and talked until 2AM. She told me about her father dying and what her family means to her. I told her about my mom and my grandma and my brother. Arielle watches Monty Python. She likes to hike. She traveled to Nepal on her own terms. She laughed at the same things I laughed at all night. I am aware I had known this person for a total of four days across two countries. I was, embarrassingly, completely falling for her. I own this. I jumped the gate to get back into my guesthouse at 4AM and lay in bed thinking about Dutch holidays.

Because: December 5th is Sinterklaas. The Dutch Santa — lives in Spain, white horse, kids leave shoes by the door. Arielle had told me all about it. So the next morning I bought Snickers and Mars bars and dropped them off at her hotel before she woke up. Because apparently I am twelve years old and also possibly in a movie. We had breakfast. Things were a little awkward the way things are when something real happened the night before and now it’s daylight. She held my hand for a bit. That counted for something.

The goodbye was hard. She’s got six months of world left. I’m going home to Michigan. When I asked if I’d ever see her again, I got: perhaps. Noncommittal. It’s the right answer and I hate it. Kazi was standing right there at the actual goodbye — Kazi, I love you, but you screwed the pooch.

At Tribhuvan Airport on departure, Kazi and Jyoti both gave me white scarves. I didn’t know what they meant in the moment. Khata — Tibetan Buddhist blessing scarves, offered as gestures of respect and goodwill and safe passage. You give them at departures, at arrivals, at moments that matter. Kazi gave me one of those. He could have just been a guide. He was a guide the way a surgeon is just a guy with sharp tools — technically accurate, misses everything important. Kazi was patient when I was frustrated, calm when I was scared, funny when I needed it, relentlessly competent at every moment in between. The scarves are in my bag. I know what they mean now.

Nepal gave me altitude sickness, panic attacks, infinite stairs, garlic soup, a bucket shower that felt like a spa, the best card game of my life, and a Dutch woman who may or may not be the most interesting person I’ve ever stood outside a hotel with at 2AM. Not a bad two weeks.

Field Notes

1. Kathmandu will hit you harder than you expect — give yourself at least two full days before the trek starts, not to sightsee, but just to let your nervous system catch up to the situation.
2. Garlic soup at altitude is not a folk remedy, it’s actual medicine — Kazi prescribed it at 4,130m and I went from genuinely unwell to functional in under an hour; drink it, don’t argue.
3. Budget roughly 1,500–2,000 Nepali rupees per day (about $20–25 USD in 2002) for tea house accommodation plus meals on the Annapurna circuit — the trail is cheap, the gear you forgot at home is not.
4. The taxi cartel at Nayapul after the trek has a number and they’re going to have that number, so save your energy for the ten hours of descent that came before it.
5. Kazi at Eco-Trek in Pokhara was the single best call of the entire trip — a good guide isn’t logistics support, he’s the difference between a bad two weeks and a story you’re still telling twenty years later.

Questions about the Annapurna circuit, tea house logistics, altitude prep, or anything else from this trip? Ask the Wild William AI — it knows all my notes and it’ll give you a straight answer.