Nepal 2002: Garlic Soup, Infinite Stairs, and a Dutch Woman Named Arielle

Wood smoke and diesel. That’s the first thing — before the noise, before the faces, before any of it makes visual sense. You step out of Tribhuvan International Airport into Kathmandu in November 2002 and that combination hits you so fast and so completely that it’s like the city is skipping the introduction and going straight to the point. You are not from here. You are not prepared. The bill for your visa is already $40 and you haven’t technically arrived yet.

My guide Jyoti was holding a sign with my name on it, which was the single most reassuring thing I’d seen since Tokyo. He got me into a car and we drove into Thamel and I sat in the back seat genuinely unable to process what I was looking at. Hovels stacked against hovels. Motorcycles and cars and people playing an ongoing game of chicken that nobody seemed to be losing, probably because everyone had agreed on different rules than the ones I knew. The pollution wasn’t ambient — it was present tense. It sat in my lungs and made itself comfortable. I had real trouble breathing. I spent my first hour in Nepal being outwitted by the air.

That night at Hotel Dynasty (down three back alleys, somehow legitimately nice) I woke up at 10PM in a full panic attack. If there had been a flight home available at that exact moment, I would have taken it without packing. I am not dramatizing this. I was absolutely convinced I’d made a serious mistake.

By morning, I was on a bus to Pokhara, which is a sentence that sounds casual and was not. Nepali bus rides on mountain roads deserve their own category of experience — something between public transportation and extreme sport. Kazi, my guide for the trek, sat next to me with the calm of a man who had made this trip several hundred times. I held the seat in front of me and watched buses play chicken on switchbacks with what I can only describe as mutual confidence. We arrived. Pokhara had a lake. Space. Air that wasn’t trying to kill me. And then Pat showed up — a friend from home — and just seeing a familiar face knocked the anxiety dial down by about six notches. We had steak. I slept like a person who’d been turned off at the wall.

The trek started at Birethanti. The trail description I’d read used the word “moderate.” The trail and the word “moderate” have no relationship whatsoever. The stairs go on without end — not as a figure of speech but as a structural reality. Someone built infinite stone stairs into the Annapurna foothills and then labeled them a path. My legs issued formal complaints by hour two. I filed them under “review later” and kept moving because Kazi was ahead of me and Kazi does not slow down.

Lunch on day one was fresh veggie noodle soup with fried potatoes at a tea house somewhere on the climb to Ghandruk. I’ve eaten in a lot of countries and I want to be specific: that was one of the best meals of my life. Simple, hot, made by someone’s hands, consumed with burning quads at altitude. That’s the formula. That evening in Ghandruk we met a French woman named Megitte and ended up splitting an enormous chocolate cake and somehow getting roped into a card game called “The Joker is Hiding” — which may or may not be a real game. I still don’t know. It didn’t matter. Hot tea, broken French-to-English translation, one girl whose only known English phrase was “Don’t touch me!” and the whole table losing it until the candles burned low. I slept like something recently killed. It is the best compliment I know.

Day two brought Machhapuchhre and Annapurna South visible from the window at breakfast. I’ve been trying for twenty-plus years to find the right words for that view and I keep running into the same problem: describing it makes it smaller. So I won’t try. Just know that the scale is wrong in the best possible way, and that I sat there with my tea going cold and didn’t touch it for a while.

On the trail that day, Gregg — an Australian I’d met on the bus to Pokhara, a man with an extraordinary collection of stories, including one involving a woman who turned out to be a thief and which I won’t detail here but which Pat and I discussed for about two hours — blew past us on a descent like gravity was his personal assistant. The man moved at a pace that made me feel stationary. We crossed a river and hit an ascent that was, to be precise, practically vertical. At the top: dal bhat at Kazi’s tea house, where we met Helen and Sarah. Helen: Irish, Chicago, Motorola. Sarah: Irish, Sydney, between jobs. Good company over food that had earned its keep.

“Drink the garlic soup,” Kazi said. He said it the way someone says a thing when they already know you’re going to argue and they’ve already decided not to care.

That was at Annapurna Base Camp. 4,130 meters. We’d arrived with maybe thirty minutes of daylight left, temperature dropping hard, and me experiencing the full altitude sickness package — nausea, dizziness, balance gone sideways. I was not triumphant. I was barely vertical. I had exactly zero faith in garlic soup as a medical intervention. It sounded like something invented by a grandmother who’d run out of other suggestions. But Kazi had not been wrong about a single thing in five days, so I drank it. The nausea stopped. The dizziness faded. I have no explanation. I don’t need one. Drink the garlic soup.

The night before base camp, at Machapuchre Base Camp, I’d met Arielle and Jo. From Holland. We played cards — Bullshit, specifically — and then some dice game I only half-understood but committed to completely. They were traveling for six months. Six months, the whole world as itinerary, Burma and New Zealand on the list. They mentioned, casually, that I was welcome to join them for part of it. We drank rum with hot water. They got me singing Christmas carols. Then they requested Mariah Carey and I drew a line. Some things are sacred.

Coming down from base camp took days. Long, leg-wrecking, beautiful days that I mostly didn’t write about because I didn’t have the energy to hold a pen. The descent from Ghorepani to Poon Hill for sunrise — you set an alarm, you drag yourself up in the cold, you stand at the top and the Himalayas are just there, all of them, lit from the side, and you understand why people come this far. Then it was ten hours down. Birethanti to Nayapul. My quads filed their final formal complaint and I agreed to review it never.

At Nayapul, Pat attempted to bargain the taxi fare to Pokhara. I say “attempted” with genuine affection. The taxi operators had a number. The number was not negotiating. The number had been the number before Pat arrived and would be the number after Pat departed and the number was waiting patiently while Pat made his case. We paid the number. In Pokhara: hot shower, the Everest Steak House for the third time (a pattern I was fully committed to), a steak, a beer, and then I genuinely don’t remember getting into bed. I just remember being in it.

The Part I Wasn’t Planning to Write

The next morning, Jo and Arielle were there. Right there, in Pokhara, as planned. Pat went off to get a haircut and I sat down with the girls over tea and the day immediately had a point. We made dinner plans. I went shopping in the meantime — bargained trekking pants down to 600 rupees (~$8 USD), which felt like a personal achievement of moderate significance. Found a shirt for my friend John in a country where the average build is considerably smaller than John’s, which required what I can only describe as an archaeological expedition through three separate stalls.

Dinner was at Fewa Park, an outdoor cultural place by the lake. Jo recommended the spaghetti carbonara. I ordered it. Jo was wrong. Arielle wasn’t very hungry and gave me half her sweet and sour chicken, which was the best thing on the table. We ordered every apple dessert available. They all failed us. The food was a disaster. The company was not.

We got kicked out at 10:30 and moved to the Hard Rock. I twisted my ankle on the way back from the bathroom. The beer helped. There was a man on the dance floor doing things I can’t describe in print but which Arielle and I found endlessly funny. Somewhere in the evening, Arielle and I ended up in a corner just talking. Really talking. She told me about her father and what family means to her. I told her about my mom and my grandmother and my brother. We stood outside her hotel, the Hotel Glacier, until 2AM. I jumped the fence to get back into my guesthouse because the gate was locked and I had made choices, and I lay in bed thinking about Dutch holidays.

Because it was December 5th. Sinterklaas. The Dutch version of Santa Claus — lives in Spain, rides a white horse across rooftops, kids leave shoes by the door. Arielle had explained the whole thing. So the next morning I bought Snickers bars and Mars bars and dropped them off at her hotel before she woke up. I am a forty-year-old man. I am aware of this. I did it anyway.

The goodbye was hard in the way that goodbyes are hard when something real happened and you both know it and the logistics of your lives are pointed in completely opposite directions. She’d said “perhaps” when I asked about seeing her again. It was the honest answer. I hated it and I respected it and Kazi was standing right there at the actual moment of goodbye, which — Kazi, I love you, but you absolutely screwed the pooch on that one.

At Tribhuvan Airport, waiting for the flight home — KTM to Bangkok, Bangkok to Narita, Narita to SFO, SFO to Detroit — Kazi and Jyoti handed me white scarves. Khata. Tibetan Buddhist blessing scarves, offered at departures and arrivals and moments that matter, as gestures of respect and safe passage. I didn’t know what they were in the moment. I looked it up later. They’re still in my bag.

Here’s the thing about Nepal that doesn’t show up in the guidebooks: it doesn’t let you stay comfortable. Not for a day, not for an hour. The city is dirty and chaotic and the altitude will make you sick and the stairs are genuinely infinite and the bus rides are genuinely terrifying and there’s a real chance you’ll wake up at 10PM in a panic attack wondering why you thought this was a good idea. And then a man named Kazi will hand you garlic soup and tell you to drink it and it will work, and an Australian you met on a bus will turn out to know someone from your lake back home, and a French woman will lose a card game she invented, and two Dutch women traveling for six months will invite you to Burma with the easy casualness of people who understand that the world is actually available to you if you stop sitting still.

Nepal in 2002 cost me $40 in visa fees before I’d even cleared immigration, a near-death bus ride, significant quad muscle damage, one genuine panic attack, one bucket shower that felt like a five-star spa, altitude sickness at 4,130 meters, and a poem written in a departure lounge for a woman who said perhaps. I’d go back tomorrow. Not because it’s easy. Because nothing that matters ever is.

Got questions about planning an Annapurna trek, navigating Kathmandu for the first time, or what to actually pack for high altitude in November? Drop them with the Ask WildWilliam AI — it’s got everything I know from 40+ countries, including the stuff I wish someone had told me before I got on that bus.