Kayaking next to corpses.....three days down the Kali Gandaki

We spent three days northwest of Pokara rafting down the Kali Gnadaki. Although it was not the 4+ rapids they promised it was an amazing trip down a river filled with canyons, villages, the occasional rapid, and, oh yeah, funeral pyres where ashes go straight into the river. It was pretty surreal to be in a kayak with a burning body a few feet away.
The trips highlight was spending the night on a beach by a village where kids came down for a photo shoot and volleyball game before bed time.

It's a bird...it's a plane.....it's a festival.....it's a weird day

After coming down from the mountain....heroic and hurting (seriously....after carrying that backpack on my hips for two weeks I feel like a twelve year old German Shepherd) we arrived back in the lakeside town of Pokara where we started the day learning how to fly and ended it looking like a Fraggles that had been attacked by Grateful Dead fans carrying spray paint.

By flying....I mean paragliding. Paragliding made me feel like a 3 year old discovering the swings for the first time. You latch yourself in (or your parents do...in this case it was my paragliding instructor), there is very little explanation as to what is going to happen (actually..absolutely no instruction from my tandem rider), you gain some momentum (a push.....or as in the case of paragliding you run like a rabid gazelle off a cliff) and spend the remainder of the ride with your mind in a cocktail of fear, elation, the giggles, and wondering how in god's name you will be able to stop this thing. The ride lasted about a half hour where your eyes dart from the land below, to the other parachutes in the sky, to your own chute--praying all the ropes are made of really, really strong material and don't run into each othe tangling up into a dive bombing mess. It literally takes your breath away though, to see the Annapurna mountain range in the background with the sky speckled with ballooning human birds floating in the thermals next to hawks and vultures. As one can imagine, epic "Planet Earth-esque" music was playing in my head as we flew over the hills. When we got to the lake, however, the soundtrack shifted to Swedish death metal as the instructor asked me if I wanted to try some aerobatics. We cruised over the water (actually...not quite over the water - somewhere between the water and land which was sooooo not cool) and he instructed me to follow all his commands. Throwing my body form side to side we proceeded to start a slow spiral before blending into a gyroscope that caused that mornings Masala Tea to pitch forward to the back of my throat. Just when I though all was lost and we would black out (I've heard pilots do when they hit equally high spinning speeds) we landed with a quick pillowy brake. Not dead. I repeat....we did not die. Yay! After we landed and explored the next level of the sport, parahawking, where you do the same thing with a hawk tied to your wrist to help find the thermals we fly in. Maybe next time.
As we drove back into the city we started to see more and more bikers coming by who appeared to have gotten into severe accidents that caused them to bleed rainbows. Were we witnessing the Carebear armageddon? Not quite, as we saw line after line of children, armed with buckets, waterballoons, and squirt guns fully loaded with multicolor dye. Holi had started. Holi is the yearly color festival in Nepal and India. We heard three different stories of how it was started involving three different gods but we have no clue which one was right. All in all, it's a day to have fun smearing dye, throwing water, and dropping colored powder on your friends and family. It was a bit like Halloween only no candy and the people make your costume for you. It was, universally, fun.
Three hours later we were drenched, painted, and still giggling.

Trek-tacular!

We got back from our 10 day trek in 9 days because we're fast. That's right...fast. Our legs hurt, our knees really hurt, our feet are sore and we both lost weight. That trek was pretty hardcore for us. We actually went up to the Annapurna Base Camp right after an unusual late spring snowfall. We kept passing people that had turned back because the relatively warm weather was causing avalanches and the pass to the base camp wasn't safe. We got to the avalanche area one day after people started hiking up again. Supposedly most of the avalanches had already happened and they don't happen until 10:30 am or later (we were told). We actually saw a big avalanche across the canyon from the safety of our guesthouse the night before we headed to the base camp. They are so loud and crazy!
Even with this apparent harbinger of our impending death, we went with about 15 other people at 6:00 am and had to walk over avalanche after avalanche, which is really tough walking in tennis shoes and six dollar boots (that didn't break until the last day...Yay!) :). Right at the start Codie slipped on a rock into a creek soaking her left foot. SInce we're a little freaked about avalanches we're practically jogging up the mountain and then "rumble, rumble, crack" an avalanche happened about 20 minutes behind us on the trail. It turns out it was pretty small (by avalanche standards) and mostly the dust hit the actual trail where people were. Two British guys were right where it happened, were scared silly, and ran back to the guesthouse with their porter and guide (we found this out later and were wondering why the 2 British kids never made it up to base camp).
Walking up on this trek is like walking with a family, you pass the same people, they catch up with you at night, you talk about where you're headed and end up getting to know the people on the same trek as you. So the British kids freaked everybody out that was coming up on the hike, rumors spread like wildfire that no one could go up to base camp (only the crazy Korean group came during this time. Seriously Koreans are hard core. Every group we met were decked out in mountain gear and owning the mountain). Meanwhile, we were chilling in a winter paradise at 13,550 ft (The peak of Mount Hood is 11,249 feet), the sun was shining, we're in t-shirts, and the food at the guest house is unreal. We were sitting at the base camp at the world's 7th tallest peak (Annapurna 1) and surrounded by a sanctuary of other mountains. Sweet.
We left the next morning at 6:00 am, hiked back across the avalanches and this time I completely bit it in the creek where Codie fell and both my feet went in the water. I curled up into a fetal position on some rocks and saved the rest of my body from getting really wet and cold but had the pleasure of hiking with wet sock for the next three hours. It was actually funny because we were going down at that point but not too funny since I had "wet sock". Those of you who know me know there are three things I loath: dolphins, men in capri pants (that means you, David Wood), and wet socks. We made it back last night and went out to dinner and ran into all kinds of people from the trek.

As if that isn't enough adventure, tomorrow we are going to go paragliding!!! Don't worry too much we are going tandem with an instructor. How cool is that? You can see the Himilayas as you float down for a 1/2 an hour. Tomorrow is also Holi--a huge festival here (google it and look at the pictures--tourists are huge targets during the water/color fight). ON the 11th,12th, and 13th we are going rafting on the Kali Gandaki River were cremation pyres are burning on many of the curves and intersections of the river (it's nicknamed the holy river). So, we won't be very good bloggers over the next couple of days. Later!