Treking the Manaslu Foothills: Day 2

I ended up getting maybe 2 hours of sleep this past night because of the over abundance of dust there was floating around in Prakashs' attic where I was sleeping. I had already been suffering from some serious allergy problems since the day I arrived in Kathmandu, but this night really did me in for good. For some reason, I ended up getting a slight fever that night, the post nasal drip I had turned into a sore throat with a swollen right tonsil, and my nose had became an uncontrollable faucet. Aside from being sick, my bed was a bamboo mat with a dirt filled pillow. This allergenic "no man's land" made for a terribly painful night.

Prakash came get me at 5:30am to find me already up and miserable. I had questioned whether or not to continue with the trek and obviously decided to go on. I figured maybe some fresh air and exercise might kick this thing out. I was terribly mistaken. About 1 1/2 hours into the hike we stopped to get tea and soup in hopes to relax my body but this really didn't do much. Over the next 3 hours, I began experiencing some mild hallucination's where every time I would look up, everything in front of me would start moving away from me in a tunneling effect. When I looked up at things closer, they would wave back and forth. I became very worried as to what I had gotten myself into. At this point, it was half way so I had to decide to go further or tell Prakash of my current condition and turn back. I chose again to continue, and again, bad move because the next 4 hours were only uphill. We got lucky though and hitchhiked on a tractor for an hour which was a real relief until we got off and had to hike another 3 hours till the top.

Upon reaching the top we had walked nearly 30km or roughly 19 miles over 8+ hours and I was so exhausted, sick, and dehydrated that I wasn't even happy that the hike was over. I was simply dreading the night that was to follow.

The rest of the day and our night was spend at a small Nepali Tea house where no one spoke English. This made things very boring for me as I had no one to talk to. Aside from not speaking English, they spent the entire night making fun of me which at first I thought was kinda funny but eventually became quite annoying. The best part of the night was when a monkey tried to steal a chicken. He didn't succeed in taking it but did kill it which meant we were having chicken for dinner. This was when I came to the reality that if anyone here wants to eat meat, they had to kill it. Its not like the modern world where we can open the fridge or go to the store. They ended up serving me the worse parts of the bird and its organs which was so disappointing because all I wanted was a decent meal. In this village there was also no bottled water so they had to boil water for me and then wait an hour for it to cool. To top it all off, I had to sleep in a dusty basement on a bamboo mat again. This night was not as bad as the last because I was so exhausted that I was bound to catch some sleep. But, in order to sleep, I had to wrap a scarf over my face in order to reduce the dust intake which didn't really help at all. Another miserable night was ahead of me....