Author: Derek

Friday, 14 January 2011

Leg 1 is definitely Hong Kong because I have to visit some family members and friends. I know the place quite well and Hung Hom is where the trains at. It is about 24hrs, a long time but a good warm up I guess. 

The preparations will include, VISAs for the relevant countries. Mongolia, Russia, and Belarus. Warm clothing, some food because starving would be terrible, water treatment drops, alcohol gel, soap, first aid kit (large supply, thermal flask, chain + padlock, shoes+back-up, sleeping bag+liner, the usual stuff, compared to my Nepal trip. I need to top up with about 6 jabs, serious vaccination.

Beijing is a great place. I know a little bit of it having been there in the past. The great thing is that I have some friends there. The good thing about the Beijing friends is that they are not imaginary, which is awesome. Imaginary friends are just not real. Luckily I haven’t had the need for imaginary friends yet. Anyway I feel this is digressing from planning my trip. 

So I will stay one night in Beijing so I will get a good hot pot in the evening. I think I know where I will probably stay and it’s pretty cheap. 200-300RMB, about 20 squids.

Beijing is a great place. I know a little bit of it having been there in the past. The great thing is that I have some friends there. The good thing about the Beijing friends is that they are not imaginary, which is awesome. Imaginary friends are just not real. Luckily I haven’t had the need for imaginary friends yet. Anyway I feel this is digressing from planning my trip. 

So I will stay one night in Beijing so I will get a good hot pot in the evening. I think I know where I will probably stay and it’s pretty cheap. 200-300RMB, about 20 squids. 

Hot Pot is awesome. It is like cook as you eat buffet. It lacks the finesse of other cooking method because it is just boiling. Everything makes sense from the flavours of the sauce. I like chilli, garlic mixed with soya sauce and a bit of coriander, it just works.  

And a cold light chinese beer (snow flake) I think is the english name, job done.   

Wednesday, 5 January 2011

2011 is difficult to have any long period of time off. I might be booked up in 2012 fingers crossed! So 2013 is realistically my departure date. So little time, too many things on my to do list. 

I might not even have a job then. Difficult to tell I guess because time off travelling means time off earning money and time spending money. That is a double blow. 

There is an event in 2012 which hopefully with fingers crossed, I can play some part in. It could be good! 

Saturday, 1 January 2011

Happy New Year

Update done. 

Next. 

Tuesday, 28 December 2010

As I walked past the Nepali Border control on my way home. This american girl caught the corner of my eye. Her face was on the poster. She did not make it home. It was memorable because it was the last thing I saw from Nepal. She was trekking in the LangTang region and lost contact. Later I found out one of her relatives replied on my post in the Lonely Planet Forum.

My original plan was to do the same trek around the same time. LangTang being a up down trek (same way up and down), we could well have met. I am not saying the outcome would be any different because I am probably worse than useless in a crisis. The reasons why I changed my plan was that I didn’t feel confident (aka scared) nor had the right people around me. It’s a really sad story and it gave me another perspective in life. I think although I am more fearful, but at the same time I can handle more risks. 

The recent news of a tragic missing person case, just cast my mind back to that moment of walking past that poster. My thoughts are with both of their families, with the new year, hopefully new hopes.  

The world can be a wonderful place, but in reality it is an unforgiving one.

Sunday, 12 December 2010

The plan is to find myself in Hong Kong. Then take the train to work in UK.  This plan is Bullet Proof. A bit of an overkill for a commute. The time planned in Aug 2011 or Sep 2011, when the weather should be kind to me. (There is always some logic in my decisions, regardless of whether that logic is logical or illogical) 

This one requires planning because it involves numerous countries, a fixed time frame, finite budget, different cultures compared of my solo trips in Nepal and China. VISAs need to be arranged and these are not easy ones. 

The other factor is to obtain enough time for this journey. I think it is obvious that it will take longer than 14 days (21 days is what I am working to). I need to confirm that I can take this amount of time of my other more important commitments such as job or maybe my future girlfriend (Another sign of my disillusioned optimism.), like that would happen. 

Beijing is a big city, so getting there from Hong Kong should be ok. The next leg is from Beijing to Ulaan Baatar. This is the capital of Mongolia. I find Mongolia fascinating from my childhood hence why I want to do this trip. 

From Mongolia, it is a matter of a jumping on a train to Moscow. This is going to be the difficult part, getting the right tickets, some sort of language proficiency may help, getting on the right train, . Although, I will have my trusted compass. I think heading west is the general right direction. The Russian VISA takes the longest and more criteria to obtain. More details are needed.  

My plan to plan this trip is to have a day by day detailed walkthrough. It is less straight forward than just going to an exotic place, blow money on fun stuff and take a flight home. This will be going to some harsh environment, eating and sleeping with minimal luxuries to make the budget last! This is still my kind of holiday. My budget is however much I can save. 

The aim is by making a good plan and if I cannot use it next year, I can attempt to use it in the future. There are so many factors that I will need to consider; such as time scale, budget, political climate, my mentality and commitments. Everything needs to be in place to tackle the trip. It looks like a long way away in a couple of senses but this is the first step.  

There are a few initial ideas. I think I can take 2 of them. 

1. Everest Base Camp and Nepal East to West on a motorbike, gonna need to work on my back muscles and (less importantly) a bike license. 

2. HK to UK by land, Trans-Siberia Train, Mongolia one of my favourite place ever and Hong Kong (excellent food there)… This could work.   

South America, it is quite faraway. 

These are going to be costly. Good thing I have a job lined up, totally motivated for it. Lots of time to plan. All is going well I guess. 

To be continued……

Wednesday, 2 June 2010

A few more days of Nepal left. Everything needed to be finished.

A lot of goodbyes to be said. I am fine with these events. Nothing lasts forever after all. I said good bye to the school, my trekking guide, the company, the tycoon and his crew, the hostel, and my host family. I felt I was very lucky with the timing, and mostly the people who I met. There were also the wood carver Binod, the teachers from the school, 

I went off to stock up some souvenirs and got some blessed tibetan prayer flags. I also bought a couple of packets of ‘Tasty biscuits’. It had key ingredients such as ‘EDIBLE’ starch which was awesome because it was edible as supposed to inedible. Each 200g packet costs 12 Rupees. BARGAIN. The huge length of time until the expiry date meant it was a pretty good souvenir for myself. The light fluffy texture was KWALITY!!! 

The host mum. She provided the Dhal Bhat that powered me twice a day, everyday. She cooked over 100 Dhal Bhats for me. Although they do taste pretty much exactly the same due to limited choice of ingredients and a more limited choice of herbs etc. And to be fair, she did an excellent job considering she only had curry powder, chilli powder and salt to work with. It was all good food. Although I had to top up with pizzas when I decided that I deserved an Ex-pat lifestyle for a week or 2. (A few days before and the week after the trek)  

Thank you for the Lama’s for their wonderful hospitality and made sure I survived Nepal. 

There was time for an epic Everest mountain flight courtesy of Help 2 Educate UK. Another trip with a dual propeller plane. It felt safe and still had computer and modern stuff in it. 

In this blog, little was mentioned about the hostel. It was undergoing some fundamental structural change. Hence at times, it was difficult. But it’s director, Ian was in Nepal fixing it. The whole charity is a credit to him and his team. The growth in 6 or how many years was pretty amazing. Their work is representative to what Nepal needs. Ian is definitely doing something that I can’t do. So respect points there. 

Mt. Everest or Sagarmatha is the peak on the left. That is the highest mountain on Earth. 

Tuesday, 1 June 2010

This was the highlight of the project because the kids’ reaction to the experiment it was as close to the results I will see. I guess the final results would be a more complete way of educating them science but that would be harder to see. 

The adjacent picture showed a single sheet of A4 paper could hold up 1kg (900ml water and beaker) of mass. I did not know that can happen but they enjoyed it. This experiment was just a bit of ‘fun’. No-one got epically wet and no beaker smashed. I should have used the plastic beaker. I only had paper on that day. I tried. 

I was going to tell them about Euler buckling but I doubt I would gain any respect points from that.  

This was a WOOOO. The pinhole camera. They did not understand why the image was upside down and why lens were not needed. Also the zoom in function by sliding the inner tube outwards. Obviously everything became clearer (excuse the visual pun) when I drew the diagram for the two cases. 

I got another WOOOO here. This was the principle of moments. The key here is that the unknown mass (wooden block) is 30cm (0.3m) away from the pivot (fulcrum in Nepali) and 300g (0.3kg) is a certain distance away from the pivot to balance the system. By matching the weight and the length I eliminate the need of calculators in this experiment. Them being kids, I guess the most impressive thing for them was that might not have been the demonstration of principles of moments. It would be that they did not need to use a calculator to work anything out. Which is a good thing in Nepal because not every kid have one. 

This was the WAAAAAAAAAA. Actually it was the reaction from the science teacher first!!! He never seen anything like this before, unreal. I explained to him that it was just salt (sodium chloride). He just didn’t believe me because he never saw salt in that form. Then I had to explain to him. “You thought you need to heat it by bunsen burner to force the water away to leave the solid salt behind. But it does not give the salt enough time to form crystals. However what I did was made sure the solution was saturated in room temperature by dissolving as much salt as I can and filtration to remove the excess salt hence crystals can form immediately as water evaporates slowly. Evaporation gives bigger crystals because more time is allowed for the salt molecules to slide and fit together perfectly, eventually result in big crystals. (I can’t remember the exact term I used) He then showed his class and they spent a good 15 minutes looking at table salt. Funky square crystals. 

Saturday, 29 May 2010

Once I completed the trek, I realised that everything which I wanted to do was pretty much done! Amazing, it was relaxing time for a couple of days. I offered my guide either an air-ticket to return to Pokhara with me or take the 16hr jeep and keep the money. He chose the latter hence we split up and eventually met up again in KTM. 

The strike was annoying because I planned to trip whole Annapurna Circuit Trek. The one week delay meant I would run out of time. Since I needed two more days at the school to finish everything. Maybe next time I will finish the other half. Although the other half is a bit dustier with the road which is a big turn off for trekking. 

Pokhara was a really chillaxing place. Personally, I think it was much better than Thamel. I would recommend potential nepal tourist to head to Pokhara sooner and get the trek done because the duration of the trek can change with the conditions in the mountains. Then work your way back to KTM.

I relaxed arrived at the View point lodge by the lake. The view was magnificent. There I had buff chilly and beer for breakfast. That pretty much set the theme going. At the evening, I had the steak at the lodge. The chef was so enthusiastic about cooking that smoke was pouring out of the kitchen and with a shout of ‘wahoooo’, my steak was ready. Their interpretation of a pepper steak had a thick layer of pepper powder. I thought he fell to the the common pepper lid loose prank in the kitchen, but I was in Nepal, that was how they do pepper steaks!

The New Everest Steak house was amazing. It is ironic for a steak house in a country that bans killing cows. Maybe the beef was imported. I didn’t care. The trekkers special had 3 fillets and it was epically fulfilling. I had to top up my protein after the trek. I think I did a good job there. After the meat sweat, I returned to the hotel and prepared for my bus trip tomorrow. 

I was stuck somewhere between Pokhara and Kathmandu for 8 hours of my life. I read ‘Into Thin Air’ during this time. My hopes were briefly raised when 2 minibus of army people with big guns moved in. It turns out that they were there to make sure everyone was well behaved in during the Bandh. 

At 5:00 pm, the strikers needed to go home for their dinner hence they let the traffic through once more. And my day bus became a night bus which I was not particularly excited about. It was a good move that I invested in tourist bus. Traffic accidents for night buses did not occur everyday, maybe every two days because the cars were poorly maintained and drunks were drivers. 

I arrived in Thamel at 10pm. I knew one of the Brit on the bus from the trek 

so we shared a room at 300 Rupees hence 150 each. £1.50!!!! We quickly ventured out for food. There were lots of touts for girls and hash but we wanted food more. Eventually we found reasonably well known restaurant.  It was there, I spent my last 500 Rupees. I had 200 left. 

Back in the hotel, the water was yellow and two dead cockroaches welcomed us. Charming. I DEETED myself and went to sleep. I left the next morning to take a bus to my host family. Going home Part 1 done. 

Tuesday, 11 May 2010

The people were pissed off with the Maoists’ strike. Not everyone was a Mao. They called off the strike for an indefinite of time. Although they did say they would strike for an indefinite amount of time. So I really didn’t know long how things will stay open for but it presented my chance to start my trek. A lot of people had this perception that trekking was hard physically and only for the fittest. In fact it really was like walking except everything was just epically more awesome.    

I met plenty of kind fellows on the trek. There was the drunk hotel owner who offered alcohol to everyone of his guest. Due to the off season time, the trek was not crowded. There were about 5 trekkers who  started on the same day as us. My Guide, Nyima and I trekked at our super pace and left at different time so we had the whole mountain to ourselves.  We would end up at the same lodge at the end of the day and play Carcassonne. A german board game based on the french town, it was a really simple but an intensely strategical game.

There were other characters on the trek too. I met this guy who was on a ‘spiritual’ walk. He really lost me then. I hope he found the answer that he was looking for in the end. 

The trek was really physically demanding. The picture above was myself trying to find my limit in high altitude napping. The sun was ridiculously strong due to less cloud at the high altitude. Hot sun and cool breeze gave me the ideal conditions for after lunch nap. My limit was 3800m. I was unsure about napping at 4000m because I struggled that day. And potential brain damage meant it was best not to nap at 5000m.  

I actually had food poisoning at about 3300m. Luckily there was a health post and I had a really good guide. Another reason to hire a guide as opposed to buying a GPS. (costs are similar) The next four days was pretty tough, but luckily the second day was an acclimatisation day which gave me a chance to recover and hygiene myself.

I was so deep in the mountain, that the only way down was up. So the next two days I went from 3500m to complete the pass at 5416m then down the other end at 3800m with 4 hours sleep in the middle. Needless to say it was probably the toughest thing I ever did. By the end, I had a   mammoth headache.  And I will never try that again, the thin air may have impaired my judgement then but sweet to finish it. The descend was hilarious. 

This is the Thorong-La Pass which is at 5416m high. Five thousand four hundred and sixteen metres above sea-level is a lot and according to some 30% less oxygen!!! Once you are up there in a reasonable condition which I was, the hardest part of this trek was done and I was not likely to die.  

The feeling on the descend was relieved and a bit of awesomeness. High altitude sickness was off the menu. And the really long descent down to Muktinath (down by 1600m) to reflect on one of the few quests that I actually completed even though I hadn’t attempted many. The food poisoning took a toll on the body. I felt weak for a while but once my turd was solid, I knew I would be too. I might have lost some brain cells but it must be one of the better places to lose them. So they were not all lost in vain. My trek ended at Jomsom so in theory I did only half of the Annapurna Circuit Trek but it was the good half. I guess I just have to return in the future to checkout the Annapurna Sanctuary Trek, my guide’s favourite one. 

The trek was amazing and I would strongly recommend anyone to do it. Road developments will make the trek worse in the next decade. CHECK IT ASAP!!!