Nepal: Moon Cycles or Not?

For April 8

The last night in Namche Bazaar was not a great one.  I didn’t sleep well, my period started, and I started having diarrhea.  I knew I would likely have to deal with my period on the trip so I was prepared for that, but not happy about its appearance.  The cramps were horrible.  But then I got to couple that with diarrhea, which made it even worse.  I figured my stomach was upset with the food or something so I just worked under the assumption that it was travel related.  I also started having trouble eating food.  I would eat a few bites and then couldn’t do anymore.  I’m sure the food was good, but to me it made me feel like I wanted to throw up.  It was after I started having trouble eating that I finally understood the guys on my Kilimanjaro trip who couldn’t eat.  I just couldn’t understand at the time how they just couldn't eat anything, but now 2 years later, I understood.  What we found out in hindsight, after a positive Covid test on returning to Kathmandu 8 days later, was this was the start of me being sick with Covid.  To this day, our best guess is that I caught it from Valentin, who we met that first day.  We can’t know for sure, but based on the symptoms we knew he was dealing with, and the fact that I started to not feel great 2 days later, it makes sense.  

But throughout the trip I was able to brush off everything I dealt with as altitude and travel.  

• Diarrhea: Stomach not agreeing with an abnormal diet and just traveling and drinking water in a 3rd world country.  

• Issues Eating: Altitude.  

• Fatigue:  Hiking miles uphill a day at high altitudes.  

• Cough: Dry air caused by altitude.  

I don’t know if I ever had a fever or body aches because I was taking ibuprofen twice a day to deal with achy muscles and joints from hiking.

Enough of that though…onto the trail.  On Day 4 we were heading for Tengboche (12,632 ft); the monastery on top of a steep, steep hill.  Throughout the day, due to not feeling well and not eating much, I dealt with shaky legs that forced me to stop frequently.  At one point Anil asked me what I was experiencing that was making me not feel great, and I said that my period had started and that the first day is always a little tiring and crampy.  And he goes, “ah, I wondered if maybe it had something to do with your moon cycle.”  Amy gave me an iron supplement to see if that might help, but otherwise I just pushed through.

Even if I wasn’t feeling great though, the views certainly were.  Just as we set out from Namche we came across an old man sitting by the side of the road taking donations to fix the path.  Anil told us that the story is that when the man was younger, his wife fell to her death down the side of the mountain because of the poor path.  So he made it his life’s mission to fix the path so no one else would experience that.  And the part of the path that had been fixed up was certainly much better that the other areas.  It had a defined edge with stone to help it from washing out and was more even.  There was work being done on the path by a young man.

The old man collecting donations.

Day 4 was a day of animals.  We saw a bunch of mountain goats, as well as the national bird of Nepal (twice!).  The Himalayan Monal is a beautiful bird that looks a bit like a peacock, minus the large colorful tail.  The Monal has feathers of blue, with an orange tail and both green and red-orange along its neck.  And the head is blue-green and has a nice plume on it.  Very colorful!

Himalayan Monal

Our hike stayed fairly flat (by Himalayan standards anyways) with some ups and downs, but not really steep ones to start out.  But then, about an hour before we stopped for lunch, we started to descend.  We started our day out at 11,400 ft and by lunch were back down to 10,800, where we crossed a river.  We ate lunch…or more, I ate some peanut butter and cheese crackers after eating 3 bites of my fried rice, and then worrying that the woman who cooked our food would think I didn’t like it or something.

Does that look steep to you?  Heck yes!  My legs could tell you it was.

After lunch it was all uphill.  Two hours and 2,000 feet of up.  Anil took us on a path that was less busy and less intense, for which I was certainly grateful!  It was really nice not dealing with all the other people playing leapfrog. For most of the trail, but especially during the steep spots, there would be spots to stop with a place to sit down, but other times if you needed a break, you just found a rock. The others jokingly called me "Princess" because they would be on the lookout for rocks that were a good place to sit and say, "I've got the perfect rock for you, Princess, nice and flat." And it would make me laugh.

Pemba, taking a break in a beautiful location.

Eventually we crested the hill and directly to our left was our tea house.  Hallelujah!  While Renee, Amy, Louie, Anil, and Pemba went over to the monastery, I took a nap.  After the others arrived back, we headed down to a room where they were playing a documentary called 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible.  It was about a Nepali guy named Nims Purja whose goal was to climb all 14 8,000 meter peaks in 7 months with an all Nepali team.  The man and his team were crazy! They managed to do Everest, Lhotse, and Makalu in 48 hours; that would be the 1st, 4th, and 5th tallest mountains in the world…in 48 hours.  He is also the person who took the crazy picture of the traffic jam of people trying to summit Everest; a picture that was plastered all over news websites back in May 2019.  Anil told us that Nims and his expedition crew would be making their way up the mountain in like a week and I’m almost 100% sure they were the group we saw that seemed like they were on their way to a party between Tengboche and Dingboche as we were on our way down.

I did manage to very slowly eat some garlic soup and crackers at supper.  Garlic soup is their cure for altitude sickness.  And I did discover that it was something I could usually manage to get down, very slowly.  And the crackers were amazing after a day of not having much to eat.  After supper it was time for bed, where I managed to get like, 10 hours of sleep, which left me feeling much better the next morning.