My guide translates most of what people say to us/her (when we were resting next to a river a little girl, idk, around 4, came up to us, and dumbfounded me with the precise logic of her reported arguments. The verbal sparring match went sort of like this: we should give her chocolate- obviously, we didn’t have any. in that case we should just buy some from the little shop her dad ran. too bad we didn’t have any money either. then where had we got our water? from the river (Sunita, my guide, wasn’t stupid either). then where had she gotten her water container? and this is where I forgot the rest. I’d been wondering, too, why this woman around 30 was running around with a pink metallic barbie bottle, but later in the 3 Sisters guesthouse I read their information book on the bedside table, and it asked for donations of hiking boots, hats, and water bottles).
so now on our way further up the mountain, past a group of boys flying kites (and trying to untangle one), we met an old woman whose goat hadn’t come back that day. where from, I’m not entirely sure, I got a bit sidetracked when Sunita said, she’s crying if the jackal got her goat, or maybe it was a tiger. yes, they come this way, she had seen tigers five times in her life, twice in the zoo and thrice in the wild. You have to sit really, really still. or keep still, I guess, if you’re not sitting yet. anyway, we found an ideal spot for dead goat, ravaged or not, when we observed an unusually large amount of eagles, vultures, and Himalayan griffons circling said spot. Great for raptor watching, though, and boy was Sunita an ornithologist! She kept spotting birds with names like white-chested laughing thrush, and we even saw parrots in the wild. Oriental turtledove is another one I remember. The black kite is another one that kept getting me confused until I figured out it’s supposed to be a bird, not an actual kite, which there were plenty of already.
I got so enthusiastic about the whole thing plus idea that on the way back home I divulged my idea of possibly doing fieldwork for my master’s thesis or something with the 3 Sisters Trekkers in Pokhara to Sunita, whose response sobered me up again- I wasn’t the first one to get excited by the rich topic of gender and empowerment in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society sort of in limbo democracy-wise, apparently. To be honest, I was probably just looking for an excuse to come back (and something that sounded better than “I <3 trekking, even though there seem to be an awful lot of steps involved, and seeing the sun rise in really high mountains is kind of awesomely beautiful” on a scholarship that could pay for the trip).
After I tell her my tales of rat-sized mice and cockroaches (sort of like my mom’s stories of German shepherd-sized foxes in front of our house, which she was crossing the street to pet for after a midnight walk, because from far enough away it looked like one of our red cats) (size-wise, I never felt the urge to pet any vermin in my room), Sunita’s nice enough to call the guesthouse and get me a room way at the top, where the mice won’t come for sure- also, it will be my last proper bed for the next three nights which will be spent on busses and airplanes.
Trekking, you don’t see women at their prettiest, but at their most enduring. And that’s really the beauty of it.
