The Invisible Day – Paiya to Nunthala

Due to the adverse climbing conditions today I didn’t take photos, apart from the leech strike. However I am inserting at random previously unseen material!

We woke, we packed our gear and wandered down to the tea house from the barn that we slept in. It’s ok sharing a room with Killer. He’s considerate and a decent bloke. He doesn’t snore either, not like the old bugger sharing with him.

What happens is that you start high up but want to trek down to a village quite a long way away. Most villages are set high in the hills, so even though you’re heading lower, you have to drop way down, cross the river that’s in your way and then climb up really high to the village. And this happens day after day on this route to Jiri. At least we’re as fit as butchers’ dogs at this stage of proceedings.

It had rained heavily overnight and it was cold. Not the cold that we felt at 18,000 feet but a kind of insidious wet cold that crept into your bones and dismantled your joy for the new day.

After breakfast we set off into the cloud at around 6am.

I couldn’t take any photos; I just wanted to hold on to my walking poles and make sure I didn’t slip over the edge. We had heard that there were significant mud slides and landslides across our path but that we should make it. However the rain resumed soon after we set off, to reduce the odds.

After an hour or so of difficult walking we hit the biggest landslide on a particularly steep and seriously long drop. It had wiped away our path and left areas of deep mud, which had remained on the slope, defying gravity. To cap it all, whilst we were looking at the problem there were a number of decent sized stones falling down across our path from higher up the mountain.

I decided to go first because if the lads went before me I wasn’t sure I’d have the bottle to follow. It was very dodgy, trying to behave normally on a slope that would have done justice to some kind of life-threatening episode of It’s a Knockout. But being sensible and calm helped a lot. Oh yes I was, for most of the time.

We let a couple of dozen people walking in the opposite direction come across the landslip first. It wasn’t safe to cross each other on the slope. I then called out to another big group about to cross towards us that we were only 4 people and would appreciate it if they would wait until we crossed over to them. Setting off I got to halfway over the slope without great difficulty and without being taken out by falling rocks. David was behind me and the two lads behind him. Here there was a choice of climbing up the mud and taking a higher route to safety or dropping down to the level that the people waiting to cross towards us were gathered.

A fat idiot of a German in the waiting group shouted at me ‘Come down this way’, getting more and more worked up when I turned round to Nir to ask what I should do. ‘Come zis vay’ shouted the idiot. ‘Climb higher papa’ said Nir, and I followed his advice. After a few metres of climbing I saw that the idiot had come out onto the slope and was immediately below me. I said to him that he was in danger of me falling on him or dislodging more mud or rocks onto him if he didn’t go back to safety. He said ‘You are endangering me! Vy did you not obey my instructions’.

Fair play to me I didn’t shout anything about orders that must be obeyed or anything mildly controversial like that. But I did lose it with the fat idiot, until Killer, the arbiter of calm and common sense, shouted for us to keep quiet and get on with crossing safely. I did and we all did.

Anyway we had another bout of avalanche crossing and then for the rest of the way down it was just slippery mud. And leeches. The jungle is full of them.

Nir got three in him, David two and me just one. This is a genuine leech strike from today. The dirty cheating dogs slip down into your boots and suck blood from your feet.

After lunch, in a village over the next river and up a bit, we climbed further, dropped again, crossed another river and then started climbing. The rain began to let up but it was still a hell of a climb this late in the afternoon, and it lasted for hours until the light started to fade. We made sure we got out of the jungle before dark – there are tigers and black bears roaming about here after dark!

Another draining day climbing up and down for 10 hours, with mudslides, leeches and tigers waiting to eat us. Good fun innit!

Night night.