The Mao baddies

Sorry for not keeping ye olde blog up to date, but you see we've been hiking our little butts off for over three weeks around the wilds of Nepal. We just got back last night from a nice long walk around the Annapurna circuit and it was absolutely incredible. Easily the most amazing thing we've done on this trip so far (with the possible exception of our time with the elephants - that's pretty damn hard to beat).

We had no guide and no porters, just packed our rucksacks with what we thought we might need and headed off into the wild blue yonder. I can't even begin to describe the hike - every day was completely different but absolutely incredible in its own way. We saw every possible environment, village, climate and viewpoint - often a few within a single day - and we went from sweating buckets through our singlets and shorts in the baking hot forests to wiggling our toes to prevent frosbite as we gasped for air in the thin atmosphere of high passes threading through snowcapped peaks at an altitude two and a half times the height of Kosciusko, and everything in between. I wrote pages and pages of journal every night, there's no way I could even begin to do it justice here. As soon as I get some photos uploaded I'll whack a few (of the thousand or so that I took) on here to give a general impression.

Two things stick out in my mind right now. One was me getting slapped around by armed terrorists trying to extort money out of us within the first few days of the trek. I came round the corner to see two Nepalese blokes chatting to Martin and Nick - a lovely couple of English lads we'd met that day - and Hugh, the most irritating Swiss man alive. Apparently the Nepalis were Maoists demanding a 'contribution' and Hugh had been haranguing them on why communism was a bad idea. Martin and Nick thought he was about to get a world class beating, but luckily for him that was the exact point when I showed up. I saw the group talking and thought it had nothing to do with me, probably a couple of guys trying to sell some trinkets or something, so ignored their calls to stop and marched right by. One guy grabbed my backpack from behind to pull me back so I slapped his hand away. He spun me round, started screaming at me and gave me an open-handed slap to the side of the head. Reflexively I cocked my fist to king-hit the little prick, but was brought up short when he flipped his shirt back and started to pull the butt of his pistol out of its holster. "Ok ok no problem here!" He ranted for a while and tried half-heartedly to hit me a few more times but I just sort of stood there blocking his flailing arms with a reassuring smile saying "Ok ok, whatever you want mate" and thinking "this could turn out to be a very bad day..."

As it turned out he calmed himself after a couple of minutes and by the time Sarah came trotting up the trail, the boys and I were in the middle of negotiating the price of our contribution to the cause. Slappy even wrote me out a nice receipt so in case we ran into any more Maoists we could show them that we were already paid up members. According to the emails Nick and Martin have been sending out to their kith and kin, I "got beaten up while resisting a violent gang of communist gunmen", that sounds pretty good doesn't it? In fact it wasn't that bad, the same thing happened to an Argentinian guy we met a few days later. Good story though. And apart from my explosive diarrhoea a few weeks later, the only bad thing that happened to us over the three weeks so that's ok!

Oh the second thing I wanted to talk about - getting engaged. Maybe another post for that.