Pokara

As soon as the bus arrived at the bus station in Pokara all of us tourists were hounded by the guesthouse touts. Having little idea where we were and how much a taxi would be to the main accommodation centres we decided to go with one of the less boisterous touts. It turned out great, as we got a free ride to the Lakeside area and the guesthouse was lovely, cheap, clean and central (Karma Guesthouse, beside the Royal Palace).

So the whole point of coming to Pokara is that it's the main centre from where people set off on big multi-day hikes. I'd been here 10 years before on the last trip with Hanno, and the place all seemed fairly familiar. The main road is now paved, and the shops and restaurants all look a bit more dapper, and there are more of them, but otherwise the place seemed much the same.

But quite a few other things have changed, like the location of the hiking permit office, the location of the immigration office (to extend our visas - at the border we could only get a 30-day visa for $40US, it used to be $30US for a 60-day visa, the cheeky beggars!), the introduction of a new tracking system called TIMS (which I luckily found out about after passing an agency that was advertising it - it's free to get a TIMS permit, but if you arrive at the trailhead without it you're fined).

So to get everything organised we hired bicycles and rode around the various offices getting passport photos, permits, renting sleeping bags (only 20 rupees a day, as opposed to the 'official' price of 50), and cash for the trek itself (everything was quite spread out and far from the main tourist Lakeside area, so having the bikes was a godsend).

The money issue was fustrating though, as I didn't know how much money I'd need. I planned on hiking the Annapurna Circuit trek, which can take 3 weeks, and then linking it with the Annapurna Sanctary trek, which can take another 12 days. During all that time you're in the mountains and have little chance of finding an ATM (it turned out there are ATM's in Jomsom, but you can't relie on them working when you get there). Anyway, after checking online and asking people I picked a figure and hoped it would be enough. In the end we managed to keep the costs down with regular haggling and we finished the entire trek almost a week early, so it turned out I had loads more money than I needed.

I also had a fairly traumatic time dealing with my apartment management company back home, as the tenants had given notice to quit the apartment, and so I needed to get new tenants in quick. As I've said before on this blog, the only major anxiety I've had on this entire trip has been due to my apartment back home - and this situation was happening at the worst possible time, towards the end of the trip when the cash reserves are dwindling rapidly toward zero!

Thankfully though my mate Peadar from back home stepped into the breach and literally saved this trip from a premature finale. He took over the management of the apartment from the inept KPM, advertised and got new tenants as well as re-painting numerous damp patches, sorting out the decrepit sofa, organising new swipe cards for the gates, getting a new lock fitted on the patio door, etc. Without Peadar doing all that for me back home I would have lost an absolute fortune paying KPM to get all these things taken care of (and it took them 6 weeks to find tenants last time!), so needless to say I'm very deeply indebited to him.

So anyway, after 2 days of organising all the above we left everything we didn't need for the hike at our guesthouse, and early in the morning got a taxi to the main local bus station to get a bus to the trailhead at Besishar (paying half the tourist-bus rate). The morning hadn't started too well though, as the first thing I did that morning was put my foot through a small hole in my hiking trousers, thereby making it a huge hole! These were the only trousers I was bringing, and they had been fairly threadbare to begin with, but I just decided to head off anyway, and hoped to get them repaired in Besishar. Within 5 minutes of arriving at the town of Besishar I had the pants expertly repaired for 0.50cent and so we were all set for weeks and weeks of hiking along some of the best trails in the world.