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Hello, This letter is five days late and I apologize for that. I’m in Nepal and was walking the Annapurna Circuit and left my laptop in Kathmandu out of consideration for its weight. After a 120-mile, ten hour bus ride back today (yes, that is a 12mph average), I’m writing to you from a hotel room at the epicenter of this magnificent, heart-wrenching, chaotic country. My experience of Nepal has had such range. Moments of profound wonder, like the one photographed above, taken at 5am in High Camp before climbing up and over Thorong La, a 17,769ft mountain pass. Notice the bit of clouds hanging above the valley — photographs have trouble doing justice to the scale of the Himalayas. Contrast that with the kid I watched kill a pigeon for dinner with a rock wading through a garbage river when I got off the bus in Kathmandu this afternoon… Nepal is a land of high peaks and low valleys, of sights that can take your breath away for opposing reasons. A true adventure it has been. My backpack got lost in Los Angeles on the way here and didn’t arrive until six days later. This was great timing, as my sixth day here was the Holi Festival where everyone covers each other from head to toe in bright colorful chalks. I was quite a spectacle retrieving my pack from the airport that afternoon. Armed with a lack of information, the journey to, through, and from the trek has had its moments. While most people prefer to prepare, I enjoy serendipity and the discovery of things yet known. This altered many an aspect of my experience, from the surprise around each bend of those epic mountain valleys to the confusion felt two days ago when a shopkeeper yelled, “Where you goin?!?” as I confidently strode by in the opposite direction of town down the highway I was looking for. I think many would chide me for being so unprepared and assuming any additional risk, but with incrementally increased exposure over the years — in the mountains, with many a stranger, and other forms of these situations — I think feeling my way around and occasionally making a fool of myself has become my preferred method of travel. The Annapurna Circuit was also more of a social experience than you might expect. Hopping off a bus in Besisahar, I found myself loading into a Jeep but a minute later with four Israelis and spent the first three days of the trek attached at the hip with them. Over time though, the constant chatting and top forty music from a bluetooth speaker became too much for me on the trail and I ventured ahead on my own. Everyone sleeps and eats with others in ‘teahouses’ along the circuit and I soon became part of another group of eight — two couples (from England and Chile) and four dudes (from Italy, the Czech Republic, Netherlands, and I from the United States). It was truly a global affair. Beyond safety in numbers for a surprisingly sketchy pass, it was quite a wonderful bunch to share such grandeur and good times with. Interestingly, now that I’ve read The Flight of the Eagle, the quote atop this letter means something quite different to me than it did when I first read it. It’s fascinating to see how much our past paints our interpretation of the present, especially of the words we encounter. As an exercise in understanding and excuse to suggest some remarkable reading, I encourage you to pick up a copy and see how the meaning of those words might evolve for you, because I’ve found that evolution pretty profound in me. It’s a book one has to work to stay with, but the reward is an unusually large dividend of self-understanding. I also read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry on the trail. Turns out we think there are one-hundred billion stars in our galaxy and one-hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Again, that’s 100,000,000,000 stars in a galaxy and 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe! To call the Earth a spec of dust in the cosmos would be to give too much credit. Doesn’t that just make all worries and problems and ambitions seem utterly microscopic? Like contemplating death, I been thinking a lot about the unfathomable immensity of the universe lately and see it a similar route to improving our perspective of what truly matters in life. Enjoy it all, eh! With love & stoke, Ethan P.S. Below is a musing I recorded on “why I venture out.” Set to one of my favorite songs and overlayed with clips from my wanderings, I was quite surprised by how well it came out. Give it a watch. If the spirit moves you, I’d appreciate if you shared it with an adventure buddy or two :)
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