Yes, we admit it. We did it. We just did what everyone does – we went trekking at the Annapurna. And we can say: Everyone is right, the Annapurna region is just an amazing hiking area.

The physically most exhausting part we had to endure at the beginning and at the end of our excursion from Kathmandu: Riding the bus is hard work in Nepal: The seats are designed for people of maybe half the height of ours and probably one third of our leg length. On the other hand, in order to enhance blood circulation, the Nepalese build their roads as bumpy as possible and carefully avoid to construct cars with shock absorber. Nevertheless, on Saturday evening we safely arrived at our hostel in Pokhara, shaken like a Polarroid picture. “We”, again, are not two, but three: Tamara took holidays from her internship and we travelled together. We benefited a lot from her, because she is physically fit and a great travel mate with whom you can joke and talk about nearly everything, except the most important topic on earth: football (soccer).

Since Tamara had only limited holidays, we decided to go on the “Annapurna Circuit“, do one half of this three-weeks-trek and return by bus. On the first day we started from Nayapul, walked some hours and were really lucky in the choice of our lodge: They had satellite-TV with an Indian channel that broadcasts the German Bundesliga. So we were able to watch the match “Eintracht Frankfurt” against “Mainz 05″ while sitting in a lodge in the middle of the Himalayas! With the match itself we were not so lucky, it was deserved 0:0 with an entertainment factor on the level of cricket ….

The next days we kept ascending, reaching one highlight of the trip at “Poon Hill”. From this mountain of only 3200m of altitude you have a great view on the Annapurna and the Dhaulagiri range, which both comprise a summit of more than 8000m. Especially at sunrise this is an incredible panorama, and it is worth the effort walking up at 5 o’clock. Actually getting up that early was not too hard for us, but for Tamara it was PURE fun – NOT.

From “Poon Hill” on, the path was remarkably not touristy, you do not see more than one trekker per hour. This means that most visitors miss the very best, because the trail gets more and more awesome while walking up to Muktinath, where you reach 4000m. At first, it is Alpine, then it seems more like a Scandinavian fjord-landscape, before, when passing Jomsom, the mountains get dry and dusty like you know it from pictures of Afghanistan. And at the very end, at the great final, the scenery is incomparably Himalayan! Just watch the pictures, but be aware that they are only able to capture a fracture of the fascination this landscape actually has.

In the guest-houses, people were friendlier than they were in Kathmandu, especially in the rather remote villages. Also with Tibetans we have made good experiences – never thought we would say something like this after they tried to poison us. However, you always should be careful that no one cheats on you, because also in the mountain region this is the aim of many people. In particular with the bus system we had some bad experiences. The sellers were extremely unfriendly, it seems they tried to compete with the Chinese officers in Hong Kong. They did not want to help us and the bus connections in the Annapura region are awful: Timetables do not match, tourists have to pay at least twice as much as locals and the company cares more about the question whether each passenger sits exactly on the seat written on his ticket than on security or reliability issues. And when we decided to drive some kilometers by bus to save time (which afterwards turned out to be unnecessary, because we walked fast enough), we had another bad episode. The bus was, like always, a bit late and it was already getting dark. Unfortunately, the driver missed the village where we had wanted to hop off and get a hotel. He realized it too late and at the next houses he told us this was the village we were looking for. So at the end, we had to walk (fortunately only) half an hour through the dark to find a guest-house. A Chinese driver never, never would have been so untrustworthy!

Probably, those rather bad experiences with Nepalis partly influenced our decision to walk on our own, without a guide. But luckily, we figured out that for us, a guide was definitely not necessary: the hike is in a really good shape, people in the villages help you finding the right way, locals can still explain you at which peaks you are currently looking, and going alone was much more fun, because you can stay flexible all the time. On the other hand, maybe a guide helps having less hassles and stress when it comes to all rather commercial interactions with the locals.

However, with the passengers in the buses things were different. On one occasion we travelled with some wedding guests who were singing all the time – probably to push away the fear induced by the rims approximately 20 centimeters away from the heavily shaking bus. Also on the way back to Pokhara, passengers were fine, willing to help us and even invited us to eat some apples. We hope that this impression of Nepalis will be prevailing here in the time to come ….