A team from the British Gurkha Camp here in Kathmandu have just returned from three weeks away, trekking around Dhaulagiri. They have been climbing in severe weather conditions, sleeping in ice encrusted tents and enduring all sorts of hard ships that I am quite happy to read about whilst sitting on my backside eating a bar of chocolate!

There is trekking and trekking in this country. It is undoubtedly the best way to see Nepal as most of it is untouchable by road and it's people walk everywhere.

I like the sort of trekking that enables legs and eyes to work at the same time. But the sort that means that your lungs burn and you have to concentrate so hard on where you are putting your next step that you simply don't care what is going on around you, is definitely not for me!

The horrible creeping feeling of dread that comes over you when you realise that you are going to let other people down, because you can't manage that final push over that 'final' hill. Words that come back to haunt you like 'don't worry, just around the next bend', or 'just over that rise and you'll be at the top'. Haven't we all been there? I never really saw the point of having to get 'to the top', especially here.

Why, I wonder to myself, do us tourists dress ourselves in gear', throwing ourselves at the paths ascending above us when the local people one meets wear flip flops and never do you see them hurrying at a hill? Do they take the time to watch an errant donkey escaping from it's bamboo fenced paddock and get chased by quick footed girls who throw stones with unerring accuracy to steer the animal back home?

The sights that they could miss, the silent flight of a red kite so close that you could touch it, the tiny primulas clinging to a damp rock face, looking above your head to the incredible canopy of rhodedendron leaves in the forests, glimpses of snow capped tops beyond. Surely striving for the next peak, pushing on and on must lose its appeal when you can stop and stare.

However, I have to admit that sometimes striving for the top is worth it. I went trekking in February in the Annapurna Sanctuary with a friend. On the third day we crawled out of our sleeping bags like reluctant slugs at 5 am in the pitch black darkness and climbed up Poon Hill for the sunrise.

The previous day we had walked for nine hours, mostly up vertical hillsides, and I had arrived in the village of Ghoripani badly in need of sustenance, and a warm bed. The thought of those two things had kept me going for the last few hours of that walk.

I felt like weeping that morning as I left the warmth, swung my legs onto the floor, tried to stand up and discovered that my legs were flatly refusing to function. Every step up that hill was torturous. The torch that I had brought proved redundant as I found that unless I kept my hands up, they swelled to sausages and threatened to explode, so I couldn't carry my torch.

And, every step was made worse by horrible, horrible people overtaking me and skipping up the hill like goats, calling to each other and obviously having a high old time. Going up Poon Hill for the sunrise is obviously a must for every traveller in the area, as it was like going up The Old Man mid season.

Here the porters all knew each other and I suppose the convergence of them all in one area made for the party like atmosphere of the short expedition. Once we got up to the top and recovered enough to look around in the grey dawn breaking sky, there was about, I should think, sixty or seventy people up there. They all congregated around the viewing tower and the tent serving hot black tea and chocolate, which some enterprising person had thought of. There was a suggestion that I should climb the fifty or so more steps up the tower to use the telescope but I declined, took myself off to a quiet rock, nursed my cup of tea and contemplated the scenery and the ache in my legs.

As the sun came up, touching one peak after another, lighting the whole panorama of those majestic mountains all around us, turning the snow orange with it's light I was completely overawed. A great cheer went up from behind us as the sun's rays struck the first top.

I felt their noise a real intrusion, breaking the honour of witnessing such magnitude.

We are all such minute specks of nothingness in comparison with the vastness of what I could see laid out in front of me. I have always known that humans want to stand at the top of the world, conquer mountains, go through the extremes of endurance to reach their goals but until that moment when the sun came up, I never really understood. I also now know that those experiences are ones that I will only ever read about, I am too small.

May 6, 2003 16:00