@emily2u 11 April 2021 more from that month

Today, I feel like sharing about my epic hiking trip in Nepal. While I usually share about my trips on social media, I hardly ever share about the "behind the scenes" stuff or anecdotes but I feel that noise.cash is just the right platform for me to do so. It's funny how the longer we are at a place, the more familiar we get. The sad part is that after being comfortable, we had to leave already. This was in May/June 2019. I spent about 5 - 6 days up in the mountains to explore part of the 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐬𝐥𝐮 𝐂𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐮𝐢𝐭 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐤.  I was promptly down with gastritis on the first night of arrival. I used to suffer from gastric when I was schooling but it has since been cured and I didn't have any attack for so many years that I actually forgot about it. One of my travel mates had gastric medication with her as she is also a sufferer.... She let me have the medication, which I ate all and managed to keep further attacks at bay. There wasn't much food to eat up on the mountains when I was there. Vegetables were the size of grass blades that I have in my compound at home. Yak meat was luxury but they were cut to the size of minced pork here in Malaysia. Besides, I don't take beef and yak is under the same meat category. In Cantonese, yak is known as "furry cow". LMAO! Another luxury food item was instant noodles. This was carried up by labourers from lowland villages. As you can imagine, it wasn't cheap at all, about MYR10 per bowl of plain instant noodles and a couple of "grass" blades. Due to my gastric, I knew I couldn't eat any of the instant noodles but really, there wasn't any choice for me. I alerted that friend, owner of the gastric meds, that as sufferers, we really should abstain from instant noodles. Similarly, she had no choice as well. And after 3 days, she too came down with gastritis and worse, she had no medication with her anymore as I had finished them all! Ahaha! Yes, I owe her.  In the first picture here is a parent and baby dzo enjoying life just gazing into the horizon. The black patches on the ground are actually animal dung. On my first day of trekking, I was sidestepping every piece but as the days went by, and we had to "picnic", our excuse to just take a break from the strenuous task of walking up the mountain and we took such a break MANY, MANY times every day, I had no qualms sitting next to these dried animal shit! The locals, though, would use bare hands to touch these pieces (which they take home to light fire), and then eat with their unwashed hands. That made me go, "Ewwww..." and one local woman asked me, "What?" and promptly wiped her hands all over me (my clothes) .... laughing hysterically. WTF, man? 🤦‍♀️ #Travel