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We leave Kathmandu tomorrow to travel to Besi Sahar by bus, and will start our trek on Wed 11 April. By Monday April 16 we will be in Manang at 3535 m and will have a rest day in Manang on Tuesday April 17. On the weekend of Sat 21 April we will be crossing our biggest hurdle - the Thorung La pass at 5400m. After Thorung La it’s all downhill, and we get to have another rest day at Tatopani, a hot springs town, on April 26. We finish our trek on April 27 and pass through Pokhara on the way back to Kathmandu, arriving there on Sunday April 29.

Spare a thought for us next weekend, when we brave the snowy high pass of Thorung La!

CJ has never been a particularly active person, and up to a few years ago could not even jog for longer than five minutes. She was roped into going to Nepal by her then boyfriend Vincent in 2002. She had her first taste of trekking there, loved it, and spent the next few weeks reading about Everest summits and mountaineering. She has no aspirations to tackle mountaineering, but she does enjoy the active life now much more than she ever did.
Apart from trekking, she also enjoys snowboarding, and has been to ski resorts in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. She also enjoys cooking for Vincent, now her husband, as well as travelling, karaoke, reading investment books, and lying about the house in general. She does not like housework, spiders or heights.
By day she is a mild-mannered doctor, working in a family clinic in the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. Her special interests are acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, and she took three years off from 2001 to study Traditional Chinese Medicine full time at university.
She was born in Malaysia and her ancestors came from China. She lives with her husband Vincent in Melbourne, and her parents, brother and sister-in-law and adorable niece Emma live in Perth.

Vincent has no time to write his profile so I am doing it for him. Vincent’s motto goes something along the lines of “If it hurts it will make you stronger” and he enjoys martial arts (Wing Chun and Tai Ji), body boarding, snowboarding, and drinking sake. His dream would be to live in Canada and snowboard every weekend, or else to spend a season just snowboarding at different resorts around the world. He also enjoys food, and will try anything if it is the local specialty, and he especially loves Middle Eastern food, Raju’s roti canai, teh tarik, and anything with chorizo in it.

By day (and often at night too) he runs several websites, including a successful directory of entertainment in Melbourne, though his aim is to be unchained from the computer and chase the waves (or the snow) while his websites run themselves (or, someone else runs them). He was also born in Malaysia and his dad, sister and her four kids still live in KL. He dislikes boredom, people who copy ideas, and green vegetables.

I went to the Travel Doctor clinic yesterday to get my last rabies shot. It wasn’t the Melbourne clinic but the Perth (Fremantle) one, as I am visiting family in Perth this weekend.

The doctor met with me before the nurse gave me my shot, ostensibly for legal reasons, but really just to have a chat! He gave me a long handout on altitude sickness, and then proceeded to give me a short version of a presentation he was about to give on GP happiness and wellbeing.

It’s a well known fact to the medical profession that there are a lot of unhappy and burnt out GPs - apparently they tend to be in the 35-49 yo age group, male, and more likely to be the practice principal and work longer hours. Nothing surprising.

He did talk a lot about how GPs could “keep the hot air balloon afloat”, as he called it. It was a lovely acronym called HAPPINESS, and I can’t remember all of it, but our big trip to Nepal does cover a lot of it, which is really why I am doing this, I think… to remain a sane and happy doctor?!?! Some of the things I remember are:

Exercise - I don’t think we will ever be as active as we will be on this trip, with 6 weeks of trekking! Plus the “training” that we are supposed to be doing beforehand (which seems to have slipped off a little, but never mind… I did go for a 6km run yesterday). My approach to “holidays” has slowly changed from wanting to do nothing to wanting to do everything (physically), and hopefully this will translate to a lifelong commitment to keeping active, which is vital in staying happy and sane.

Nurture important relationships - This will be the only trip that V and I will make this year that is just the two of us! All our trips recently have been with other people, which is lots of fun, of course, but this trip is different… Hopefully our relationship will be “nurtured” during the trip!

Spirituality - refers to seeing the meaning in life and in doing the things that you are doing, and believing in some higher power or force than yourself. This doens’t have to mean a religious higher power, although many people do find this highly spiritual of course. For me, spirituality on this trip will mean having a respect for the awesome power of nature - the towering mountain ranges of the Himalayas, and Mt Everest. There will also be lots of time spent away from computers, email, schedules, bills, appointments, and all the trappings of our busy modern life, time spent in meditative hard slog, time spent in simple rhythms of wake, walk, eat, sleep - and time to remember that there is more to life than the rat race that we are running.

Hmmm I cannot seem to remember what the Ps stand for?!

So that’s it. I am making this trip to save my career!

Nepal is a beautiful but extremely poor country that has a very special place in our hearts. It was here that we got engaged, after climbing to the summit of our trek – Poon Hill, at 3210m. It was here where we fell in love with the amazing landscape, with its formidable mountain ranges, and also with its even more amazing people. As we trekked through their back yards, tiny Nepalese children would offer us beaming smiles, hand picked flowers, and walking sticks, in exchange for nothing more than our greeting of Namaste. The Nepalese are a gentle people, but they are also very entertaining – as we found out on the night of our engagement when we gatecrashed an impromptu party in the tiny village of Tatapani. We only had time for a five day trek in the Annapurna region, but resolved that we would one day return to climb the entire Annapurna circuit.

During our short visit in 2003, we encountered two deaths. On one occasion, we were travelling by rickety taxi from the end of our trek back to Pokhara, and our taxi driver stopped to speak to a motorcyclist for a few minutes. Five minutes later, an ambulance came racing past, and we learnt that that same motorcyclist had been run over, ironically, by the ambulance, and was pretty much close to death, but was being rushed to the nearest hospital anyway.

The other death was in Ghorepani. The trekking party was in high spirits one night, and the porters started singing some bawdy Nepali songs. The landlord came over and requested that they stop singing. Apparently one of the young girls of the village had taken ill after drinking cow’s blood as part of a ritual. She complained of abdominal pain, and when her condition deteriorated someone carried her on their back to try to reach the nearest health post, which was 2 days away. She died on the way.

Nepal had given us so many unforgettable experiences in such a short space of time. We wanted to not only return and trek the spectacular mountainous regions, but also to give back to these beautiful and generous people, who gave with their whole hearts and expected so little in return.