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We were welcomed at the airport today by Elsie James and Rakesh, from Ecological Treks and Tours. Elsie has been corresponding with me via email for almost a year now I think, and it was lovely to finally meet her. She is an energetic retiree from Canada who fell in love with Nepal in 1995 and has been half living here since then. She still treks avidly, and went on the Annapurna Circuit again last year.

Their office is above the Tashi Deleg Tibetan restaurant, where I enjoyed a bowl of thukpa (soup noodles) this time last year. We were very impressed by the professionalism of their company. Rakesh is married to a Korean woman, and speaks the language fluently, as we found out today when he was conversing with a Korean couple that came in!

We met our guide, Pratab, and our porter, Kaji, today. I think we will be very happy with them. We are off at 6am tomorrow on our first trek!

We were fortunate enough to have come across a fantastic woman called Elsie James, who has organised our treks for us down to the finest details.

She is Canadian and spends a lot of time in Nepal, organising humanitarian things as far as I can tell. Elsie obviously knows a lot about trekking as well and has been such a valuable source of information on how to plan our treks down to a tailored day-to-day itinerary.

The trekking company she is organising our treks through is Ecological Treks and Tours www.nepaltreks4u.com

We decided on two treks - the Annapurna Circuit, which takes 19 days and over the formidable pass of Thorung La at 5400m (note: more than half way to Everest!!), and the Everest Base Camp trek, which takes about 15 days and which doesn’t actually take us to the foot of Everest per se (you can’t see Everest from Base Camp) but we will get good views of Everest from the summit of Kala Pattar.

They’re both classic Nepal treks, and we will be staying in “tea houses” along the way - they are little guest houses that are tacked on to a family home, and usually consist of a basic room with a cement floor, two plank beds, and two wonderfully thick quilts that make for the best sleep ever! Electricity supply and toilet facilities are fairly basic (sometimes non-existent - once we were sent to bed with a candle and a matchbox for lighting!)

We went to the Travel Doctor clinic on Friday to get information on vaccinations etc for Nepal.
It’s not a bad service as they do know a lot about their vaccines, and you probably get the vaccines for cheaper. We also didn’t get charged a gap for the actual consultation fee, although I’m not sure if this was because he knew I was a doctor too.
Otherwise there wasn’t a great deal that I didn’t already know and wouldn’t already talk about to a traveller who came in to see me for travel advice ie.
1. Food hygiene
2. Mosquitoes
3. travel insurance
4. Safe sex

The necessary vaccines for Nepal at the moment are:
The usual suspects ie updates on Tetanus, Polio, Measles Mumps and Rubella
Hep A/Typhoid
Recommended - Rabies, Hepatitis B

Hep B is probably most useful in the event of an accident requiring an urgent blood transfusion in a country that probably doesn’t screen its blood supplies - or in travellers who anticipate mingling with the locals (or other travellers) intimately, so to speak. (Hopefully not an issue for us..!)

We chose to have Rabies shots, because there are so many dogs in Nepal, and because the disease is pretty horrible if you do get it - the virus can lay dormant for years and manifest in awful neurological sequelae many years down the track, leaving you ticking like a neurological time bomb… The uncertainty of it alone would destroy me! Plus, it’s pretty hard to get evacuated out to get hold of some Rabies immunoglobulin, which should be given within 24 hours of being bitten.

It’s a rather complicated affair starting with three shots then a blood test and a fourth shot if we don’t develop enough immunity…. which would mean that we will need to get the fourth shot while in Malaysia!! interesting….

Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt getting two vaccines in the same arm (I got Typhoid as well) and interestingly, the Rabies vaccine is a fluorescent purple colour! Cool!