Journey Into the Himalayas 🇳🇵 - Part 1 of 2

I am in the middle of the Himalayan mountain ranges and the highest mountain peaks in the whole world are all around me and this is only just a glimpse of the insane stuff that you can see over here. Let me take you on the four-day journey that got me here. Okay so this is day one and it's like almost 9 a.m and we're heading out to the first stop going with my guide for the trip Prakash to the bus stop. All right so I am in Pokhara, second most populous city in Nepal if remember right at an elevation of 800 meters and there's like a gorgeous lake right next to the town and I'm here because this is where most people come to chill or like set up base before they all head out and all these treks such as the Annapurna circuit or the Annapurna base camp and all these other places. I'm going on this trek called the Maruti Himal trek which is supposed to take three nights and four days. It's supposed to be like kind of intense for as far as treks that go around here but it's supposed to be one of the most scenic ones too if the weather allows. Okay so that was the first bus now we get on another bus we probably have to change a few buses because we're not taking private transport. Bus number two this is more of what we'd call a microbus in other parts in South Asia. I just got my first ever glimpses of the Himalayas a 7,000 meter high thing called mountain fishtail which I always must have thought was just the clouds. Since I'm stuck here I want to take a moment to like talk about all the winter clothes and stuff that I had to get for this trek. I'm not going to go over my usual stuff like the camera gear and drone stuff because I went over that in a different video I'll link it here but I'll talk about the extra winter clothes that I had to buy just for this hike. So this trekking pole I actually rented out from Pokhara for like five or six days for like 50 Nepalese rupees a day. So that's just my camera bag with like a poncho inside it there's like no other space to put it. This is like a pair of gloves that I already had so I didn't need to buy this. This is my down jacket that I also rented out for like 150 rupees a day for the next five days. This is like the biggest thickest jacket that I'll wear when it gets really cold. These are most of my other clothes. I got a pair of thermal inners and thermal outers. I got like a quick dry towel and I got like two pair of woolen socks on top of the ones that I'm wearing right now and I have like a fleece jacket which is supposed to be worn under the down jacket and I have these things called like gaiters which is very interesting. Basically like I didn't even know what it was before I was here but these are basically uh covers like waterproof covers that you put on top of your shoes starting from like the mid of your shins so your shoes don't get like wet or your socks don't get wet if it's raining or snowing too much. Super useful. Forgot about the hat that's in there too. All my charging stuff. So I rented out the down jacket and the walking pole from here but everything else like literally everything else except for the gloves and the beanie I bought from this really cool store in Kathmandu. Let me show you. I'd say the best place to get all your clothes for cheaper to buy them at least would be in Tamil, this neighborhood in Kathmandu where all the tourists and especially the backpacker travelers come and stay. I got all my stuff from this shop right here for a very reasonable price and sort of became friends with the owner who has a really cool story. He was working in Korea for five years so he knew a lot of Bangladeshis there and then he saved up a lot of money by sending money back home and then he opened this store and he's like living a happy life with his own business and everything. Speaking of remittances if you're dealing with the hassle of sending money to Bangladesh from abroad you should really check out this app called TapTapSend. TapTapSend is a very simple app that allows you to send money to Bangladesh from the US, Canada, UK and from Europe. There's a lot of really good reasons to use TapTapSend. First of all there's no transaction fee on any of your transfers. Number two the exchange rates are awesome. Number three the transaction times are pretty fast compared to most competitors. Number four this is a unique one you can send money to Bangladesh through TapTapSend and send it to either a bank account or directly to a Bcash account. And number five I've been talking with the people from TapTapSend and they've given a special discount for my viewers so if you send money through TapTapSend and use the code OTG on your first ever transaction you get a 10 credit bonus. It means if you're sending money from the US you get a 10 dollar bonus. If you're sending money from Canada you get a 10 Canadian dollar bonus. If you're sending money from the UK you get a 10 pound bonus. If you're sending money from Europe you get a 10 euro bonus. So if you do need to send money from abroad to Bangladesh make sure you check out TapTapSend. All right now let us get back to Pokhara. By the way on top of all of that I'm also wearing my hiking shoes that I've had since Hawaii. Some knee braces because both my knees are fucked up. Some shorts because it's not going to be that cold till the second or third day. Namaste. So for this four day hike I brought 10 snicker bars to keep me energized and give me diabetes. Okay we're eating the very standard Nepali food called Dal Bhat for lunch and this is very simple it's very commonly eaten but it's cheap here because we're like still on the way once you get to the top to the tea houses it's going to get a lot more expensive. It's common to eat this with your hands but I don't want to wash my hands right now. Apparently it's very dangerous to eat or drink tap water in Kathmandu. No one does that not even people from Nepal but it gets more and more safe the higher up you go in the Himalayas. There are people who actually do drink tap water. Now we're taking a jeep to go high up to 600 meters to Thampus. Okay so we're at this small village of Thampas at 1600 meters and this is where we'll like begin the hike and you can already see it's like super foggy compared to like Pokhara right now. Actual trek begins right here. So we're starting from here and the goal is to go somewhere like over there. Lasted a solid 20 minutes before I had to take the shirt off from sweating too much. I just brought only one shirt and if this gets wet I don't really have anything else to wear later. Contrary to what I expected there's like really nice stairs here. We're taking a break in this very small town because my guide and my porter needs a break they're carrying the really heavy stuff. I'm just carrying my camera stuff so it's not that bad. By the way this whole trip was organized for me by this company called Himalayan 360 that's based in Kathmandu. I happened to come across them and they like set me up with basically everything here with the guide, the porter. I did the contract signing and stuff that you have to do to get some permits to be able to like hike the Himalayas. It's like very official stuff but they handled all that smoothly as well so I was able to come right here and get on this hike. That turkey scared the ---- out of me. I didn't know there were turkeys in Nepal. This feels a lot like the hikes in Hawaii. It's just colder right now. Okay it's drizzling a little bit but nothing too bad yet. By the way, rules for hiking for Pipi go 10 meters away from the trail and for Pupu go 20 meters away from the trail. Okay we're at this viewpoint called Pitam Deoralis. Apparently you can usually see Bokara behind me that way. You can see the lake usually but it's too foggy right now. So the good thing about these trails is that they're very very well marked so it's very hard to get lost. So I had something on my shoes and my socks and as I was cleaning it with my hands and my leaves I was like is this mud and it's like no it's buffalo poopoos. Lots of bugs and stuff just flying around my face. I'm having to like swat them away every few seconds. I'm at this like viewpoint and I found this baby goat. It's like four days old, like a little baby. Okay so we're at this gorgeous viewpoint and I think we're done ascending for the first day because it's drizzling a little bit. I don't know if you can tell and there's like very black clouds in the And the next stop would be forest camp. I'm just gonna rest at a tea house here. The rest of the family is here. Okay so in some bad news my drone is not working at all. This is an issue that I've sort of had before at the end of Sri Lanka and I think I know what I have to do fix it but in order to fix it I have to go back to Bokara. So I think tomorrow we can wake up really early like five six, get it solved and then like get back here. It's gonna be a very heavy day of hiking. It's gonna be like six seven hours of hiking but there's no really other way because I'm not making a video of this trek without like the ridiculous drone shots that I could get here. So this is where I'll be staying tonight. It's like very basic accommodation, nothing too fancy and it's costing me 300 rupees which I think is not a bad deal at all and the food is actually like kind of expensive. It's like double of what you'd pay at a restaurant down in a city. So that's where they make most of the money not from the accommodation but from the food which is kind of pricey so bring a lot of Snickers. Amazing. All right so it's 7 30 pm and I am about to go to bed because we gotta wake up at 5 30 or no 5 15, make that trip. So I thought 300 rupees was actually gonna get me a shared room but looks like I'm getting this whole room and I can get as many blankets as I want. So I'll take that. So it's 5 30 am and it's a lot brighter than I thought it was going to be at this hour. By the way it's really really cold. Stuck. Can you help him? Yeah. Okay. He's running away. So this cow is stuck with like some wooden stuff around his head and won't let us help him. He just runs away. Left at 6 am this morning from the tea house. Hiked down for two and a half hours. Got a bus and then minibus to get to the place where we're like fixing this drone phone connection. Took like freaking three and a half hours to get what we wanted but it finally seems like I'll have a functioning drone. So then we got a taxi for 2700 rupees all the way here and now we started the hike 15 minutes ago and yesterday we kind of stopped at 3 pm because usually it's not recommended to like keep hiking after 3 pm because apparently if you're stuck in the dark it's pretty dangerous. Leeches and even animals like bears and deer could like be a big problem. But today we're gonna go as far as we possibly can before sunset because it's very important if you want to finish the hike in even five days to make a lot of progress today. And the good thing is that we left our bags up there so we can just walk this part without anything heavy except for my drone. So we're back where we started this morning right when it started raining. But we still want to make it to forest camp. I think we're gonna put a raincoat on and just head out. All right so we're heading out to the next spot and it's like I think 5 5 30 and I think it's gonna be two hours of walking. It's definitely gonna be dark by the time we get there. So my guide just was asking me if I have music on my phone. He said I need loud music on my phone to keep the bears away when it gets dark. Make these noises so the bears don't come for us. Okay so that route that was supposed to take us like two hours ended up taking up like 15 minutes and we made it here at 6 40 right before sunset and the sun's going down right now. And I think we made it fast because I was scared of being attacked by bears. I was definitely not stopping how tired no matter how tired I was and I was pretty damn tired. Anyways we're at this tea house we could go to forest camp from here which is where people usually stop which is at the same elevation that is like around 2650 meters. They're saying it's like a solid like one hour walk away and definitely don't want to do that walk in the in the rain and in the darkness because I already saw some leeches on my raincoat. So today was 23 kilometers of walking and a lot of steps and we went up a total of like 1100 meters if I'm doing the math right and we went down 600 meters in the middle. It's too cold to take a shower but I changed everything basically because everything was drenched. I'm trying to try to dry it by these beds in this room which I think I have to myself. So if you don't like seeing blood and if you get squeamish this might be a good time to skip this video by one minute. Basically apparently when I was climbing up in the rain there was a big leech on my raincoat and I didn't even realize when I took it off that it had taken like a massive chunk of blood out of my neck and I just noticed like three hours later there's just like a lot of dried blood on my beard. Now it hurts a little bit. How much dried blood is there? What is that thing? The leech. It's in a f***ing leech! Jesus Christ! There's like a leech right in front of me right there. All healed. I was about to go to bed and Prashant bhai just called me outside and I just saw something that's like freaking surreal. The sky is so clear and you can see the peaks of the Himalayas. This is not something that's even picked up on video but I was able to use night photography to get these cool ass photos. It's 6 a.m right now and contrary to yesterday when it was super clear you could see all the Himalayas. The visibility is absolute shite today. I tried to take my drone out for a flight this morning but yeah not much you could see once you're like 10 meters away from the ground basically. Today's breakfast is like literally identical to yesterday's breakfast. The only difference is that like everything is 50% more expensive. Even though we're like only 400 meters higher I hear it's just gonna keep getting more and more expensive the higher you go. Okay we're starting day three basically at 8 a.m because I was a little lazy. So I just realized the only way to get your clothes dry is to keep it on top of this like fire heating thing in the tea house common area because I try to get it dry in my room. Didn't dry one bit. This video is getting a bit too big so I'm gonna split this into two parts. I'll catch you guys in the next part when I get to the Himalayas viewpoints. And follow me on Instagram. We can see the first rays of golden light behind the Himalayas over there. Camera's out. Show's about to begin.