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She falls for apple crumble

I was feeling dreamy and didn’t know if it was fatigue, starvation, or the thinning air that had put me in that state. It followed me everywhere I went over the next few days, from the Annapurna Base Camp back down along the Modi Valley, with its strawberry bushes and chocolate-colored river, to Tatopani, then north toward the Tibetan Plateau, through brown- colored mountains that resembled upside-down sugar cones. By then my knees ached and my feet were swollen from the steep, rocky terrain, but I was past the halfway mark so there was no way I would turn around. Luckily, the scenery kept me going as I made my way north along Kaligandaki’s dry riverbed, passing through stone villages with colorful prayer flags and Tibetan temples, as well as big cornfields and clear views of the towering, snow-capped mountains.

I used my last rupees
to buy a Snickers bar and then climbed up a hill overlooking the Tibetan village of Kagbeni,
where I was staying.

I arrived in a small village called Kalopani around dinnertime, day eight, with my pants drooping down to my hipbones. I was being stripped of all body fat—every Tim Tam, martabak, and mysorepak that had set up camp on my waistline, as well as every fruit, vegetable, rice dish, and loaf of bread that I’d enjoyed over the last month. Purges toxins, I reminded myself. No more MSG, caffeine, and artificial preservatives. No ammonium bicarbonates or potassium sorbates. Purge those red and green and yellow food colorings! Plus the mounds and mounds of palm sugar and butter—gone!—not to mention all that fried dough I’ve eaten lately. So unhealthy. Just follow that trail and purge those toxins! Focus on the mountains and keep on moving. Keep… on… moving!

The landscape around Kalopani was so dramatic that it seemed unreal. Out of one bedroom window, 23,000-foot mountains glowed under the setting sun, as it reflected off ice packed into their crevices. Through another window, I caught a glimpse of snowy, chiseled mountains that rose into the air like steps, as if beckoning me toward them. And out my door, a smooth, slate-like wall of rock culminated in knife-edge points, 9,000 feet above me. When my neck began to ache from looking up, I watched women working the rice fields around the village and listened to mules clicking along a cobblestone street. The sound of their hooves reminded me of popcorn crackling against the top of a pot.

My wallet and waistline were definitely shrinking. I was down to $8.50 and probably a good ten pounds lighter. I could also feel my willpower dissolving as stories about food began filtering down the trail. The farther north I went, talk among travelers turned more and more to Marpha, a village on the Jomsom Trail, and more specifically to the apple pie served at guesthouses there. Trekkers I met seemed less concerned with hot showers and solariums than with which guesthouses served more hot custard on their apple crumbles. And boy, I knew what they meant. They were speaking my language now.

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I arrived in Marpha day nine, after six hours hiking along a riverbed past Dhauligiri, whose peak, at one point, stood one-and-a-half vertical miles above me. I was impressed by that as much as I was awed by the amount of yellow custard the cook at Neeru Guesthouse put on my apple crumble. Yes, I had broken down and ordered a big slice. It was a moment of weakness and I knew it meant no food my last day on the trail, but maybe I could sell a roll of film or my rain pants. I just couldn’t face another plate of potatoes. That’s all I’d had—potatoes, potatoes, and lots of rice. Those were the cheapest things on every menu, so I had potatoes for breakfast and rice for dinner. I bulked it up with ketchup. But not that night! No, that night, I sat in the dining room for an hour, chewing the crumble slowly and letting the flavors linger on my tongue until they had found every taste bud at least twice. Then I stashed the last bite in my cheek until it began to taste sour.

Drugged, that’s how I felt. My hunger, which had once nourished and propelled me, was just tempting and toying with me—or torturing me. My second-to-last day hiking, I had a horrible revelation that nearly turned me off food altogether. As I was preparing the last of my noodle soups, I realized those black things floating around weren’t just specks of teapot debris or dehydrated vegetables. They were dozens of freeloading, shriveled-up bugs. I checked the expiration date and discovered these soups—"Good price for you, Auntie"—had expired four years ago. I felt nauseated thinking about how I’d eaten eight of these infested soups on this trip. Not only that, they had often been the main source of nourishment during my skimpy meals. That’s re-PUL-sive!

As a consolation, I used my last rupees to buy a Snickers bar and then climbed up a hill overlooking the Tibetan village of Kagbeni, where I was staying. I found a spot where I could look out over the stunning, green wheat fields, which whispered and swayed in a strong breeze. The dry riverbed next to Kagbeni wound out of sight, like a long string of licorice, heading deep into forbidden Mustang country. In the far distance were brown, fluted hillsides with glacial mountains as a backdrop. Here, I sat on a rock and ate The Snickers.

Out of food, money, and energy, I decided to cut the trekking time, though not the distance, a day short. I spent the last day covering 16 miles (a ten-hour walk), making my way north along a pilgrimage route to a temple at Muktinath and then retracing my steps south. During the final hours of my hike, I walked along a totally exposed mountainside to Kagbeni and then across a wide and dry, rocky riverbed to Jomsom. The winds in this region are fierce in the afternoon and gale-force gusts nearly flattened me. Walking took all the energy I could muster, and by the time I reached Jomsom, where I would fly out the next day, I had torn muscles around both knees from struggling to step forward.

I told the lodge owner at Rita Guesthouse I wouldn’t be eating dinner—"upset stomach," I said—and retreated to my room. As I lay in bed reflecting on the trip, I realized that over the course of twelve days, I had skipped fourteen meals and survived merely on rice and potatoes, plus my infested soups and chocolate bars as fillers, and that whopping big bowl of apple crumble. In the end, I figured I’d lost fifteen pounds, two love handles, and my (face) cheeks, and developed Olympic legs. But I’d gained a greater appreciation of food, a transformative experience, and an amazing sense of satisfaction from having completed the 115-mile hike. I fell asleep that night dreaming about corn bread and apple crumble, and about all the food I would eat as soon as I arrived back in Pokhara.

Kari Bodnarchuk is the author of Rwanda: Country Torn Apart and Kurdistan: Region Under Siege, two children’s books in a World in Conflict series. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Islands, Backpacker, The Christian Science Monitor, LIFE: The Greatest Adventures of All Time, The Unsavvy Traveler: Women’s Comic Tales of Catastrophe, and Travelers’ Tales Australia and Gutsy Women. From her home in Boston, she is currently writing Tales from A-Broad, about her 18-month solo trip around the world.