Foggy morning. Still groggy from the antibiotics, innards scrambled from the Guardia virus that had re-manifested after the gastroenteritis that had nearly finished me in Varanasi, I took my first tentative steps on wobbly legs on a 2,500 meter ascent over three mountains with my wondrous concubine on an eight day trek to Annapurna base camp high up in the Himalayas (4,800 meters elevation). We had bought a two week trekking permit, of which I had spend the first four days of the duration re-lapsing in a guest room in Pokhara. I did not feel ready yet, but we couldn’t blow the passes we had already paid for. The clock was ticking.

The first steps of the trek were congested, disorienting. The thin air was getting thinner with every step. Passing us coming off the mountain were weary travelers, the most ominous being the several young ladies being carried in straw baskets on the backs of porters with glazed and faded looks in their eyes. I looked at my concubine, she stared back bravely at me--without a word we said a silent prayer that we would not need such assistance. The village was commercial, dusty, filled with unsightly pandering merchants vending trinkets that only represented heavier baggage as we embarked on a journey into the unknown.

We walked on well-worn rocks, jaggedly cut into the mountain trail turf as some kind of rudimentary pavement that simply served to make our steps slippery and awkward on the wet slabs of concrete. It was morning, but it was as murky as a foggy evening in London. And for all we could see, we could have been on a cobblestone street in London, only the porters and worn down trekkers coming out of the fog to pass us in the opposite direction reminding of us of the true task at hand.

After several hours, which seemed to pass like a New York minute so buoyed were we by the sense of foreboding and adventure and natural majesty, we passed through a forest and suddenly found ourselves away from the sights and sounds of the villages at the base of the trail. Already fifteen hundred meters in the sky, we began climbing to a height that would triple and an altitude whose oxygen content would diminish by over half.

But I was getting too far ahead of myself, and I had more pressing needs at hand. Such as keeping my feet moving, and keeping my stomach quiet, though I had not eaten anything solid in at least three days.
The movement was helpful. It kept my nerves and my digestive tract focused on something besides the upheaval of the last few days, and the nagging fear that the Guardia virus was a parasite that lingered for an unspecified period of time after the original bout of gastroenteritis had long since passed into the medical archives.

Up the steppes we went, one foot after another, determined to maintain a decent pace so as not to be trapped between rest stops when darkness officially came. Without any light in the sky, we had no idea when that would be, but the steadiness of our footsteps became our anchor, a comforting promise that we would reach our next shelter in time.