Arse cracks and fingerchips

Gaarrghhh.  Awake at 3am – partly due to jetlag and partly due to some very inconsiderate people returning to their rooms and not giving any shits about keeping their voices down or being quiet.  This hotel is VERY noisy – not helped by the stairwell that stretches from top to bottom, causing any tiny sound to echo and reverberate badly.  The doors also have this annoying beep beep sound when you wave the keycard in front of the lock panel – no problem during the day, irritating AF in the dead of night.  In the end, I stuffed some earplugs into my ears which helped – probably should have done that from the start.  As I lay awake, though, I also discovered that my room is located directly above the kitchen as, from 4.30am onwards, strong cooking smells started wafting in and torturing my empty stomach (I’d missed dinner last night in favor of going straight to sleep). 

As breakfast wasn’t until 6.30am, I had plenty of time to catch up on some blogging, take a shower and do stretches (thanks, Andy, for the routine – I definitely needed it after a long day of travel yesterday).  6.30am on the dot, I wandered down to the ground floor to find the source of all the delicious smells – veggie fried rice, apparently.  There was a buffet all laid out with fried rice, steamed vegetables (um..OK), some type of curry soup, sausages of indeterminate provenance, a roti-style pancake plus some hard boiled eggs and bread for toasting.  I think you could also order omelets or freshly cooked eggs, but I didn’t bother and managed instead to forage myself a decent enough spread.  Coffee was instant Nescafe – but it was hot and the correct color, so close enough.

After breakfast, I dropped off some laundry at the front desk and headed out to explore and to get some more cash (neither Forest nor Racheal had been able to get their bank cards to work, so I was having to Make It Rain for them both).  I also wanted to look for a pair of cooler pants to sleep in – as you saw from my video, I only packed thermal layers so am a bit worried I’ll boil at night, given how hot it is at the moment (obvs it’ll get cooler as we ascend into the mountains).  I also needed to get a travel adapter as the pins on mine had broken since the last time I used it.   Apparently everything I needed was within a 5 min walk of the hotel – but the potential for getting lost was pretty high given how tangled the streets are and how none of them are labeled!  As you’d expect, there were a ton of shops selling all manner of hiking and outdoor equipment and clothing.  I don’t know how good quality it was but I’m sure it was a fraction of the cost back home – and, unlike Northern Cyprus, at least these knock-offs actually spelled the names of the brands correctly!    I didn’t need any more kit – but I did wander past a store that was selling adorable things made of felt – so of course I had to go in.  And yes, of COURSE I had to buy a bunny and a mouse.

Shopping done, the plan for the rest of the day was simple – relax and recover from the journey.  There are a number of “must-see’s” in Kathmandu that I am skipping – partly because I’ve seen a ton of temples and monkeys on previous trips to other places – but mainly because the air quality outside is so dreadful that I want to keep to an absolute minimum the amount of time I spend outside.  I’ll actually be glad to leave tomorrow as I can already feel it in my chest – I do NOT want a repeat of what happened to my lungs after the Canadian wildfires a couple of years ago where I developed a hacking cough that took weeks to resolve.

By the time I got back to the hotel, another one of our ladies had arrived from the airport and was having breakfast, so I went back down to say hello to Aqua from Australia.  Forest and Racheal were also there too, so after they had finished, we decided to check out the hotel’s spa.   It was SOOOOO cheap  – 2hr massage for $50!  I ended up booking a 100 min Swedish massage followed by a hammam bath/scrub based on the recommendation of the lady at the desk.  She asked if we were pre- or post-trekking and so steered us to the Swedish vs the deep tissue massage, based on our answers.

So, at 11am, I head over to the spa – housed in a separate building attached to the hotel.  I had to do all the usual gubbins and mark on the intake form the areas I wanted my therapist to focus on vs those to avoid (there was already an “X” placed over the ladygarden area – presumably subtle messaging for “we don’t do happy endings here”).  My therapist was a younger girl (god, I feel old sometimes) and so she took me to the changing room to get ready, changing into just a towel and a pair of black mesh underwear that took me a minute to figure out which way round they went!  And I don’t care how skinny you are – those disposable knickers are always tiny and manage to simultaneously barely cover your arse crack while threatening to give you a front wedgie.  Its a little disconcerting.

Anyhoo, I follow my lady into the treatment room and get settled in.  For those of you who don’t regularly get massages, one of the first things you usually have to navigate is whether the therapist is going to want you face up or face down.  Most of the time, you start face down as they spend a lot of time working on your back and shoulders and there is a little donut hole cut into the massage table for your face to fit into.  At best, these are not very comfortable and it usually takes a fair amount of wiggling about to find a position that keeps your nose is free to breathe.  There’s usually a Sophie’s choice decision to be made about whether you jam your forehead into the top of the donut hole to make room – or whether you sacrifice your chin and wedge that into the lower edge of the hole, thus creating space for breathing.  Invariably, no matter what you do, you end up with a donut hole shaped mark on your forehead – its just the way it is.  Sometimes there is a bowl of flowers or other decorative object placed on the floor underneath the hole – presumably as a distraction tactic to take your mind off what was happening to your face.  This is all a preamble to ask the question –  do the Nepalese have smaller faces than average??  The hole was waaaaaay too small (“Does this hole make my face look fat?”) such that my face couldn’t actually fit into it, even with the usual amount of smushing you’d expect to have to do.  I ended up in a hybrid “head-to-the-side, slight nose downwards” position that was tolerable but not terribly comfortable and was probably going to give me new neck issues by the end of the session.

The other notable difference for this massage was how, errr, participatory it was.  I’m not sure you are supposed to break out into a sweat when you are being massaged.  But this one was very athletic – as my therapist sought to contort my body into many, many different shapes in a way that felt almost competitive (“oh – right – we really ARE putting my knees all the way up there – um, OK”).   A couple of times she directed me to take her hand as she then pulled me into an extreme bend as she tried to either strip muscle from bone or disarticulate every joint she could find.  Those black mesh panties had their work cut out, that’s for sure  and I couldn’t help but wonder – as she put me into one of her more gynecologically-forward poses – just how many arse cracks had she already seen in her life?  And surely it was too many for a girl still in her mid-twenties?  (Which then leads you, naturally, to another question – how did mine compare?  Was it nice looking?  On a scale of 1-10, how did it score?  I guess I’ll never know).   Maybe she lived for the “crack” of popping joints – and I was certainly keeping score on that front as well.  I felt oddly proud of myself for not giving any up when she was working on my back or shoulders or hips – but I was eventually betrayed by my toes which gave a loud “pop” as she tried to pull them off my feet.  I could tell she was pleased.

About 10 mins into the treatment, I was already grateful for 2 things – one, that I had remembered to shave my legs and trim the lady garden before my trip and two, that I had erred on the side of caution and had opted for “medium” pressure rather than firm.  I think her Medium is like how authentic Thai curries are spiced.  It says its mild but it will still melt your face off.   All in all, I wouldn’t say it was the most relaxing massage I’d ever had (I felt I’d earned at least an “attagirl” by the end of it, if not a full-on certificate of completion) but I did feel a lot looser in my body than I had 100 mins prior, so from that perspective, I guess it was mission accomplished.

After the massage, it was time for the hammam – I’d only decided to add it to my massage at the last minute , as Forest and Racheal had been talking about the one they’d had in Istanbul and how fabulous it had been.  I remembered getting a couple many many years ago in Northern Cyprus and also recalled it being invigorating but relaxing, if you can call a large old Turkish lady scrubbing you with a broom relaxing.

This one was not.

I was COLD.  It started off fine enough with the steam room, wrapped in a towel and sat on a white bench enveloped in clouds of steam. It was warm but it had this weird funk that smelled a bit ammoniac, like a bunch of cats had been in it earlier, partying it up.  I’m not sure how long I was in there for – but long enough for my nose to worryingly adjust and not notice the smell anymore – but also long enough to get a bit bored.  Probably no more than 10minutes, after which I got scooped up and escorted to the main treatment room.

Here’s my main problem.  You sit in a steam room for 10 mins and you get nice and toasty.  You are then made to lie down, wet, on a treatment table where the ambient room temperature is no warmer than, well, ambient – and you very quickly feel cold.  Despite the lady scrubbing me and rinsing me off with warm water at fairly regular intervals, for most of the time, it was just unpleasant and I was shivering.  I did try and think about the Wimhoff method and embrace the discomfort – but with limited success.  Most of the time, I was thinking about how this treatment was probably undoing all the good work of the previous hour as I spent the next 60mins in a state of frigid tension.  I did mention casually (about half way in) that I was a bit chilly and ask if there was something to cover me with – but the therapist just looked at me and carried on, so she either didn’t understand what I was saying or she was thinking “suck it up, buttercup – I’ve just spent the last hour looking at your crack so you can endure this for a while”.

After what seemed like forever, but was in reality only a hour, my torture was over – I thanked the lady, gave her a big tip (fueled by sheer relief to get out of there), got dried and dressed and attempted to warm up with some tea.  By this time it was almost 2pm and the jetlag had well and truly kicked back in, so I decided to get some lunch followed by a nap.  Later today, I’ll meet with the rest of the ladies who are on the trip for dinner and a briefing, and we’ll be given our holdalls to transfer the stuff we are going to be taking on the trail with us (a strict 15kg limit).  So that’s it for now -tomorrow, we fly to Pokhara and the start of our trekking adventure proper!  Let’s goooooo!!!