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 almost 9 a.m. and we're heading out to the first stop. Going with my
guide for the trip Prashant to the bus stop. All right so I am in Pokhara, second most populous
city in Nepal if I remember right at an elevation of 800 meters and there’s a gorgeous lake
right next to the town and I’m here because this is where most people come to chill or set up base
before they all head out on 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 Mardi Himal trek which is
supposed to take three nights and four days. It's supposed to be 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,
That 7000-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 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 a different video I’ll link it here but I’ll
talk about the extra winter clothes that I had to buy just for the trek. 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 a poncho inside it. There’s no other space to put it.
This is 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 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 a quick dry towel and I got two pairs of woolen
socks on top of the ones that I’m wearing right now and I have a fleece jacket which is supposed
to be worn under the down jacket and I have these things called gators which is very interesting.
Basically, I didn't even know what it was before I was here, but these are basically
covers like waterproof covers that you put on top of your shoes starting from the mid of your shins
so your shoes don't get 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 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 Thamel,
this neighborhood in Kathmandu, where all the tourists 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 the store and he’s living a happy life with his own
By the way on top of all that I’m also wearing my hiking shoes that I’ve had since Hawaii.
Some knee braces because both my knees are [ __ ] up. Some shorts because it's not gonna be
that cold till the second or third day.
So, for this four day hike I brought ten Snickers bars to keep me energized and give me diabetes.
Okay we're eating the very standard Nepali food called daal bhat for lunch and this is
very simple. It's very commonly eaten but it's cheap here because we're 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 locals, but it gets
more and more safe the higher up you go in the Himalayas. Here people actually do drink tap water
Now we're taking a jeep to go high up to 600 meters to Dhampus
Okay so we're at this small village of Dhampus at 1600 meters and this is where we'll begin the hike
and you can already see it's super foggy compared to Pokhara right now. Actual trek begins
right here. So we're starting from here and the goal is to go somewhere 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. If this gets wet I don't really have anything else to wear later.
Contrary to what I expected, there's 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 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 hike the Himalayas. It's very official stuff but they
handled all of that smoothly as well so I was able to come right here and get on this hike.
The turkey scared the [ __ ] out of me. I didn't know there were turkeys in Nepal.
It feels a lot like the hikes in Hawaii but it's colder right now.
Okay it's drizzling a little bit but nothing too bad yet.
By the way rules for hiking. For peepee go 10 meters away from the trail and for poopoo
20 meters away from the trail. Okay we're at this viewpoint called Pitam Deurali. Apparently you can
usually see Pokhara 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 he's like: no it's buffalo poo poos.
Lots of bugs and stuff just flying around my face. Having to swat them away every few seconds.
I’m at this 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 very black
clouds in the distance and the next stop would be forest camp. We’re 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 fix it but in order
to fix it I have to go back to Pokhara. So I think tomorrow we can wake up really early like five six
get it solved and then 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 the ridiculous drone shots that I could get here. So this is where I’ll be staying
tonight. It's 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 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 p.m and I am about to go to bed because we got to wake
up at 5 30 or not 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 some wooden stuff around his head and won't let us help him. He just runs away.
Left at 6am 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 we were fixing this drone phone connection. Took 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 25 2700 rupees all the way here and now we started the hike 15 minutes ago and
yesterday we kind of stopped at 3 p.m because usually it's not recommended to keep hiking
after 3 p.m because apparently if you're stuck in the dark, it's pretty dangerous.
Leeches and even animals like bears and deer could 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 hiking even five days to make a lot of progress today. And now 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 going to put a raincoat on and just head out.
All right so we're heading out to the next spot and it's I think 5
5 30. And I think it's going to 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
in my phone and he said I need loud music on my phone to keep the bears away when it gets dark
Have to 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 50
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 then. 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 the same elevation, that is around 2 650 meters. They're saying it's a solid 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 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 coming up in the rain there was a big leech
on my raincoat and I didn't even realize when I took it off that they had taken a massive chunk
of blood out of my neck and I just noticed three hours later there's just a lot of dried blood
on my beard. Now it hurts a little bit. How much dry blood is there? What is that thing?
The leech
It's a [ __ ] leech! Jesus Christ. There's 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 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 am right now and contrary to yesterday, when it was super clear you could see all the
Himalayas, the visibility is absolute shite today. Tried to take my drone out for a flight
this morning but yeah not much you could see once you're 10 meters away from the ground basically
Today's breakfast is literally identical to yesterday's breakfast, I think the only difference
is that everything is 50 % more expensive even though we're only 400 meters higher.
I hear it’s just gonna keep getting you know it's more and more expensive the higher you go.
Okay we're starting day three basically at 8am 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 fire heating thing
in the tea house common area. Because I tried to get it dry in my room and 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 viewpoint and follow me on Instagram. Now we can see the
first rays of golden light behind the Himalayas over there. Camera is out. Show's about to begin.