you are what you eat

'hang on a second! haven't i seen this title before?' in case you're experiencing any sort of déjà vu it is exactly what hit me late on saturday night after eric, fran and i had just finished a very good fusion meal with paneer, guacamole and some old but still decent lavash & khobez bread.

the déjà vu requires some sort of explanation. this post will be long and in the now familiar rambling style but bear with me. there is a point to it somewhere. the story takes us back to the khumbu region in december of 2002.....

i post a dodgy note in a cafe in kathmandu looking for trekking companions for the trek to everest base camp proclaiming i am a fit & experienced trekker (i was fit in that in those days i could run about 18kms but i discovered that that is very very different from walking 12 hours uphill with a heavy backpack. as for my experience, well eric and i still laugh about the fact that i ended up doing the entire everest trek with running shoes basically). a day after i post the note, i meet up with eric (the protagonist of the story - more on him soon), daniel (an experienced german trekker who on day 2 of the trek mentioned that my shoes didn't look like they were gore-tex!) and fabio (an italian who really looked like he should have been in goa instead). we decide to take the bus to jiri and walk to namche rather than take the easy way out - a flight to lukla which is just one hour away from namche. fabio decides to fly to lukla - he says he has a bad knee but looking back now i think he was just lazy. usually, the jiri-namche trek should take 8 days but eric (a very fit canadian from montreal who at the time was a baker but also cycled competitively) says we can do it in 6 days. daniel and i nod thinking yeah 6 days, should be ok. so we tell fabio we will meet him in exactly 6 days in a particular lodge in namche. little did we know....

the jiri-namche trek is very hard. the trail crosses valleys (rather than follows them) which means you're constantly going uphill and downhill with heavy bags. daniel wrote about the trek on his website.

"To give a conclusion on the Jiri-Namche part, it has to be said that this is probably the hardest Trekking I have done in my life. It is really only going up or down all the time. Even parts were really rare."

"I am now in the state that I don't feel the pain anymore. Knees, ankles, back - everything is ignored. Just walking on. Setting one foot in front of the other. In the end even Sameer caught up on me. Together we stumble the last hour from Puiyan to Cheubas. It is well after 5 p.m. when we arrive. I am completely exhausted."

i like the 'even sameer caught up on me' bit. but like i said i wasn't very fit. i made sure i took a 'foot bath' every day to reward my tired feet. after 4 days, we realised that making it in 6 days would be very very difficult - it would mean waking up at 5.30am and walking long. it occurred to me that maybe we could do it in 7 days. what's one more day? like this guy fabio - we don't really know him and well if he has to wait one more day fuck it. eric then told me we have to give it our best shot - after all, we gave him our word. so we said ok, we go for it. and this excerpt from daniel's website sums it up:

"It is an altitude gain of 600m, but I am already dead when I reach the foot of the hill. Meanwhile my achilles heel joined the concert of pain in my body. Every step which is not on step-like rocks is painful. Knees and ankles are probably aching as well. But I don't feel them anymore. In a monotonous rhythm I set one foot in front of the other. Completely dumb. But suddenly I see the first houses behind a corner. I let go a scream of triumph. I made it. When I reach the hotel it's well after 5 p.m., more than ten hours after starting in Cheubas. Sameer arrives even later. It is already dark."

and what happened of fabio?

"We are told that Fabio who we wanted to meet here, has left in the morning. Bastard! We really hurried to make Jiri-Namche in six days and then he's gone!"

it was worth it though. we ended up being really fit and basically almost chilled the rest of the way!

i ended up meeting fabio again 8 days later and we even did a day trek together from gokyo (though he turned back halfway!)

i'm not sure why i wrote about this trek. maybe because i miss the mountains but mostly to tell you about how i met eric. also i guess its a roundabout way to say that mooli's would do it in 6 days. its the way we'd like to be with our investors, our employees, our customers and each other.

eric and i did one more trek together. this time in zanskar in february. after jiri-namche even -23 degrees was no problem. notice the new gore-tex shoes btw.


eric was passing through london last weekend and it was great to hang out with him after 6 years. he's traveled a lot more, worked in afghanistan and somehow looks exactly the same. on saturday we talked a lot about moolis (he would definitely go green - ie with green chillies!), about food (him devouring all that porridge in zanskar! bread is very important!). many times that day he said 'you are what you eat'. i told him i'd write a blog post with that title and when i opened mozilla there was TAB's post with the exact same title: you are what you eat.