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Nepal Trip 2007: Day 4 (second trekking day): Chitre 15 October 2007 9:41 am

Posted by Tracy in : nepal, travel , trackback

Today is our first full day of real trekking, and the first day that doesn’t involve, y’know, staying in a hotel. Later in the trip we’ll be staying at the home of one of our Sherpas, but first we’ve got a few days of high-altitude super-swank luxurious camping, with Sherpas and porters and cook staff, no kidding. My mind is sort of blown by the fact that there will be Sherpas and porters and cook staff, honestly. I don’t know what to make of that except that I have to keep remembering that my Western-style wealth is basically equivalent to having superpowers, and with great power comes great responsibility and all. If only that great power didn’t mean haggling over prices, which I hate. I know I’m supposed to pretend it’s a game, but my instinct is to say “fuck it” and pay the higher price and move on with my life — except that I couls end up paying orders of magnitude too much and that could screw up entire local economies for people with non-Western-superpower levels of wealth, and that’s not okay. Dangit. My plan is to enlist a haggler surrogate — my aunt Beth claims to really like the whole price war game, so any time I can designate her as my representative sounds okay by me.

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This post was written and scheduled for automagical posting in the week before I left on this crazy adventure, and updated just a tad at Kathmandu airport on October 14. I hope to write many more posts about the trip — you know, with more actual details and pictures and stuff — but for now this is all we’ve got while my intergoogle access is all kinds of sporadic during my travels from October 9 until November 6.