Paris and Brian's Great Adventure!

Recently, I had the pleasure of hanging out in South Park and interviewing two seriously awesome and hilarious friends, Brian Chang and Paris Winfrey, about their twenty-five day journey to Nepal to go visit this beast, the Annapurna, via the Annapurna Circuit.

 

Not a tiny mountain range.

 

You know when you have a conversation with someone and before you know it, two hours have gone by? That’s exactly how I can describe my time with Brian and Paris.  They answered the zillions of questions I had for them, and also kept me on my toes by constantly cracking jokes and bantering back and forth. Their laughter was contagious! Brian and I just met, but quickly bonded over our mutual love of musical theatre, traveling Europe, and red pandas. He’s also an amazing photographer – I am beyond excited to see his photos of Nepal. Paris and I have known each other since we were freshmen. We lived in the same residence hall and trained to be Adventure WV leaders during Spring 2011. Nowadays, our apartments are a thirty second walk from each other. He began our meeting by snatching my microphone and trying to sing the Star Spangled Banner into it. I’m glad that our friendship hasn’t changed much over the last four years.

Paris is studying business and economics at West Virginia University, and Brian works for the university. Although Brian is actually now Paris’ advisor (we teased Brian a lot about how he will hopefully write Paris a really great letter of recommendation after this trip), the two first met through Adventure WV. Brian was volunteering as an academic advisor on the first-ever Explore trip for Business and Economics students in 2011, and Paris was a leader on the trip. When I asked about how they met, Paris joked that it was “love at first sight.” I think anyone who meets these two buddies on their journey will find them as entertaining and intriguing as I do!

Read on to learn more about their travel plans for Nepal, what they think yaks look like, and what Paris and Brian are hoping to take away from the trip.

This photo was taken on Paris and Brian's first international adventure together! They did plenty of cool things on the Adventure WV New Zealand trip, including eating this ginormous plate of seafood.

 

O: Tell me about the trip that you are doing.

P: We fly out of Pittsburgh International on the first of July, and we will be landing in Kathmandu on the third of July. Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal. From there, we’re going to be taking a bus or a plane, we haven’t decided yet. We were advised to fly. We heard it’s less sketchy than the bus ride.

B: It’s only two hours away, but the bus ride takes six hours.

P: [The bus ride takes] six to eight hours because of traffic and road conditions. From Kathmandu we’re going to be flying east to Pokhara. Pokhara is the base camp for the Annapurna, so from Pokhara, you can walk to the trailhead of the Annapurna and then hike from there…the [Annapurna Circuit] trek takes anywhere from fourteen to twenty days.

B: It’s July 1^st to the 25^th, so we’re going to try to have some leeway between.

 
This is a map of the Annapurna Circuit, the trail Paris and Brian plan to take. 

P: We have like four days to mess around with here and there. Once we get to Pokhara, we’re going to hang out there for a little bit…and then hit the trail. We’ll be trekking through the rainforest for probably the first six days. Once we get to Manang…that’s where we start to break the tree line and get into alpine stuff.  So, the leeches will be gone by then, hopefully. [Laughs] The way that the trek is laid out is there are villages every three hours on the trail, so you could stop in a city and just hang out for a day. We’ll be in fairly low elevation up until we get to that checkpoint before The Pass, and then once we get to that point, that’s a good place to acclimate for a day. There are some museums. After a day there, The Pass is like 18,000 feet at the highest point, so you camp out, and then head back down. There are only a couple days where we’ll be at super high altitudes. On the way down, one thing that we read about was that the place is becoming developed. They’re turning the trail into roads from both sides, and are going to eventually connect them. It’s controversial locally because they benefit from the commerce and ability to trade easily, but also the biggest part of their economy is tourism, and people are shying away from that area, to the Annapurna especially, because it’s becoming developed. Purist backpackers don’t want that experience. From what I hear, it’s kind of an unpleasant experience once you get past The Pass and you get closer to the end of the trek. It turns into a dirt road and there are Jeeps flying by, dust, and a bunch of stuff in the air.

O: How long would you have to deal with that?

P: I’m not exactly sure. I know the road is getting longer and longer each year. So, hopefully we don’t get there and it’s all road. [Laughs] So, we get to the road, back to Pokhara, chill in Pokhara, go to Kathmandu, get our tattoos, catch a plane, gone.

O: So that’s the whole trip?

P: Pretty much, yeah. Maybe a couple days in Istanbul. It’s one of our stops on the way over there. I’ve never been to an Islamic country. It’d be cool.

O: Are you guys both getting tattoos while you’re there?

B: I don’t have any! ...I think I’m more worried about cleanliness than anything. We did do some research on it though.

P: We checked into it. The studio is called Mohan’s. It’s one of the best in Nepal; everyone recommends it, so we’ll check up with them and probably see. I’ve contacted him over Facebook already, and he asked for designs, but I don’t have any idea of what I want yet. I’m just going to tell him, “Hey, we’re going to go on this trek for twenty days. When I come back, I’ll have this idea of what I want.”

B: Yeah, I want to live through it first and figure it out.

O: And, are there really leeches? What other kinds of crazy things did you hear about?

P: Japanese encephalitis! [Laughs]

B: That was on the whole list of things to get vaccinated for. The leeches are the big thing that we keep reading about.

P: They’re everywhere.

B: Apparently.

O: Is there any way to safeguard against that?

P: Leech check. Every five seconds. [Laughs] You can’t even feel them because they have antiseptic [when they bite you]. So that’s probably going to be the biggest hurdle. Also, the altitude is something we’ve been advised about. Having good cardiovascular fitness preemptively is good just because your body is able to adapt quickly, but if you’re in decent shape you could be just as good at acclimating as the next person. So it’s going to be a trial by error thing when we get there to see how we acclimate to the altitude.

B: Alice [Vernon, a friend of Adventure WV’s Director, Greg Corio, who has traveled Nepal] said if we get snappy at each other that’s when we know [we’re having problems with the altitude]!

O: What inspired you to do this trip?

B: It was a joke. [Laughs]

P: Well, after [we went on Adventure WV] New Zealand, we were so like “International travel! Oh my gosh! Let’s do it!!” And then we kept thinking of awesome places that we should go.

B: Something more epic. Something different. We talked about Machu Picchu in Peru.

P: I think it was you [Brian] who mentioned Nepal. Like, “Dude, I really want to go to Nepal. Look how awesome this is. Look at all these pictures.” All the sudden we were talking about it one day and we were just like, “Let’s do it.”

B: We were joking about Mount Everest and about how much it would take to get trained and certified to climb Mount Everest. We could either choose between the Annapurna Circuit or the Everest Base Camp 1 Circuit. We asked a few people, and they said if you want to see [authentic] Nepal, you want to do the Annapurna. Because, while you could do Everest, anybody who can pay enough can do Everest.

P: It’s definitely a more physical challenge to get to Base Camp 1, but like Brian was saying, the cultural experience is in Annapurna.

O: What other kinds of cultural stuff have you heard about?

P: They’re a completely eastern culture compared to us. They’re very minimalist – from my interpretation, obviously… but, these people in these mountain villages, they’re so far away from everybody. Pokhara is a city, and Kathmandu is massive, but it’ll take us twelve days to get to Manang [from Pokhara]. These people in Manang, if they want stuff, they have to walk this trail to get back to Pokhara to get anything. It’s just the most rural of rural.

B: I’ve traveled around a lot, but this is the first third world country I’m ever going to do. So that’s going to be different.

P: Yup. And one thing I was really curious about was their main, like, stuff you would go to Annapurna to buy for your friends. Like what they do, what they make well, what their crafts are. Nepalese rugs are very sought after. Buddhist prayer rugs are super expensive, even with the exchange rate they’re still like $1000. And they have really awesome leather, I guess. They have yak leather.

O: Yaks? I don’t even know what a yak looks like. I know it’s a beast…like a hairy cow.

P: Isn’t it like a llama, but with horns?

B: It’s more cow-ish. We joked about how hard it would be to bring a yak back through customs.

 

Dr. Seuss was almost spot on.

P: Dude, definitely. If I see a red panda on the way…

B: Oh, red pandas!  They’re from that area. And I am obsessed with red pandas.

P: I really think you should get a red panda tattoo. Just sayin’.

B: I’ve seen one before, I’m not sure that I want one. [Everyone laughs.]

O: What are the biggest things you want to take away from the journey?

B: A tattoo is definitely one thing I’d like to bring back. And, this is something that Forrest [Schwartz, Adventure WV’s former Assistant Director] said in New Zealand. “Nothing really means anything until you’re hurting after a hike.”

P: You can’t get anything unless you give something to the trip.

B: Any of these trips that I’ve done with Patagonia, with New Zealand - they were all life-changing in a different way. I think life is finding more about yourself every single time. There’s no one trip where you’re going to figure it out… I am excited for the unknown.

P: Any time I leave the routines I’m stuck in and do something completely different, travel, and experience all these new things, the one thing I always take away from an experience like that is a renewal of my soul. I really find myself when I’m in the wild. All the BS goes away and I can focus on what I want to focus on. And, like what Brian was saying, just being tested. Everyone wants to know that they have what it takes.

O: You realize you can do a lot more than you thought.

P: One word of advice that I got from one of my friends is that a lot of people go to Nepal and the reasons that they get hurt or don’t finish their trek is that they go to conquer it, to beat it, and the one thing he said to me was “Respect the Mountain.” You have to respect where you’re at, and understand that whatever the mountain gives to you, you have to deal with. I think one thing too, is being able to connect with nature again, as corny as that is. As the days go on, you’re slowly more aware and centered… I hope that this is a good personal time.

B: Yeah, and every day we talk, and we’re both struggling with our own things in our lives, and we’re so excited to get out there and get re-centered.

P: Being the only two people who speak English in our immediate distance, I think we’ll learn a lot about each other.

B: And aside from each other, we’ll learn a lot about ourselves in our own introspective way.

***

Follow Brian and Paris’ journey on their blog at ru5hh0ur.tumblr.com.

Wish them good luck on their travels today (feel free to leave something below in the comments)!

Oh, and expect a follow up interview upon their return on July 25th! These two are way too much fun for me to only interview once.

Namaste :)

Olivia