Sometimes expectations differ from reality. What I had imagined and what I was planning was completely different from what I got, and this unsettled me. I couldn't write and even think about writing; it seems like only now I'm getting back to myself and my plans. At the same time, I can't complain and say that I didn't like the condition I was in.

It all started with the desire to have my hair cut short before traveling to Nepal, thus covering some of the upcoming discomfort. My Turkish hairdresser coughed so much that I could feel it even through his typewriter sliding over my head. I thought that the main thing was not to get sick now before the trip, and it would be better not to think at all, since I fell ill right on the plane. I tried to turn myself inside out by coughing in Kathmandu and was only finally done when I got home. It was not clear how to gain height in this condition, and what it would entail was also a big question, but I had already started walking and didn't want to give up because someone came to work sick.

Absolutely everything that happened was annoying; I was literally struggling with my physical and internal condition. The dusty road that crosses our hiking track, where everyone rides in jeeps and you walk and die with every step; the muscles that said riding a bike every day and walking 9 hours a day are not the same thing; joints and ligaments that resonate in pain with every cough that starts in the first seconds of stopping. A few days later, I found my routine, in which I had to walk thinking only about the rhythm of my breathing, in balance with my body temperature so as not to spit myself out on the already dirty track. But I fit in very well with the overall melody of the road, as all I heard was Sherpa spitting and tourists coughing.

Instead of the views that inspired me, we walked in a haze caused, according to locals, by seasonal gas pollution in the region, then by fires from India or seasonal burning of grass. When we slept, we looked at walls with panoramas of views that did not exist in our reality. By the end of the day, I was so tired that I would fall asleep at nightfall, sometimes without even having dinner, but I would wake up before sunrise. I have to pay tribute to the fact that I actually got a good night's sleep, just like I did in the ocean in 2010, only then it didn't hurt.

It seemed that when we reached the heights without roads, everything would change, but there were 100 times more people there, and traffic jams made of mules and yaks were added, and with them the whole road turned into a conveyor belt for dung production. At the same time, it came at the peak of my poor condition, where I was already tired of struggling with pain and coughing.

But things have changed!

‍