I write in my journal every day, and Gambu, my guide, always asks “what are you writing about?”
Every day I give him the same answer, “I’m finding different ways to say: everything is beautiful and everything hurts.”
This morning was particularly hard.
Imagine going up a flight of stairs carrying a small child. You keep climbing flight after flight, and you think the end is up ahead, but you turn the corner and you just see more stairs. You do this a few hundred more times, all while taking in less oxygen as you climb higher.
I thought that part was tough, but I forgot about a nifty little law called gravity. What goes up, must come down. So, I spent the next two hours in a steep descent.
Going downhill sounds like a better time than climbing uphill, but it takes such a toll on my knees that I couldn’t wait to go uphill again.
Anyways, they say all is well that ends well right?
I got to my guest house early in the day, per usual. Gambu and I keep a quick pace and don’t really rest along the way, which gives me plenty of time to relax and enjoy the views.
I had been thinking about how this trek feels a lot less social than the last trek I have been on, the Camino De Santiago. I met so many incredible people from all over the world on that trek, some of whom feel like family to me now. I missed that kind of atmosphere.
Then I realized, maybe it wasn’t the trek. Maybe it was me. Maybe I was being less social than usual?
This was a brilliant realization because this was something I could fix!
I decided to be more open to having a chat with passersby, so when two beautiful Frenchmen, whom I had seen around on the trek, stopped to chat with me and asked me to join them for dinner I happily obliged.
They were Kevin and Remi, two friends who both worked in finance just enjoying a vacation together.
We spent hours sitting around the fire in the dining room of the lodge we were staying at. Remi taught me French, while Kevin poked fun at how few vacation days Americans get. Then our little ménage à trois did the most fun and exciting thing two Frenchmen and myself could do: we played Uno until we were politely asked to go to bed.
Like I said, all is well that ends well. A day that started out so rough, ended in the loveliest of ways.