For some reason, I have always been hesitant to write about Nepal. To give it a story. It was a journey that changed me. Something that, as far as I could establish, had never been done before. A world first. But I never wanted my adventure to be compared to anyone else's. I didn't want it measured against a set of rules and regulations that would decide whether what I had done counted or not.
It was unsupported. And yet, in some ways, it wasn't.
Guides would meet me at checkpoints so they could hand over permits, allowing me to travel alone through areas where solo travel was forbidden. After finishing the Manaslu route, Raj, our coordinator, met me with new batteries and a head torch because mine had broken and there were simply no shops around. I also had company for the Manaslu Circuit. I was conscious that Basknet was riding with me rather than guiding me. He didn't interfere with my navigation, route finding or decision making. But travelling with someone is always different from travelling alone. Early snow had made the traverse over Larkya Pass more dangerous, and being completely alone up there no longer seemed like a risk worth taking.
Maybe that is why I never wanted to invite criticism into what, for me, remains one of the coolest things I have ever done.
So I never claimed an official world first. It was enough for me to know that I had done it.
I still remember how nervous I was when I met James to present the project to him.On the final day, they dropped me. They were much stronger riders than I was, and somewhere along the way I got lost. I didn't have a working phone. At first, I panicked. And then something changed.
I can still remember the final climb. My mind became incredibly calm. There was no point worrying about where the others were or how far I still had to go. There was only the road in front of me and the next thing I needed to do.
My body felt strong because my mind had stopped fighting it. And somewhere on that climb, an idea entered my head.
What if I could do this day after day? Not for three days. For weeks.
When I got home, I started looking into whether it was even possible.
I found a film on Red Bull TV about two South African runners, Ryan Sandes and Ryno Griesel, setting the FKT from west to east across the Great Himalaya Trail. I watched it over and over again.
I studied the trails. The kilometres. The mountains. The sheer scale of the adventure.And the more I watched, the more one thought refused to leave me.
I want to do this on a mountain bike.
So I started researching. Routes. Distances. Passes. Logistics. Permits. What could be ridden and what would have to be carried. And somewhere in all that research, I realised something.
Nobody had done it before.
So there I was with my plan, waiting for James at a garden centre where he was meeting me after being out for a ride.
I felt nervous.
James was like family to me, so I'm not entirely sure why. I suppose it was because this project meant so much to me and I valued his opinion. I wanted him to be as enthusiastic about it as I was.
There was something else sitting in the back of my mind too. Both Rob, my pain specialist, and Morgan, my physio, had told me I needed a break from racing if I was ever going to get my sensitive nervous system and pain under control. And here I was, about to tell James I wanted to cross Nepal on a mountain bike.
Finally, I spotted him.
“Tea? Coffee? Cake?” he asked, putting his stuff down before disappearing to get us tea and cake. He eventually sat opposite me, that familiar cheeky smile on his face. “So,” he said in his Scottish accent. “You wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes.” I could feel myself blushing. “I have an idea.”
“Well,” James teased, “what's new?” I looked down at the table. I could feel him watching me, patiently waiting.
Slowly, I heard myself begin. “I want to traverse Nepal on a mountain bike. From west to east. It'll be roughly 2,000 kilometres with 85,000 metres of climbing.” I put the books and maps I'd bought onto the table. “I'll follow the Great Himalaya Trail High Route where I can. A similar route to the runners' FKT.” "The dream is to follow the whole of the Himalayas, through Pakistan, India Bhutan, but I will start with Nepal"
Finally, I found the courage to look up.James had one enormous smile on his face.
“What do you need from me?” And with that, he pulled out his notebook and a pen.
“Oh,” I added. “And it's never been done before.” That was the beginning of a brainstorming session that would turn into ten months of preparation, leaving no stone unturned. Unfortunately, I didn't get the same response from everyone else. Most people thought it was insane. So eventually, I stopped telling people.
There was only one person I wanted to come with me: Karin, whom I'd met through racing. When I told her about Nepal, she was every bit as enthusiastic as I was.
I'd chosen her because of what I'd seen in her as a racer. We had worked well together during the Nisraman Adventure Race in Belgium, where we'd finished third. I knew she was strong. I knew she could suffer. And I thought we would make a good team.
But as the expedition got closer, differences between us began to show.
I desperately wanted to know whether I could do this. Even before we'd left, however, I found myself picking up pieces Karin had dropped. Slowly, doubts began creeping in about whether this was something we could actually pull off together.
But by then, I was completely committed. I had worked harder for this than I had ever worked for anything. I spent endless hours training in the Scottish rain, wearing a weighted vest while pushing and carrying my mountain bike uphill, trying to recreate the hike-a-bike I knew would be waiting for me in Nepal.
Hours in the gym.
Hours on the bike.
Twelve-hour races followed by high-volume training days, teaching my body to keep going when it was already exhausted. A month before leaving, I started altitude training.
I wasn't going to let anything get in the way.
Nothing.
And perhaps, looking back, that was part of the problem. Because I was so committed to going that maybe Karin no longer felt she could say she wasn't.
While preparing the route, I realised I needed a company in Nepal that could arrange our permits. But I didn't just need any company. I needed someone who understood the magnitude of what we were trying to do. I had a contact at Salomon, so I emailed him and asked whether he could find out which company Ryan Sandes had used for their FKT. Instead, he sent me Ryan's email address.
He'll never answer me, I thought. Then again, maybe he would. So I emailed him.
Not only did Ryan answer, he became a huge supporter of the project. He gave me his phone number and, because of the time difference, we would leave each other voice messages. He shared everything he could with me about their traverse.
More importantly, he gave me Raj.
I paid for Raj and the logistical support out of my own savings, but it turned out to be money very well spent. He would become a huge part of why the project succeeded.
When I finally met Karin in Nepal, she had already been there for an adventure with her boyfriend. We sat around a table with Raj, going over the route and finalising the points where guides would meet us with the permits we needed.
Suddenly, it all started to feel real.
Our base in Kathmandu was the house of a friend I'd met during the Yak Attack. He wasn't there, which meant we could leave everything we didn't need at his house.
We checked our equipment one final time.
Bikes.
Bags.
Clothing.
Navigation.
Everything we'd spent months thinking about was now sitting in front of us. Then it was time to get on a tiny plane to Simikot. We hadn't even left the airport before we hit our first problem. They didn't want to take our bikes.
Of course they didn't.
But in Nepal, everything seemed to be met with a certain amount of theatre. Talking. Negotiating. Waiting. More talking. People disappearing and reappearing. And somehow, before we knew it, our bikes were coming with us and we were squeezed inside a tiny plane heading west.
There was nothing left to prepare. The adventure had begun.
Whilst sitting on the plane, I thought about one of my last nights on call before leaving Scotland. I'd been staying with Lori. She had cooked a wonderful meal to celebrate my new adventure, and afterwards we stood together in the kitchen doing the dishes.
I was chatting away about Nepal while drying plates, cutlery and glasses. Then, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to say, I told her, “There is a chance I won't come back.”
Lori looked at me.
“Not because what I'm doing is dangerous as such, but because it's so remote. If I fall, if I break something, if I get sick, it could be days before anyone is able to rescue me.”
I felt Lori's silence through my whole body. “But the risk is worth it to me,” I said. She put her arms around me. “Oh, Nienke. You'll come back.”
The truth was, I was deeply disappointed in myself. In my life as an athlete. In my life as a professional. I needed this expedition more than anything. Not because I needed it to be successful. Not because I needed to prove that I could cross Nepal. I needed something that was mine. Something I was fully in control of. Something that excited me again. And as our tiny plane touched down on the smallest landing strip I had ever seen, in a little village called Simikot, the world as I knew it began to change.
It was apparent almost immediately that this expedition wasn't going to be easy. Before we'd even made our way to Hilsa, on Nepal's western border, we'd already had more mechanical problems than we'd planned for. Something in Karin's front wheel wasn't fitting properly, causing it to rub against the brake and creating constant extra resistance.
Something else became apparent quite quickly too. I was strong. I had prepared. I was fit. Karin wasn't.She had known me as the broken athlete, and suddenly I was the one leading us. It seemed to create a competition over who should be in front, until eventually I had to remind her that this wasn't a race. There were no titles to be won here.
Looking back, I think perhaps the biggest difference between us was that I desperately wanted to be there. Every problem made me more determined to continue. With Karin, I sometimes felt the opposite. As though every problem became another reason why perhaps we shouldn't.
And yet, when we really needed each other, something changed.
We hadn't been out of Simikot for more than a few hours when the road seemed to disappear into a vertical wall. There was no riding it. We had to climb using our hands and feet, our bikes on our backs. This was where Karin came alive. I was frightened of heights, and some of the exposed traverses terrified me. Karin helped me through them. She was calm where I wasn't, and I trusted her. In the moments when we really needed to be, we were a team.
The maps weren't particularly detailed either. A day I'd calculated at sixty kilometres could turn into eighty-five. The amount of climbing sometimes almost doubled. We were moving far more slowly than I'd planned. On our way back towards Simikot from Hilsa, it eventually became obvious we weren't going to make it. We needed somewhere to sleep. This time, it was Karin who remained upbeat. We made our way into a random village and somehow found a man who spoke English. He invited us to stay at his mother's house. Then he asked us a question.
“Do you want a shower?”
Our eyes lit up. By then we'd gone almost a week without one. “Yes!” We dropped off the bikes, grabbed our flip-flops and followed him through the village. “Come, come,” he kept saying. It was dark. The path became narrower. We crossed little creeks and followed him farther away from the village. I looked at Karin. “Where is he taking us?” I was starting to worry. Then I noticed something strange. The water running across our feet was getting warmer. We climbed a steep rocky track until somewhere in the darkness we could hear falling water. The man stopped. “Go, go,” he said, pointing upwards. “It's up there. I'll wait here. Make sure nobody comes.” Karin and I climbed higher.
And there it was.
A pool of hot water beneath a waterfall. It was heaven. We stripped off completely and lowered our tired bodies into the water. For a while, there was nothing else.
No bikes.
No kilometres.
No route finding.
No wondering whether we would make it.
Just two exhausted women, naked in a hot pool somewhere in the Himalayas. I lay back and looked above me. The entire sky was filled with stars. It is one of those moments that has never left my heart. Heavy legs and aching shoulders were soothed by the warm water, while something inside me was soothed by that enormous sky.
Then Karin broke the silence.
“We might go viral on Instagram after he uploads his video of two naked women in the waterfall.”
I looked at her. We burst out laughing.
“It's so worth it,” I said.
Karin wanted to go home when we reached Simikot. It was too difficult, she said. Too slow. She had too many things she needed to sort out at home. I wanted her to stay. There were tears. And there was my persuasion.
Looking back now, I realise how good I was at that.
So we kept moving. But things went from bad to worse. The terrain was insanely hard. Our bikes were too heavy, and eventually we had to accept that we were carrying things we simply couldn't continue with. We needed to leave equipment behind.
Another difficult conversation.
The trail itself wasn't always easy to find. The monsoon had changed roads while new ones were being built that didn't exist on any of our maps. We spent hours in silence. We spent hours fighting. I spent hours doubting.
One thing stood out to me throughout those first weeks. No matter how tired I was, how badly things were going, or how much our equipment and bodies seemed to be falling apart, I could still be completely soothed by a view.
The silence.
The mountains.
The sheer beauty of where we were.
That was where I found my motivation. Sometimes I could hear my mother in myself. “Look, Karin. What an amazing view.” I would say it in moments when everything else was going wrong. And somehow, for me, it mattered. The mountains could still pull me out of whatever struggle I was in and remind me why I was there. Looking back, I think that was one of my biggest strengths. I could still see the beauty, even when things were hard.
After days of isolation, we finally came across a small village. There was food. Suddenly our spirits lifted. We ate everything we could get our hands on, including chicken. We were hungry. For a little while, everything felt good again. Even Karin seemed happier.
According to the map, we were getting close to one of the bigger towns in the far west. From there, things were supposed to get a little easier. There was just one problem. A river stood between us and the lights of the town. We couldn't find a bridge. We couldn't find a way around it.
And I wasn't feeling particularly well.
As darkness fell, we made our way down towards the riverbed, trying to work out whether there was somewhere we could cross. We could see the lights on the other side, almost luring us towards them. Then we heard an angry voice behind us. A man was shouting. He couldn't speak English and we couldn't understand what he was saying, but one thing was perfectly clear. We were not supposed to cross that river. He made us follow him back up the road. And pointed us towards a place to stay.
The following morning, we saw the river properly. And we understood. Had we attempted to cross it in the dark, there was every possibility we could have been swept away. Instead, there was a kind of cable system spanning the river. An open metal cabin hung high above the water and was pulled across by a person standing on the opposite bank. Apparently, this was how we were getting across. Sitting in an open cabin suspended above a raging Himalayan river, relying on another human being to pull you to the other side without getting tired, remains one of the scariest moments of my life.
But also, admittedly, another great story to tell.
Eventually, we reached the town. It was another disappointment. We had booked what was described as a luxury hotel. By Western standards, it would have been closed down for electricity danger with wires tangled up along the walls sometimes sparkling away. And I am sure I saw a rat cross our room.
And it was within those walls that our expedition as a team of two really began to fall apart. The chicken caught up with Karin. She spent the night vomiting and with diarrhoea. She was done. She was taking the bus.
Karin somehow managed to get to Rara Lake on tea and a few biscuits. But there was no convincing her anymore. We found somewhere to sleep, and she negotiated a bus with the people we were staying with. The following morning she would take the bus to Jumla.
I would ride. It was more than a hundred kilometres, but from what I could work out, almost all of it was rideable. I could do it. That night, Karin and I had one of the most honest conversations we'd ever had.
We cried. We laughed. We connected. After very little sleep, I left at dawn. My face was swollen with fatigue, my body exhausted.
And I rode.
And rode.
And rode.
All the way to Jumla.
Karin took the bus.
Through the kindness of Nepalese people along the way, I eventually found the hotel Raj had booked. It had a bed. It had a shower. It had food. For that moment, it was everything.
From Jumla, we knew we were heading back into the really remote parts of Nepal, all the way towards Dolpo. And then it was my turn to get sick. For three days, I couldn't keep food or water inside me. Anything I ate or drank went straight through. But because of where we were, stopping didn't seem to achieve very much. There was nowhere really to stop. So I kept moving. Decorating the trail in the process.
It was during this section that we met Basknet, a friend of Raj's. He came with us through the final remote stretch towards Dolpo. He seemed to think we were legends.
I certainly didn't feel like one.
But his kindness, his constant smile and his sense of humour meant more than he probably realised. By then, most of my world had been reduced to putting one foot in front of the other while pushing my bike up ridiculously steep terrain. Just one more step. Then another.
By the time Karin and I finally reached Dolpo, we'd experienced so many crazy things that we were both ten kilos lighter in body weight and probably ten kilos heavier with everything we had to process in our heads.
At four o'clock one morning, we had the biggest fight we'd ever had. Once again, I persuaded her to continue.
Just to Pokhara.
I promised her that when we reached Pokhara, she could fly home. For the section through Dolpo, we agreed to pay people to help carry some of our equipment. And maybe this is why I've always struggled with calling the expedition unsupported.
Because sometimes it wasn't. There were moments when people helped us. There were moments when I needed that help.
The far west of Nepal is so incredibly remote that I still struggle to describe it. Those first weeks were some of the hardest of my life, and I so desperately wanted Karin to remain part of this dream of mine. But now we both knew there was an expiration date.
Pokhara.
Strangely, once we knew that, things between us became calmer.
The section from Dolpo towards Pokhara remains one of my favourite parts of the expedition.
The landscape was extraordinary.
We bivvied near a 5,000-metre col, where I spent the night trying to decide between freezing my arse off at minus twenty degrees or pulling the hood of my bivvy closed and feeling as though there wasn't enough oxygen to breathe.
At some point, we'd also acquired a German Shepherd. He belonged to one of the guesthouses in Dolpo and apparently had a habit of following people he liked. For whatever reason, he decided he liked us.
So he came too.
There was something different about those days. They were quieter. More peaceful. Eventually, we reached Pokhara.
And there, at the gates of the hotel, I said goodbye to Karin. She watched me go.
For the first hour, I cried.
With every pedal stroke, I kept hearing Katie's words in my head. I'd asked her for support when I no longer knew whether what I was doing made any sense. “If you keep going solo, the experience will change you in a way nothing else will. It will open doors for you that you never knew existed.”
So I kept pedalling.
Alone.
In many ways, it was scarier. In many ways, it was easier. There was an enormous relief in only having to think about myself. About what I wanted and when I wanted it. When to eat. When to sleep. When to stop.
Life became very simple. I got up when the sun got up. I stopped riding when the sun went to sleep. I made up for time lost in the West. I was a woman on a mission. But there were moments when I found myself looking for Karin.
A scary traverse.
A trail that suddenly disappeared.
A decision that needed to be made.
For a split second, I would turn as though there was someone there to discuss it with. But there wasn't. There was only me. So I started talking to myself. Out loud.
Okay. What are the options?
Can I get across there?
What happens if I can't?
Can I go back?
Somehow, saying it aloud made everything seem more reasonable. Then I would make a decision. On my own. And each time I did, I could feel something returning to me. My confidence. I began trusting my judgement again. Sometimes I would stop, look around and suddenly realise where I was.
Completely alone, surrounded by some of the most beautiful and highest mountains in the world. And I would just stand there and take it all in.
The strange thing was that the more time I spent alone, the less lonely I felt. With nobody beside me, there was nobody I needed to explain myself to. Nobody to persuade. Nobody whose mood I needed to read. Nobody I needed to keep going.There was just me.
And little by little, I felt more and more like myself.
I made my way up to Muktinath in record time and stayed at a Dutch B&B, where I had one of those wonderful conversations that somehow moved between Dutch and English without either of us noticing.
We talked about dreams. About following them. And then, in Muktinath, the doubts found me again. Ahead of me was Thorong La. I had to get myself and a fully loaded mountain bike over 5,416 metres in one push and down towards Thorong Phedi.
People I met told me I was crazy. That it was insanely steep. That it would be a long day. So I started long before the sun woke up. The stars dancing in the sky. The moon light guiding me up the trail.
Once again, I surprised myself. I was approaching the pass as the sun was rising when another mountain biker came towards me.
He stopped. He hugged me. “Respect,” he said. “It's tough climbing from that side.”
I was completely out of breath. By then, I'd developed a system.
Five steps.
I was allowed five steps before I could stop.
Then another five.
And another.
All the way to the pass, pushing a bike and kit weighing around thirty kilos, with another seven kilos on my back. When I finally reached the col, I felt something I hadn't allowed myself to feel very often during the expedition.
Pride.
I'd been there before during the Yak Attack. There was tea. There were people. There were prayer flags moving in the wind. I stopped and talked to some of the other travellers. And standing there, I suddenly felt emotional. I thought about Michael. I thought about my friends.
And I felt happy.
Simply happy.
I knew where I was now. This was familiar terrain. And ahead of me was some of the most epic singletrack I had ever ridden. I sang all the way down to Thorong Phedi. Being applauded by hikers coming up the other way.
I felt like a hero.
I arrived much earlier than expected and, for a moment, considered continuing all the way to Manang. But I didn't.I'd spent so much time isolated from other people that suddenly I wanted to be amongst them.
So I stayed.
I spent the afternoon and evening hugging the fire, eating, drinking chai and listening to other travellers tell their stories. For once, I wasn't trying to get anywhere.
In Manang, I caught up with Corie Wallace, who was attempting an FKT of the Annapurna Circuit and had become a friend. And Basknet had asked if he could join me for the Manaslu Circuit so he met me there.
I felt ready for the next part. I had no idea it was going to be considerably rougher than expected. Basknet was a bundle of energy and dreams. He was completely in awe of what I was doing, which I found equally irritating and adorable. But he adapted to me quickly. He could see the previous weeks written all over me.
In my legs.
My face.
My filthy clothes.
Manaslu tested us.
A snowstorm was coming, and from the reactions of people travelling in the opposite direction, it became increasingly obvious that what we were trying to do was considered slightly crazy. Again, people who didn't know me questioned what I was doing. And again, it irritated me. Eventually, one hiker looked at me and said,
“Oh, you poor girl.”
Something in me snapped. “But you don't know what's ahead of you,” she said defensively.
“And you don't know what I'm capable of,” I replied.
 |
| Over the pass in Manaslu |
Later, at one of the refuges, I told the story to a guide who had become fascinated by my journey. He smiled. “People will always judge what you're doing by what is feasible for them. And you, you are so far beyond that, they cannot imagine being that strong.” He paused.
“Take it as a compliment.”
That night, I slept in the highest refuge before the pass. It was bitterly cold. We gathered every blanket we could find and piled them over ourselves. Around me were locals I'd met the night before, people who had fed me and welcomed me. lay there listening to the sounds of sleeping bodies. And somewhere in the darkness, I began to feel something shifting inside me. I couldn't describe it yet. I just knew something was changing.
By morning, the storm had settled. Basknet and I stepped outside into clear skies and sunshine.
And knee-deep snow.
It was epic. Exhausting. Beautiful. Sometimes all three at once.
By now, Basknet had learned when to talk to me and when to be silent. When to offer help and when to leave me alone. When to make a joke.
And sometimes, for reasons I couldn't explain, tears would start streaming down my face. He never asked me what was wrong. He simply moved beside me, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.
We completed the Manaslu Circuit incredibly quickly. I think I pushed Basknet close to his limits, but he kept me going with his humour and that characteristically Nepalese optimism I'd come to love. Eventually, our routes separated. Basknet turned towards Kathmandu. I continued east.
Alone again.
Back into the remote countryside. I remember one climb in particular. Sixty kilometres. Over three thousand metres of ascent. It seemed never-ending.
On days like that, I allowed myself music. Normally, I guarded my batteries obsessively because I needed them for navigation, but sometimes I needed something else more.
That evening, I was supposed to find something resembling a hotel. But there was nothing. Just darkness. The sound of barking dogs in the distance.
I was exhausted. I was close to 4,000 metres altitude and still climbing, with no sign of anywhere to sleep. Then suddenly I saw lights. And children playing. It looked like a school. I made my way towards it and two girls, probably around sixteen, came over to me. I asked them where I was, showed them a map one of the locals had drawn me of this new road. They told me I was on the right path, heading east.
“Can I stay here?”
They shook their heads. No. And suddenly, I started crying. “Why are you crying, miss?”
“I am lost,” I sobbed. They looked at me.
“You are not lost.”
One of the girls thought for a moment.
“Wait. I know someone.”
When we arrived, the man who opened the door clearly knew all the children. Before doing anything else, he looked at me.
“You smell.”
I couldn't exactly argue with him. “Here is the shower. Here is soap and a towel. I'll find you some clean clothes.” By the time I emerged, clean and wearing clothes about ten sizes too big for me, the two older girls were still there. And dinner was waiting. Later, I learned more about the man who had taken me in. He was an architect who had worked all over the world. With the money he'd earned, he had come back and built the school so that children from his village could have a better future. We sat around the table talking.
About life.
About dreams.
About chasing them.
Exactly the kind of conversation I loved. Except somehow, this time, I had become the inspiration in the story.
I loved it.
After nearly seven weeks of sleeping on hard floors, in refuges and wherever else I could find somewhere to put my body, the bed felt impossibly soft. There were pillows. Clean sheets that smelled wonderful. I lay there thinking it was the greatest luxury in the world.
By morning, there was a map waiting for me.
Clear instructions had been drawn onto it, showing me exactly where I needed to go.
East.
I looked at the map and thought about what the girls had said to me the night before.
You are not lost.
I felt unexpectedly emotional saying goodbye.
Then I got back on my bike and continued east. A few minutes later, my satellite phone started beeping like crazy. Apparently, I wasn't the only person who had thought I was lost. The road I'd been travelling on the night before was new. It didn't exist on the maps, so on my tracker it looked as though I'd wandered off the route and was heading towards the edge of a cliff. Then my little dot had stopped moving.
For ten hours.
In what, according to the map, was the middle of absolutely nowhere. While I'd been showering, eating dinner, talking about dreams and sleeping blissfully between clean sheets, Michael and Raj had been watching a stationary dot somewhere high in the mountains of Nepal and imagining the worst.
They were frantic.
I quickly sent messages explaining that I was alive, perfectly safe and, despite all available evidence suggesting otherwise, I knew exactly where I was going.
I smiled as I continued riding.
You are not lost.
No.
Apparently, I wasn't.
During the entire expedition, I only had one bad crash. It happened towards the end. I sat up and did what had become instinctive by then. First, the bike. Everything seemed to be working. Then me. There was a big gash in my leg.
“Crap.”
Possibly having too much medical knowledge as a veterinarian, my mind immediately jumped several steps ahead.
It's going to get infected.
Really infected.
I'm going to lose my leg.
Realistically, it probably needed a few sutures. But there was nobody around to suture it. So I cleaned it as well as I could with my first-aid kit, bandaged it up and took the antibiotics I'd brought with me.
Then I got back on my bike. I still have the scar today. Whenever anyone asks about it, I tell them it came from the time I almost lost my leg in Nepal. Admittedly, that version of events may have become slightly more dramatic over the years.
By then, I was ready to go home. And another conversation had begun following me. On the Manaslu Circuit, we'd met a Belgian bikepacker travelling with his wife. He had previously coached Olympic-level triathletes and now worked for Garmin. We knew many of the same people. We had dinner together and talked about adventures and dreams and everything in between. At some point, he asked to see my Garmin inReach. He wanted to see where I'd been. He'd been coming to Nepal on and off for ten years and knew the country well. He stared at the route. Then shook his head.
“You're a fine specimen,” he said. He kept looking at the track. Then he looked at me again.
“You realise you're extraordinary, don't you?”
I didn't say anything.
“I've coached Olympic champions, and I haven't often come across people with your resilience.”
That conversation cemented in my head.
It still think of it sometimes.
Not because nobody had ever told me I was strong. But because, after years of feeling disappointed in myself, after years of feeling as though somehow I had failed, for the first time I believed what he had said. Maybe because I believed he was qualified to make that judgement. Or maybe because, after everything Nepal had asked of me, I was finally ready to hear it.
Eventually, I reached the far east.
When I arrived at the final village, where a jeep would take me back to Kathmandu, something inside me was extraordinarily quiet. There was no discussion in my head about whether I was good enough.
No argument.
No war with myself.
Just silence.
Good silence.
For seven weeks I had been reduced to very simple questions.
Where am I going?
Can I get there?
Do I have enough food?
Where will I sleep?
Can I take another step?
Somewhere in all that simplicity, the other questions had disappeared.
Was I successful enough?
Was I good enough?
Had I made the right choices with my life?
Nepal hadn't answered them.
It had simply made them irrelevant.
Seven weeks after leaving, I arrived back in Kathmandu and connected to Wi-Fi. My phone came alive. There were messages from people I respected. Congratulations. Praise. People telling me what an extraordinary thing I had done.
And there was one message from Karin.
“Congratulations. I didn't think you would make it. You are one tough human.” I sat with those words for a moment. In the end, Nepal had created a distance between us that hadn't been there before. As I continued east on my own, I had become increasingly disappointed in Karin. Not because she hadn't wanted to continue. By then, I understood that. This had been my dream, and perhaps I had expected too much when I wanted it to become hers as well. What I struggled with was that she had left completely.
She had flown home.
She hadn't stayed in Nepal to support me. She wasn't waiting in Kathmandu when I finished. After everything we had started together, I had imagined that somehow she would be there at the end.
She wasn't.
And that was something I struggled to forgive her for. Still, I read her message again.
You are one tough human.
She had seen parts of those seven weeks that nobody else had. She knew how hard it had been.
And I was proud.
But strangely, not because it was a world first.
Not because of the kilometres or the metres I'd climbed.
Not even because I'd made it across Nepal.
I was proud because the expedition had started as an idea in my head.
I had imagined it.
I had planned it.
I had paid for it with my own savings.
I had trained for it through endless hours of Scottish rain.
And when it became harder than anything I had imagined, I hadn't walked away from it.
Not once.
Somewhere along the way, I realised I hadn't walked away from myself either.
Not once Somewhere along the way, I realised I hadn't walked away from myself ei
