out-rused by the masters

The thing about our guide, Binod, was that he wasn't a bad guy, he was just a little ... inexperienced. He was kind of a young guy, younger than we were, early 20s; he said he'd been around the Manaslu circuit three or four times before, and been on many treks prior to that, but as we found, it was kind of hard to get a straight answer out of him. But being inexperienced is fine, as long as you can find the way eventually, as long as you have three simple words at your disposal: "I don't know". Binod, we found, was not very good at using these words on matters of any import.

( the shifting of the ruse )

This is the first of a handful of stories from Nepal. If you don't have a Dreamwidth account, but you want to get notified so you can read more things like this when I write them, I also have an e-mail list; I promise I'll only send mail for things that I write that go here on this blog.

(both images shot on Ilford HP5 Plus, pushed to ISO 800.)