The food prepared and eaten on a high-altitude hike or trek is like nothing else you may be used to. High-carbohydrates, low-fat diets are usually the rule. Carbohydrates help replace depleted muscle glycogen stores, and require less oxygen for metabolism. A person can expend as much as 6,000 calories a day (almost two pounds a week) depending on the altitude and temperature extremes…a weight-watchers dream come true because the food is rarely tasty.

This trek was no exception. The cooks try their best and it’s not easy cooking at altitude but the food was generally awful. (My comments only, feel free to disagree.) A high-altitude trek cook always prepares a hot cereal for breakfast. Cream of Wheat, Oats, Kasha…whatever it was and no matter how I tried to make it palatable with honey, brown sugar, white sugar, syrup…anything …nothing helps because I just detest hot cereals.

Other breakfast foods were mashed potatoes and spaghetti. This…I like, but not at breakfast. If you’ve ever climbed above 10,000′, you may be familiar with the morning nausea and headaches associated with mild altitude sickness. At least we are. Neither ex-Marine nor I could stomach mashed potatoes or spaghetti at 6:00 a.m. (lunch yes, breakfast, no) and lived on cookies/biscuits for breakfast. The nausea would disappear when we began hiking and not reappear until the next morning.

our Kyrgyz cook
Lunch was the highlight of each day. Whether or not it was a perch on the rocks or in an open meadow, our cook made wonderful salads with tomatoes bursting with flavor, and had brought lots of sweet, juicy Kyrgyz melons. To this day, I wonder why all the flavor and taste has gone out of our tomatoes and melons at home. Lunches were wonderful until we ran out of tomatoes and melons.

making lunch in the meadows of Kyrgyzstan 

our trek crew eating lunch in Kyrgyzstan
Dinners? More Carbohydrates. Spaghetti, rice, mashed potatoes, unidentifiable meats and more melons. Starving by this time and feeling better, it didn’t make any difference what was on the table or how it tasted, but the food did get worse with each passing day.

You may have noticed the traditional white felt hats kalpaks the Kyrgyz crew is wearing in the photos. It wasn’t long before the entire group went on a major buying spree and ended up wearing these distinctive hats.. more later on the hats…

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