Shey Phoksundo Down
Sometime in the night I saw the dark shadow of a Jackal creeping into the village. I flashed my torch in its direction and it bolted for the trail towards Phoksundo Lake. We woke up early and packed up what little we had left out. We were trying to make up a little distance and make the return trip in 2 days allowing us some extra time for what was to come. I remember when John and I started planning this little trek and I recall him saying, “This section is relatively flat.” I looked at a graph of the trek and I saw nothing flat about it. We were at around 3800 meters at the lake and we were going to drop to 2000 in two days and then head over three passes again up at 3800, 3900, and 2700 meters with elevation drops in the low 2000 + meter range. I showed him the graph and he laughed.
We had tea and bought some biscuits to go and figured we’d pull in somewhere for a noodle lunch and more tea. We were also told the water wasn’t good but we ignored that and drank water out of all the wells along the way. No problem. We found out that the woman with the kid on her back and her mother actually went back down the day before and as we were leaving Ringmogaon we saw Peter and Justin by the kitchen window and said we’d see them down the trail.
We climbed up to the traverse and looked down at the switchbacks. I like them better from up here. We pulled into the same round roofed viewpoint and soaked in the morning light as it lit up the eastern ridgeline and hit our faces. The switchbacks are covered in loose round rocks and a powdered dirt mixture of animal manure and earth. The types of rock I can loosely identify are Mika, Granite, Quartz, ancient riverbed, and pockets of limestone and chalk.
The morning flew by as we averaged something like 6-7 kms/hour. By 11 am we had covered 20 kms and were stopping for lunch at a teashop. We were considering going back to Sangte but so was the other group and with hydroelectric workers already staying there it would be really crowded. Peter and the others had one more project to get sorted and they caught up to us and then walked into a Birthing center along the trail to wire up a refrigerator for medical supplies. While they were there they fixed the weigh scale because recently all the babies born on site were exactly the same weight at birth, 4.4 kilos. Go figure.
After we passed Renche where we had stayed two nights before we were headed for the one hotel teashop we hadn’t stayed at yet called Chhepka and it was only a couple kms up stream from Sangte where the others could stay and we wouldn’t over load the elderly couple running the hotel. Hillside switchbacks up and down around bends in the river slowed our pace but we were still ahead of schedule. The faster bunch of Peter’s group leapfrogged with us a few times and we all met up at Chhepka at the threat of sunset in a deep ravine. The sun wasn’t actually going down but hidden and it was getting chilly with the wind cooling as it slowed coming up the river with the momentum of the day on ebb. The ground had been treacherous most of the way with loose rocks, mules trying to nudge you off the trail and a cliff. (Just FYI, when animals come up the trail move to the high side of the trail). Peter’s group took off for the last bit and we stayed the night. We had done 30 + kilometers with sore ankles, a couple blisters amongst us but felt acclimated and ready for a ripping day to come.
Again, as always, the kitchen was where it was all happening. We pulled in a sat against a wall in a row while 5 or 6 Nepali men came in and sat with us. One of them owned a string of small pack horses and he was the most informed on our trail to come and gave us loose directions on how to get to Tripurakot some 40 kilometers away. The rest of the Nepali played with a grand daughter and laughed and watched us with curiosity. Not a lot of foreigners stay in the hotels so it is a treat for them to talk to us when the chance arises. It turned out that this woman made the best spicy paste that goes with your dal-baht. It was made out of marijuana seeds, garlic, tomato and onion. I’ll give you the recipe in an up coming blog when it is more fun.
I woke up in the middle of the night and went outside. It was cold and dark with stars and the Milky Way offering light along with the full moon. When I returned to the hotel there was a little girl standing at the top of the stairs covered in dirt and really big hair, really big. I thought I entered a Scary Movie comical set. She went down the stairs silently as I disappeared in my room, spooky little thing.
Prebash and I usually woke up first and we’d get sorted until time to wake the other two. At 630 am I’d quote a Bardia National Park guide we once had, “It’s 630 in the morning and the door is open.” The usual response was another quote from the same guide said slowly, “I don’t care.” None of us were big on breakfast, tea and biscuits would suffice and off we’d go. We still tried to make distance while the sun wasn’t up because it really changed the temperature in the valley and the tempo of our trek. With the sun came heat, wind and clouds of dust. I was not tan.
Once again we bumped into Peter’s group having a break at a teashop. We pulled in for noodles and tea. It was getting hot and we were at the point where we had to visit the police guard station to let them know we were out of Phoksundo Lake area and heading for Jumla. We’d have to check in with another guard down the trail. There are a lot of checkpoints with police or army stations along the trail to help prevent smuggling from Tibet, China into the rest of Nepal. The coolness of the shady Cedar and Pine forests gave way abruptly to a barren landscape with switchback trails etched into the low brown grasses that had grown on the steep mountainsides. There was a good wide trail along the river with a few metal bridges where need be and we kept walking down saying farewell to the cool aid club and Himalaya Currents Inc. Everything was dried out and the villagers were cutting their crops for the winter. There weren’t very many people around in this moonscape as we descended to 2000 meters and the village of Tripurakot, at the base of a brutal climb to come. The first thing you see is the temple on the hill at sunset.
The lady running it was wonderful and set us up with a couple rooms and a roast chicken to celebrate a 40 kilometer day. I think we had a warm beer before moving on to the much cheaper Roxy. I brought out my Apple UE Boom speaker and Prabesh and Krishna brought out their Nepali and Hindi contemporary music playlists and we ate a nice dinner while a couple boys practiced their dance moves in the background. The moon was a day past full when it rose over the mountain ridge. We played around with the camera to see what we could get but there was a lot of dust and particulates in the air so nothing came out clear but still it had a nice affect. The power went on and we all raced for plugs and battery rechargers. The problem was there was no switch to turn off the power so we slept with them on and everything plugged in that we could. If anybody woke in the night they’d look at what was full and could be turned off making room for whatever was left. In a one-plug room it takes awhile to recharge 3 phones for camera and music purposes and rechargeable batteries for cameras and GPS toys. The night went silent.
