THUR, 29MAR2012Chame (2710m) – Ghyaru (3730m)19km/ 1020m

Leaving Chame, we met up & hiked with two Russians, one who lives in Canada and is now a Canadian citizen. Nice guys, but a little faster than us, so they pushed ahead. We won’t see them again since they are going to Tilicho Lake.

 We hiked a long time through pine forests & saw lots of small-scale logging. It is all manual with two person handsaws & axes. We never saw any close up action, but found the scaffolding-like sawmills they made in the middle of the forest next to the tree they cut. We even found a few where it seemed like the workers had just left for lunch, with the log half cut into boards. It was amazing how efficiently they turned the log into precisely cut boards. Because of the quality of the sawing, the boards would require almost zero planing to use and they stacked up perfectly for drying. Kenyans turning trees into timber with chainsaws are crude & sloppy in comparison.

Part of the trail was carved like ledges directly into the cliff-face with a big, overhanging canopy of stone. They are in the process of widening the path enough for vehicle traffic. We saw a team of men with metal rods drilling the granite by hand, meaning without the compressed air jackhammer! They may have used dynamite afterwards, but we could not be sure. They had a blacksmith nearby, sharpening the steel rods on a charcoal fire & small anvil… These guys lived in tarps-come-tents in the wood nearby the worksite. We also saw a team building embankments for a road the same way, moving rocks by “backpack” (two boards & some ropes lashed to their heads) to fill these giant wire mesh boxes. Simple and amazing.

We walked through the beautiful old village of Upper Pisang, where there was a prayer wheel wall of about 100 small prayer wheels. Many amazing old buildings, too.

We enjoyed a packed lunch today of omelets wrapped in chapattis with yak cheese. The cheese is hard, kind of like parmesan, but tasty & sharp!

We finished the day with a crazy trek straight up for ~1hr, passing 12 electrical poles that shortcut our giant switchbacks and teased us the whole way up. It reminded us of summiting Mt. Kenya but with fiercer winds. We passed a Russian couple and the woman was really struggling. Wendy threatened to go back and carry her pack for her, but I convinced her to focus on getting to the top. Once we got to top, I dropped my pack and went back to help. She barely hesitated when I offered to take her pack and at dinner rewarded me with a precious Mars bar imported from Russia!

At the teahouse we chose at the top, we met two brother (German, maybe?) who were there for their 2^nd night and had just returned from a 5050m acclimatization hike. They wanted to “pop out for another quick one,” but we said no thanks. At 5:30pm, one brother to take off and leave for the next town, which was between 1-2.5hrs away! (It gets dark around 6:15-6:30!) The brother that stayed behind did not seem too worried about him though – aaahhh, brotherly love!

Had ‘thanduk’ for dinner – a traditional Tibetan soup with dumpling-like homemade noodles. It was very nice!

  

19km 1020 m elevation gain - at least 500m of this was in the last 1 km!!

We arrived at Ghyaru after dozens of grueling switchbacks. We picked Yak Ru lodge, mostly because it was right in front of us at the end of the last switch back, but I can hardly imagine a more rustic, nostalgic place. The proprietress was an ancient, wrinkled Tibetan lady and the lodge was built of timbers and stone, both dark and smooth from time and weather. It smelled like damp wood and slightly of smoke. We were provided with a bucket of hot water and we bathed in a dark frigid stone room with cold wind rushing through a missing windowpane. For dinner we had Tibetan thukpa soup with lovely chewy homemade noodles.

The view of Annapurna II was stunning and as the sun set (and rose again the next day), the light on the mountain changed every five minutes and I kept running outside to take another picture. I hope one of them comes out at least one tenth as beautiful as it really was.

I imagined that each evening I would have hours to read, write, and contemplate my navel to the point of boredom. I’ve read exactly 23 pages of my book. Evenings slip away in an exhausted haze as you get out of your wet things, try to clean up, unpack everything you need, eat dinner, plan the next days walk, then crash into bed. Quite a bit of time is spent doctoring my feet each evening with bits of moleskin and duct tape. Patrick is like a blister surgeon. Much time is spent lying in your sleeping bag wondering when you will be warm enough to sleep.