Our plan for this trek was to start exploring the western side of the Makalu-Barun Conservation Area, a huge and lightly populated territory south of Everest. We flew to Lukla and instead of going north to the Everest base camp as most tourists do, we trekked east over the ridge into the Hongu Valley. We would go up it and try to cross the Mera La (pass) into the next valley and trek down it to the south. The first part of the trek included a well made path through the
rhododendron forest where they and the primulas were in bloom. Paths like this are quite common in the more populated parts of the hills. They were financed by Nepali government grants and constructed by the villagers.
On the way down the other side of the ridge men were pit sawing lumber for building. Our house in Newtown was built this way a century and a half ago.
The paths were more difficult further on, like this one where John is almost vertically below where I took the picture and Dhiren is the yellow-capped blur below him.
Here John and Dhiren are resting after we descended the steep and
slippery path past the sawyers. We're at a terminal moraine, the
bottom end of a glacier. You think of glaciers as being ice but most of the ice is obscured by the rubble that accumulates on its surface. Monsoon rains have washed out the end of the rubble in this case.
The river was low when we were there. The scoured boulders give a sense of how much more powerfully it flows during the monsoon.
Here's how it looked further up-river. It's hard work trekking up these river beds. There's not much of a view from a valley floor, anyway, and there was none at all here after the clouds came up the valley.
In a small gompa further up the valley there was an interesting old statue of Padmasambhava, the Indian sorceror-priest who
established Buddhism in Tibet. He has the fierce expression and mustache of a powerful religious magician. One of the ways he subdued the local deities was by shooting thunderbolts from the end of his fingers. He could fly to high places in order to meditate and when he was engaged in aerial warfare.
There's also a dragon flying across the mountainside in this area.
When we reached the head of the valley the Mera La (pass) turned out to be impassable because of snow so we had to turn
back and go round the long way. Near the head of the Hongu is a
sacred lake, a female deity, and its male companion, a mountain deity. You can tell when they're deities because they'll be paired in this way.
Pilgrims make small towers of stone at these sites. Dhiren made one here.
We slogged back down the valley and over the ridge a lot further south where bamboo grows. Many buildings there are made of
bamboo mats and some of stone. A double layer of bamboo mats makes a roof completely waterproof. The farm in this picture is close to Lukla. Behind it is some of the severe deforestation that took place while the Maoists were in control in the hills and it wasn't safe for the conservation workers. Land was cleared for pasture and to get lumbar for buildings that were erected without permits, and there's still a lot of cutting for firewood that's sold to the lodges in Lukla.
On a happier note, it was sunny now and I love that. John suffers badly in the heat but he's a pretty creative fellow. Here he has made a shady place for post-prandial contemplation.
We stopped to resupply at the village of Chupsang where I took pictures of some of the locals while Dhiren got Dr. John to open up his medical office. You can do a lot of good with antibiotic ointment for wounds, placebos for things that will get better without treatment, and stern insistence on going to the hospital for things that will become serious problems if not treated. You need enough basic wilderness/emergency medical training to know which is which and unlike me, John does. This woman and child were among the healthy ones.
When we continued on from Chupsang it was hazy a lot of the time so there were few photo opportunities. This one with a magnificent rhododendron tree in the
foreground was irresistible.
On another fine day we rested near the top of a steep terraced
village where a couple of locals were resting, too. The farmer was
very fond of his young goat. This was a rare moment when he didn't
have it in his arms.
This was a prosperous village with some fine stone farm houses.
When we got further away from 'civilization' again the buildings were
either entirely made of bamboo mats or had rough stone walls and a
bamboo mat roof. These low roofs are a popular place for small
children. Very young ones are looked after by their somewhat older
siblings.
Here's a stone walled summer farm at a higher altitude that wasn't yet occupied because the grass wasn't ready for animals yet. We stopped there for lunch.
A few days later we came upon a sacred site way up in the hills. There
was a very old stone edifice honoring the Hindu god, Shiva, that was
protected by a recently made stone wall. We placed our prayer flags
here. If we'd been able to cross the Mera La we would have
placed them on the pass.
The weather up there was usually wet judging by the moss everywhere and our path became increasingly steep and slippery. We
were were running short of time because we'd had to come the long way round and
bad weather had slowed us down, then I lost concentration for a moment one morning and fell. We returned to well made paths where I
was an object of interest to small children, perhaps not
exclusively because of my arm ornament. It took several days to reach Tumlingtar's grass strip airfield and a
couple of days there before a plane arrived, but it was often sunny
and I began to believe my
left arm had always been shaped differently from the right
one.