6th April – to Thame
We’ve been here less than a week and it already feels like ages. The routine of early wake-up, followed by packing the bags so the porters can get off with them early, breakfast, walk, tea, walk, eat, walk, eat, sleep is becoming familiar again.
Later we will be camping, but for the next few days we will be staying in the ubiquitous tea-houses; stone-built lodges that are dotted along the trails with imaginative names like ‘Everest View, ‘Valley View’ & ‘Sunshine Lodge’.
We left the main Khumbu valley yesterday, and headed up the thame Valley. The usual bustle of yaks with their drivers & porters carrying unfeasibly large loads of anything from bottled gas to eggs, chickens, pringles or coke in wicker baskets stacked high above their heads has fallen away and we’re in a much less well-trodden valley with more in the way of agriculture, and even a yak nursery.
It seems to be potato planting season, and the little walled fields are now all turned brown earth. We’ve seen a family of 4 witha team of 2 yaks ploughing, 2 potato-droppers and a stamper-inner. These are the lucky ones; we’ve also seen lone, bent old women in their traditional skirts creeping round their suddenly enormous-looking plots, bending and reaching slowly, one potato at a time to fill it.
The weather has fallen into apattern of glorious sunshine in the mornings , clouding over in the afternoons with usually a little snow; and cold! Also dry, despite the frequent rain & snow. I’m told that here the snowfall doesn’t melt, but simply sublimatres into the thirsty air and dissappears in a matter of hours.
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