Yak Kharka, August 21

Yak Kharka, August 21

MY GREAT HIMALAYA TRAIL X RANDY SUN

2021.08.21

Hopes for a warm night did not come true. The height is only 3650 meters, but at night it suddenly began to snow, which has not happened to us yet at much higher altitudes. In the morning it got warmer, but the sky is cloudy. Which, in general, is good, because today we have another climb transition.

 

Right in the morning I went to the Bonpo monastery again. This time I was lucky - a lama with the keys followed me to the monastery. Inside, the Bonpo monastery is no different from an ordinary Buddhist monastery. The same Buddha statue, the same murals on the walls, the same drums, vessels for oil, and so on. The trouble is that the lama could not explain to me why this monastery is considered the Bonpo monastery. All his stories boiled down to the fact that Bonpo is an ancient Tibetan religion, which has now become the same as Buddhism. I even thought that the lama just does not know English well, so he cannot clearly explain the difference. Asked the guide to ask the same question in Nepali. Alas, in the end I received the same answer in the guide's translation.

 

Today we have a short walking day, only 4 hours. We essentially replaced the day with complete idleness with two short walking days, which allowed us to speed up the movement along the route for another day.

 

The valley that leads to our next pass (Bagala pass) is quite rich in waterfalls. More precisely, we saw the first waterfall today on the Foxundo River. This is a very impressive waterfall - a fairly large river flowing out of the lake falls from a height of about 300 meters. And further in the valley you can see two dozen waterfalls of different shapes and sizes. Some are quite large and interesting.

 

The transition turned out to be relatively simple, in 4 hours we gained about 400 meters of altitude and it happened mostly smoothly, without sharp ascents. We stopped for the night in front of the place where the path to the pass goes up sharply. Tomorrow we will have a rather difficult climb.

 

From local observations: unlike Humla and Mugu, there are no people smoking ganj* in Dolpo. Although she is here, too, of course, is growing. However, many indulge in alcohol - mainly the local drink "chang". It turns out that the locals believe that alcohol, unlike grass, does not interfere with work. Therefore, they prefer to drink rather than smoke. Interesting logic.

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