Descent to civilisation?

The last post left us in a storm at 11000 feet playing cards with our guide. The following day was a daunting 1300 metre descent which we anticipated would be doubly difficult due to the new snow. In fact it was delightful! We woke to sunshine and a clear blue sky. A short walk up to the crest of the ridge revealed a completely unexpected mountain vista of the eastern Himalayas stretching all the way to Everest.

 The descent through a pine forest on virgin freshly fallen snow was delightful with the snow cushioning our knees from the pain of the descent. As we got lower the pines gave way to rhododendron forest just coming into flower. After just 4 hours we stumbled across our destination for the day. Melamchigaon. 

We stayed in a lodge with a French Buddhist retreat led by a Tibetan llama with a great sense of humour. 

We went on tour of the village including the Buddhist temple and prayer cave followed by a prayer walk round the whole village. 

Next was a visit to an excellent school which was a centre of excellence for the surrounding villages and produced results as good as the best in Kathmandu. 

This had the effect of keeping local children in the area rather than moving the children to Kathmandu for their education never to return to their villages.

We are now in the Helambu region where the Tibetan bread is much more tasty and everyone congregates in a communal room on low benches around a low fire and stove. The mum of the house impressed us by cooking for 24 people from a single stove without any sign of stress. 

We've now come up with the perfect lunchtime snack - dal bhatt followed by Mars bar momos - a sort of Mars bar pasty - yum!

Further down the mountain the following day Karma our guide invited himself in to someone's front room / kitchen and proceeded to cook us hand picked nettle soup. 

As we got further down we started to see the inevitable signs of urbanisation - piles of rubbish , stray dogs, filthy streets, and piles of building rubble, but the Nepalis we met remained unfailingly friendly and cheerful. The return bus journey to Kathmandu was less bone- shaking than the outbound jouney but the driver did have an addiction to overtaking uphill on blind hairpin bends with his horn blaring. 

We are now back in Kathmandu for a day of R & R before heading for Delhi tomorrow.