Paro Hotels
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Trek in the Himalayas
Entry 13 of 14 | show all | print this entry |
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Our flight to Bhutan had a stop in Kathmandu, Nepal, and Sarah got her first sight of the Himalayas. We flew into Paro, the only city with an airport in Bhutan. It had taken five flights through five countries over five days to reach Paro from Windhoek, Namibia and there was a big temperature change - it was in the 40's in Bhutan as opposed to the 100's in Namibia.
We had two days in Paro before our trek. We visited the Paro dzong (A dzong is a large Bhutanese building that serves many purposes. It was a combination of a fortress, administration center and a monastery/religious ritual site) and Tiger's Nest, an incredible monastery. In our 17 days in Bhutan, we would see many dzongs, monasteries and other religious sites, but the Tiger's Nest had the best location. Tiger's nest is about 2,000 feet above the valley floor and perched on a sheer cliff.
We started our trek at around 8,500 feet of elevation, and it would take three days of trekking to reach the Jhomolhari base camp at 13,000 feet. Luckily for Sarah, the trails that we were on had bridges and there weren't any glacial stream crossings. The trails were originally yak herder trails, and we shared them with many yaks and horses. The trails were very muddy at times and covered with yak and horse dung. They also weren't as pristine as we would have imagined. There was a fair amount of litter along the way. The trekking companies are required to trek out everything, but the locals and yak herders would litter along the trail. Looking up, the views were beautiful - alpine forests and snow-capped mountains in the background. Most of the trail followed a picturesque turquoise stream.
The camping was pretty plush - we had a "staff" of 6 people (a guide, an assistant guide, a cook, two horsemen and someone else who helped everyone) and 8 horses that carried all of our stuff. This seemed like a lot of overkill since we only had a total of three bags for the two of us. Our daily trekking schedule was that someone would wake us up in the tent with "bed tea" and then we would have breakfast in half an hour. They would cook up a full breakfast - hot mango juice, porridge with cashews, eggs, meat (sometimes spam) and toast or pancakes. Then we would leave with our guide while the others packed up camp. We would trek for a few hours and then we would stop for lunch. The cook would make us three dishes and rice and there would be mango juice and oranges for dessert. We would trek for another few hours and then we would arrive at our camp for the night.
Sometimes the horses and the rest of the staff would get there first and they would have camp set up for us. Then we would be served afternoon tea and cookies. We would have a few hours to relax (and try to stay warm!) and then we would be served a candlelight dinner in a big tent. Dinner would start with soup, then rice and three dishes and finally dessert (the cook even made a pear pie one night!). After dinner, if we were below the tree line, we would sit around the fire for a while, but if we were above the tree line, we would hop into our sleeping bags to stay warm. At the higher elevations, we would be in the tent in our sleeping bags quite a bit (maybe 16 hours / day!). The evenings out by the fire were great. It snowed a little bit on us during two of the evenings and we awoke to a lot of frost on the ground each morning. Luckily we had really warm sleeping bags (thanks Pete!) and were comfortable at night.
The hard part was that it was much colder than any previous camping trip and we both started the trek out with colds. It was routinely in the 20s and 30s when we were sitting outside eating our breakfast and dinner. Also, when we were at the Jhomolhari base camp, Mark got pretty sick because of the altitude on the second night after we did a day hike up another 1,000 feet or so. He was feeling very nauseous and tired. Feeling nauseous anytime is not good, but when you are staying in a tent and going outside means being in 25 degree weather, the situation is much worse. Luckily we had already made it to the highest point on our trek and the place with the most spectacular views. The views of Jhomolhari from the base camp were spectacular. We were probably about a mile away from the base of the 23,000 foot mountain, the highest in Bhutan.
Although we ended up descending the next day the way we came up and not doing the loop we had planned on, we didn't really miss any scenery. The loop that we originally were going to do would have required us to go over a higher pass and then spend another two nights at roughly the same elevation. We ended up cutting a day off our trek by going back the way we came, and we were very happy that we did. After we finished on the 7th day, one day earlier than planned, it started to rain and it rained for the next day and a half. More thumbnails ...
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