The Trek to Yaphu

Day 1
The first day involved a full day of walking all the way down to the river and then all the way back up the other side via Tumlingtar (where we could have flown to in 45 minutes from Kathmandu if the airport had been open!) After a brief mirinda and daal bhaat takari stop in Tumlingtar, we continued our uphill struggle up to Khandbari, the capital of the Sankwasaba district. We spent most of the day trying to juggle our walking poles whilst greating all the children with the traditional Namaste (palms together!)Now we felt like proper hardcore trekkers, but we were put to shame by the entire Nepalese community who overtook us every step of the way, wearing flip flops and carrying huge bags of rice, while we were sweaty blobs pulling ourselves along with our fingertips, despite our snazzy poles, boots and miniscule (even non existent) backpacks. It was embarassing.

Day 2
After a night in a hotel, during which our main evening activity was watching the lizards crawl around the ceiling, praying they wouldn´t fall in our mouths as we slept. The second day of walking involved a very very long uphill climb in the blazing sun. (although, yet again we were overtaken by 4 year old school children in flip flops carrying their bags on their heads). We stopped for lunch in a small shop at the edge of Khandbari and took full advantage of ´having a long rest´ by laying on one of the beds. Vikki fell asleep and soon the whole nepalese family had gathered around to take a look. Arriving at the top of the hill on the way to Angala we were allowed another lovely long rest. We weren´t exactly looking at our most attractive at this point but a group of nepalese women thought it would be a great time to take photos and videos of us on their phones and then show them to us. Confirming our fears about how disgusting we looked. (Thankfully even Petemba, Dipendra, the health centre doctor and our porter were also looking fairly hot and tired which was slightly comforting! We then had a short 25 minute trot down the mountain to Angala where we were greated with hot Nepalese tea, put up our leaky tent and got a good nights sleep.

Day 3
The day we had been dreading. We had been promised that it would be a difficult day, so you can imagine that we were really excited...
It probably would´ve been fine (or at least easier) had it not been absolutely boiling. We started with a long climb down, then crossed a rather dubious bridge before climbing all the way back up again. Thankfully, we´d been told this would take over 4 hours but we managed to do it in 2.5. Arrived in Yaphu, we were greated by a lovely crowd of people outside the Khenpalung Health Centre (funded by Nepal in Need) and given garlands of flowers and some pepsi and biscuits which was nice suprise at the end of the long day!

xxx