Trekking in Nepal- Round Manaslu:
travellogue Day 12: The day before crossing Larkya La we went from Samdo to the high mountain pasture of Dharamsalla which is sometime called also Larkya Phedi .
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Crossing a high pass starts with polishing the shoes.
When I started to do the planning with my friend Bachan I had insisted that all the porters must have a good down jacket, a warm Sleeping bag, sunglasses and strong mountain shoes.
And before we were starting in Kathmandu everyone had first to show me his equipment. When I cross a high pass, i definitively want that everybody is perfectly equipped like me.
Nepali Porters do sometime risk their lives because they can not afford to buy good equipment or often because they don’t think that it is really necessary.
As long as the weather conditions are good, this might be OK, but in a snowstorm it can be very bad. This can happen also on common passes like Thorong la.
Los geht’s
I had brought some special mountain boot shoe creme from Germany but only one tooth brush to put the cream on the shoes. So it took about half an hour till every one was ready.
My friend Bachan had organised the whole tour. He is a Guide. Most of the porters were personal friends of him but with his natural authority he looked that every think was working well.
I know him now for more than 10 years and have made very interesting tours with him.
Bachan is leading and organising tours with single persons up to groups of more than 10 tourists.
The trail to the Larkya la is easy to find. In regular distances big poles show you the way if there is snow.
Soon we had to cross the first little snow fields and at 4000 m the altitude started to slow us down.
The awesome Samdo Ri 6335 m in the east above Samdo
Soon the landscape is pure high Himalayan in a side valley to the south a enormous glacier comes down from the Larkya Himal
Two days ago we had feared to get bad weather, but we had perfect bleu sky!
From her we had a view on the north face of Manaslu
Dharamsalla
After a while we finally could see the alb of Dharamsalla with the little shelter house. On this pasture a little river flows down so it is the ideal place to stop before the final crossing day .
The shelter has no door or windows, so everyone can enter it. But it was pretty dirty so we erected our tents.
Die kleine Schutzhütte.
When we arrived, we were alone, exept from some Yaks grazing the dry brown rests of some grass.
Our porters put down the bags and started to make some litres of tea .
Also we started to cook, today it was Stupps’s day, as we alternated every day with this task. So the menu varied, as every cook had different things and today we got noodles and a delicious “mousse au chocolat” The porters just cooled 15 packets RaRa noodles for them.
Just before the night about 20 people from the village returned from their trail fixing journey. Soon the shelter was crowded and they started to make some tea n food on various little open fires. But they liked also our big stove as we could offer them within minutes 5 litres of tea. But not only tea was drunk, chang and roksi flew like water and some of the young men were pretty drunken. after two hours they packed their good, took some torches and returned in the dark to their village Samdo.
Der Rauch der Reisig- und Yakdungfeuer fand nur mühsam einen Weg durch die wenigen Öffnungen und Ritzen und so konnte man eigentlich nur am Boden sitzend frei durchatmen.
And we went to our tents to sleep as we were also very tied.
In the night we had minus 14°C
Since autumn 2010 there is now a new lodge with around 15 rooms at Dharamsala
Photos: the pictures of the Manaslu pages are from me and my friends. You can see the respective photographer in the filename of the photo: HH = Hans Henninger, HPS = Hans-Peter Stupp, MJ = Manfred Jeckel and AdR = Andrées de Ruiter
For the search engines, Trekking in Nepal, A travellogue of the Manaslu trek, Round Manaslu, Pictures of Manaslu trekking, Photos of Manaslu trek , Trekking in Nepal - round Manaslu, Dharamsalla, Larkya la