16th – Cloudy with a hint of marmots

The day started as usual with the exception of the weather being overcast with some heavy clouds here and there. We started gently ascending some 100 meters to Rumbak village where we got the chance to see how a normal house here looks from the inside. We visited the guide’s sister’s husband’s father where we got to taste butter tea and chang. Chang is basically home brewn beer and it is never know how strong it is so some caution is usually necessary when having a drink. The butter tea didn’t win any prizes and the chang, well… I’m not a fan of that, either. Smelling the contents in a small glass I was reminded of a yeast/water mix you start off with when baking.

There are 9 families in the village and three sources of income; guesthouses, camping sites (like the places we were staying at) and farming. The families are split into groups of three and each group gets the income for one of the three sources. Every year the groups rotate so that the split of money coming into the community is as fair as possible.

We continued our walk and after ascending to 4260m we reached the next camp, but to do some acclimatization we kept going on tomorrow’s route towards the Stok La pass, but stopped and had our lunch break when we reached 4400m. After the break we turned around and went back down to our camp where we arrived at around 1300 and had the rest of the day off.

Up to late afternoon the overcast held its grip which meant we had the occasional drizzle. Coming back to camp we had some actual showers but they were only short-lived which made them relatively easy to avoid. Late afternoon the sun managed to cut through the clouds, but it wasn’t long after it set behind the mountains.

Sitting in the dining tent during the afternoon we were able to see marmots in the distance, and by the looks of it it seemed to be a whole family/group.

Our host.