Morning
and departure as usual. The day’s plan was to walk in the morning and reach
Manang for a late (1300-ish) lunch. The walk was relatively unremarkable; a
couple of beautiful views of the mountains on the way. The total ascent during the
almost 5 hours was no more than 300 meters so it was a gentle trek.
Right
before coming into town we saw a field with several small groups of people.
Getting closer we saw that they were in the middle of butchering several yaks. This
was done for their week-long festival, the Diwali (“the festival of lights”).
Had we not arrived during this period we would likely not have seen this.
After
lunch we had the afternoon off spent on relaxation and taking a walk in the
town. A lot of shops with souvenirs and candy & energy bars, and, to my big
surprise, at least 4 cinemas. Not the kind you’d see at home but rather
teahouses with room(s) with projectors. The movies are obviously related to
mountains; 7 years in Tibet, Touching the Void, Everest and so on. And only few
of them not involving some kind of disaster (1996 specifically).
Manang
is a natural stop for hikers so there are quite a lot of hotels and shops. What
has been surprising for me on the entire trek until now is that almost all
houses are made of brick and mortar. It does make sense in a way as we more or
less have been following a road up to now so they have the infrastructure for
transporting the building material as opposed to the EBC trek where the
buildings mostly is pieces of wood put together as everything has to be carried
manually after being flown in to Lukla.
Slaughtering a cow. That's the intestines he's holding up.
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