Kierkegaard's travels: 19th – There is no slaughter without laughter (Tatopani (1200m)

Thursday 19 November 2015

19th – There is no slaughter without laughter (Tatopani (1200m) – Sikha (1935m))

Breakfast was at 0730 and an hour later we were on our way to our next stop; Sikha, 700m higher. Like yesterday the trek was hard due to the heat and sun out in the open, the difference was that it didn’t take longer than 10-20 minutes before we were cooking.

At some point we had a break at a pace where they were serving slices of a huge cucumber. I have never seen one this big; the radius of it was close to that of a watermelon at home.

Around half an hour later at 1230 we arrived at our new teahouse. One from the group left/forgot his camera behind at the cucumber place which our guide picked up. As he (the forgetful one) was one of the first to depart the place we were several who saw what happened. Despite the multiple comments from us along the way containing multiple instances of “photo” and “camera” he never took the bait, and it wasn’t until we had been sitting for 10-15 minutes at the new place he noticed something was missing. Our guide started backtracking today’s walk with him until a few steps down the path where he wanted to show one of the others’ new camera….

In the afternoon two chickens were bought for the porters as a treat and we could watch them kill them, clean them, taking them apart and preparing the more unusual parts and eating them before they took the “real” meat with them into the kitchen for cooking. It was fun to watch. The unusual parts were basically put directly onto a small fire and were then charred before eating. I got to taste a small piece of charred head with salt; you couldn’t see it was the head due to the charring and it just tasted like salty charred fatty chicken.

Tomorrow we will ascend 900-ish meters, estimated same time as today.