Day 178: Dolpo day 9 - Threshing time

Harvest time in Saldang

A half-day's walk brought us to Saldang.  Unlike the encampment of Shey, this was a town, almost a metropolis, Dolpo-style, and we had arrived at one of the busiest times of year, during the harvest.  Groups of women stood in the fields, threshing grain.  They wore waistcoats over long sleeve clothing and striped aprons over long black skirts.  The uniform was regular, like the metronomic sound of their threshing poles hitting the ground.  It continued after dusk, after our soup and dal bhat and cups of ginger green tea had been consumed; threshing must finish before the snows arrive.

Nothing is mechanised in Saldang

In the afternoon we visited the most splendid gompa we have yet seen and added to London Mountaineering Club's collection of gompa receipts.  Then we tried the local shop, seeking beer and chocolate.  Resemblances to Tescos were few.  We climbed a step ladder into someone's bedroom and sat on the bed, looking at a haphazard arrangement of items on a shelf: a few cans of Chinese beer, a pot of vaseline, noodles, chewing gum.  "Do you have Mars or Snickers bars?" Krishna asked in Nepali.  Presumably word went round the village that some white folks wanted chocolate and someone entered with a full refuse sack.  My eyes widened.  We had not tasted a crumb of chocolate since we left Kathmandu and now someone was carrying a whole bag of the stuff.

Villagers threshing wheat

The shopkeeper opened it.  "Chocolate."   Was the word accompanied by a slight smile?  We took a closer look and found heaps of Chinese chewing gum.  Perhaps anything sweet counts as chocolate here.  I shook my head and Guy bought some beer to reward the shopkeeper's efforts.  When he needed change from 500 rupees, the man ruffled around in his bedding for a note, but could not find one.  Then his wife began feeling in her underwear.  Guy eventually received his change from a hidden location and we clambered down the step ladder laughing.

"It's hard to communicate with people here," Krishna told us.  "They don't speak much Nepali, only Tibetan."  Once again, our merchandise had come down the valley from Tibet, not over the pass from Nepal.  I wonder what the Tibetan border looks like and how easy it is for the locals to get permission to trade there.  But perhaps Saldang is largely self-sufficient?  When we left the village next morning, the sound of threshing had already begun.

Colourful field patterns as we climb the trail above Namgung

Yaks on the look-out

Yak

At the top of the small pass between Namgung and Saldang

An interesting mix of attire: ancient and modern!

I'm sure Pamela can tell us what these are?

First views of Saldang

Saldang nicely camouflaged amongst the hills

Saldang

Mani wall on the approach to the town 

It was harvest time in Saldang. Everywhere we looked there were groups of peasants threshing or carrying wheat. 

Their job done for the day, the donkey boys relax

A typical Tibet-style house in Saldang 

Threshing

Cut wheat ready to be processed

The monastery at Saldang 

Chortens and flags mark the approach to Saldang monastery

Again, we sought entry by means of the caretaker

Books in the monastery 

Saldang monastery

Harvest time

This girl told us that she was 13 but the apron normally indicates marriage!

Day 177: Dolpo day 8 - Yak herding

A yak caravan descends the path to Namgung

"Jum jum."  The familiar morning phrase.  "Let's go."  After a full rest day in Shey, we must hit the road again.

As we wandered off, the campsite owner was yelling at Narinda and pulling the donkeys' tethers out of the ground.  The problem?  He did not want us to leave any donkey poo in the campsite, although we suspected that numerous herds of yaks should bear the brunt of the blame.  "This man has high blood pressure," Uttam said wryly.  "He needs to meditate more."

Leaving the tantrum behind, we followed the valley, occasionally passing Tibetan summer encampments, but seeing no one except a girl of perhaps eight or nine.  She whistled to a herd of yaks and their huge lumbering bodies, dozens of times her weight, obeyed her trill.  Within seconds, she had sorted them into a neat line, plodding up the valley in front of her.  It was a bit like asking a song thrush to heard ostriches, but the task could not have been more elegantly achieved.  Yaks, it would appear, respond immediately to the perfect fifth.

A turn in the path lead us upwards to the second 5,000m pass of our trip.  We all have survival strategies for making it up the final air-less, rasping, quad-burning steps to the top.  To take his mind off the effort, Guy decided to learn the names of all the dwarfs in The Hobbit - goodness knows why.

Autumn colours upstream from Shey

"Ori, Nori, Dori, Oin, Gloin, Fili, Dili," he started.

"There's no Dili," I corrected him.  "That's the name of our cook."

"Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Ori, Nori, Oin, Gloin."

"You've missed Dori."

The path lead to a false summit and we had to plod beyond it.  It was time for the final pull onto the ridge.

"Ori, Nori, Dori, Fili, Kili, Thorin, Nori, Dori, Dori, Dori, Nori ..."

At last we made it to the top where Tibet spread out before us, thick with high-rise mountains, summit following dusty summit.  Up here the world was as arid as 'Himalaya' suggested.  The unfolding of a brown landscape sounds anything but beautiful, but just look at the pictures.

Alas, not everyone was enjoying themselves.  Donkey boy Narinda lay on the ground and I went to see if he was OK.  He nodded, stood up and walked a few paces, then slumped down again.  Surely this wasn't an altitude problem?  He's a local boy, used to high places, and this was our second pass of the trip; he had not struggled with the first.  So what was wrong?  If I asked at the Tibetan shop, with its supply of Chinese wine, might they be able to tell me the answer?!

We dropped into a valley flecked with bright red vegetation around the village of Nangung.  Red on brown; brown on red.  Then another gompa cut into the cliff below us.  A doll's village-worth of tiered fields stood around it, inhabited by bundles of harvested grain.  Just upstream, our mess tent had appeared.

Yaks being whistled into line

Herder camps dot the valley above Shey

Susan ascending the Shey La 

The Shey La is less steep than the Kang La and spectacular in its barrenness 

Myself, Nigel, Dili, Tony and Susan at the top of the Shey La

Prayer flags in front of the mountains of the Tibetan plateau

The mountains of Tibet

The magnificent nine

A caravan of Ford Transits arrive at the pass (right on queue)

Yaks and donkeys depart the pass

The caravan moves on...

...leaving the Donkeys behind whilst Narinda nurses his head! 

Red scrub announces our arrival at Namgung.
Another gompa-in-a-cliff!

Namgung nicely exposed by a ray of light but still camouflaged against its surroundings 

It's early October and the harvest is nearly over in Namgung

Day 176: Dolpo day 7 - The Monastery in a Cliff

A Yak caravan crosses in front of our tents
(with Shey Gompa in the background)

The gompa (Buddhist monastery) at Shey could swallow all of the mani walls and prayer flags we have passed so far and leave room for more.  Although the interior boasts just one small room, its surroundings radiate ribbons of stone and brightly-coloured cloth fluttering on the hillside.

We found a caretaker to let us inside and proudly took a receipt, made out to London Mountaineering Club, for our donation of 1,000 Nepali rupees.  Inside, brightly painted buddhas and photographs of lamas abounded.  Outside, manure dried, ready to fuel December's fires, and a horse looked on.  Spirituality and everyday life brushed together.  Aloofness will be of little use here when the winter snow storms arrive.

The granddaughter of the caretaker watches
us from behind her door

After photographing the gompa, we wandered down to the river where Uttam and Narinda stood beside a grey Tibetan tent.  "It's a shop," Uttam told me.  "They sell Chinese noodles and Chinese wine."  From Shey, it takes traders only two days to travel to Tibet - far quicker than linking up with the rest of Nepal.

Some more Ford Transits arrived while we stood talking, this time carrying bundles of firewood towards Saldang.  But, Nigel, Guy and I turned in the other direction to visit a gompa cut into the cliffs just over an hour away.  As we approached, a white building emerged from the precipice, where the monks slept, while the red room next door served as a place of worship.  It seemed improbable; two buildings set amongst chiselled rock accompanied by the lone thread of a pathway and a cluster of birch trees in a valley far below and silence (the monastery lay empty).  But this, if anything, was what I had expected of Shey.

On the way back, we stopped to look for ammonites.  The supply was so plentiful that even unobservant Susan soon uncovered one.  Their curled and fossilised bodies looked incongruous just below the snow line.  How do ocean creatures come to lie on the slopes of the world's tallest mountain range?  Fortunately we had Guy the geologist with us to explain.  Sections of the Tethys Sea, which once lay between the Indian and Asia tectonic plates, were scraped off and thrust upwards when the two plates collided, forming the Himalayas.  And so the echoes of past seascapes rest in the thin air and cold winds, so distant from the conditions that once formed them. The mountains all around us are mere children, a thing of yesterday.

Massive chortens dot the hillsides around Shey

Water-driven prayer wheels on the approach to Shey

The temporary camp on the valley floor was apparently peopled by traders from Saldang

Shey Gompa

Holy books stored in an alcove in the ceiling of Shey Gompa

Muscular blue-haired buddah 

Temple drums 

The caretaker of the Gompa and his granddaughter

Babu Hari admires the view

Narinda spins prayer wheels at the temple 

Mani stones 

A young Yak blocks the bridge 

Meanwhile it's elder relatives are put to work

Marmots played on the edges of our campsite

Tsa Kang monastery perched on a cliff-edge

The living quarters at Tsa Kang

Tsa Kang

A close up of the religious building at Tsa Kang

A view of Shey from the path to Tsa Kang. Our tents are the ones on the left.