Hiked about five hours today. After all the chaos of the last few months, the going into the office as early as 3:30A M, the late night work outs and the normal day to day stuff it was good to just walk. The first couple of hours are generally downhill rocky paths that work your knees over. When you reach the bottom of the the gorge you cross the first suspension foot bridge over the Duhd Koshi river. My wife loves suspension foot bridges. She would pray “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…” The Buddhist are into chanting so she fit right in with all the porters. I wouldn’t surprised if people all over the Khumbu are chanting “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…” This is by far the lowest of the bridges to the river and a good place to learn the one rule that matters – yaks and zukils (their low altitude cousins) have the right away. If you encounter a yak train coming the other direction the options are to retreat or climb over the side and hang on – sure to make you some tourist favorite photo.

After lunch we started for Monjo another couple of hours further on. We regained all the altitude we had loss after again crossing the river. I made a fundamental error at this point. I was burning up the trail passing all the folks with common sense. For me it is just an incredible feeling to wake up in one spot and go to bed somewhere else that you have gotten to under your own motive power. In any case I was pretty sweat soaked when I got to the tea house. Now I was wet it was fairly cool and I did not have any dry clothes. In a few minutes I was chilled to the bone and had the shakes. My teeth would have been chattering if they hadn’t been clinched. Eventually the porter showed up with my duffel and I was able to extricate my sleeping bag and some dry clothes. Took a couple of hours before I really felt warm again.

Monjo Tea house is pretty typical of the accomodations if you do not tent camp on the way in. It would have to improve a lot to be called spartan. The walls are plywood and the floors are concrete. The four star establishments will have have a connected bathroom, again concrete and plywood. Since most of the water comes from a cistern on the roof and solar heat is the standard the degree of sunshine will determine how hot the water – maybe uncold would describe it better. There will be a common dining room with a central wood stove down low. As you get more altitude and less trees the fuel of choice shifts to dried yak dung. Everyone should enjoy a big pile of dahl blat (the local staple) around a yak dung fire at least once in your life. I personally think the yak dung smells better. In any case, I have actually developed a reliable four star tea house rating system which I expect all the travel guides to eventually adopt but I think I will save my definitions of one, two and three stars later.

Of course it started to pour rain and I forgot my head lamp. I stumbled back to my plywood palace in the wet and dark. Just another day in the Khumbu…