24 hours later, sitting in another tea house dining room. Just finished another dahl baht, which I'm now digesting, along with all of the other sensory inputs - visual, auditory, social, tactile, etc. it's starting to get just that little bit colder, a strong hint of what awaits us further along the track.
A shorter trek today, just over 2 hours, mostly ascending. Found a very cheap but nice room with adjacent toilet for Rs200 (US$2) facing out into a garden with a window letting in the sunlight. As we arrived early, after some breakfast and a short rest it felt like a rest day.
...it's now a bit later that afternoon in a nearby tea room and I've just ordered a pot of masala tea, which is genuine Indian chai, half way between what is called chai in Australia and strong black milky tea. Nepali chai drank hot on a cold day (all days here are cold) is, in my opinion, the best there is. There are large windows making the most of the sunlight before it sets behind the mountains at around 4:30pm and everything suddenly drops 5 degrees in temperature. We're perched on a hillside above a long river valley and an equally long white cloud that has suddenly engulfed the entire valley in a blanket of mist. Hopefully it will keep us warm tonight. We have a sweeping view of Dingboche from where we sit. It's a mixture of 'tea houses' (generic term for hotels/guest houses), small shops and traditional stone houses with shingle rooves. There are lots of tiny paddocks divided by fences of piled up stones less than a metre high and reminiscent of the Yorkshire dales from British TV shows.
The SECOND most important piece of technology to pack (after earplugs) is a Kindle. After reading someone's trekking blog who wished they'd had one, I went out a day or two before leaving Australia and bought 2 Kindle paper whites (one each) (my autocorrect is ironically trying to make me write 'paper weights'. ... They weigh about the same as one novel, take up only half the space, the battery lasts for weeks when fully charged, they can hold thousands of books, and, to cap it all off, do not depend on any external light, making it convenient in dimly lit areas, (meaning you can gravitate to the spot near the fire rather than the spot under the light bulb), rooms without electricity or after your travelling companion wants to go to sleep. Aside from a bunch of good novels, we also have travel guides and other relevant non-fiction at fingertips.
...(end of digression)... This journey is also, for me, about taking my time, when I inhabit a world in which there's always a sense of hurry. We have put aside 27 days to complete a trek that some would complete in 18-20 days. This gives us time to stop in each place, explore multiple side journeys that are not on everyone's itinerary and know that there is no hassle should we become delayed or sidetracked. This makes it very relaxing as some people and groups that we've come across seem to be putting themselves under unnecessary pressure, thus reducing their enjoyment of the journey.
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