Day 8 to Kyanjin Gompa
By recent trek standards today’s walk to 3,900m was a breeze. We left before the sun was up and whilst the cool, nighttime catabatic wind was still blowing. The muddy bits were frozen hard until the sun poked over the mountains and burned off the cloud. There followed a lovely gentle amble past yaks grazing their riverside pastures, prayer flags and the odd lodge or cafe. The season is at it’s end but there were a few trekkers and their guides around.
After 2.5 hours we crested a slope and caught our first sight of Kyanjin Gompa and the gaudy, multi-storey lodges that surround it. All new and freshly painted. Quite a sight in the morning sun.
A helicopter flew, low up the valley whose mission was to switch on the newly commissioned hydro station and the 11,000 volt grid that now runs up and down the valley. Things are changing very fast here!
For the first time the down jackets were out in force this morning except mine which remained ‘safely’ tucked away in my lovely waterproof, brand new kit bag. Unfortunately though, the kit bag touched a gas stove on it’s way out of the lodge and went on fire. Team Medex Maintenance swung into action later on in the day applying spinnaker tape to my melted down jacket and elaborate gaffer tape patches to the holed kitbag. A sliver of silicon from Denzil’s stores fixed my lens cap too!
In the afternoon I caught up with emails and the others burned off their excess energy by climbing the moraine to a frozen glacial lake. The afternoon clouds ushered them back to the plush new lodge complete with yak dung stove, carpets and the odd en-suite.
Tomorrow the team will likely split into a group bound for a bigger hill (5,000m) and a team bound for a pimple (4,600m). Either way the air is now getting thinner up here and there will be much puffing along the way.