About the latest Nepal uploads. 5 March 2008 4:43 pm
Posted by Tracy in : nepal,pictures,travel , trackbackThe last few dozen or so pictures I’ve posted to Flickr have been making me want to start a greatest hits photo album, and maybe eventually I will. For now, however, I’m just going to show off a few of my favorites.
I’m proud of how this little panorama turned out:
It’s the view down into the valley from one of the many suspension bridges we crossed — not across the Dudh Kosi river which we were more or less following north, just one of its little tributaries. Anyway: pretty!
Next up: another one of those uniquely Nepali trekking dilemmas:
On the one hand, I gotta yield to the zopkio. On the other hand, it’s not going anywhere for a while, so maybe I should just go around? But passing a mani wall counter-clockwise provokes the Yeti…. I’m so bewildered just thinking about this situation, I don’t know what I did. And now, because this is a food blog, our October 22 lunch:
Fries, baked beans, cauliflower, and currylicious coleslaw, on top of a chappatti (yum). Not pictured: potato/mustard greens tarkari, rice, and sardines in tomato sauce (though I skipped those). That night at Ghat, I finally had the presence of mind to take a picture of the soup:
Every dinner started with soup and something snacky, like popcorn or papadums, and I was usually too hungry to stop and take a picture. This bowl was probably my second helping. You can see the rest of dinner here.
The next morning we saw some of the most spectacular mani stones and mani walls ever:
Those are easily 20-30 feet high, both painted and carved, and the displays stretched on for at least a quarter of a mile:
It was awesome. Somewhat less awesome was the fact that we’d been seeing increasing numbers of tourists since passing Lukla airport. Hoo boy was it ever obvious who’d just gotten off the plane. In my journal, I wrote:
…ye gods there’s not a happy Westerners in these parts. Cranky bitches are so very missing the point, which is that we are in Nepal and it is AWESOME. Geez, people, get with the program already!
and
I canNOT believe the number of iPod listeners seen on this Everest highway. Honestly, I know it’s overwhelming and all, but freaking set up your own mental filters a.s.a.p. while you can, because it’s not gonna be much fun to do it emergency-style when you run out of batteries.
Also many of the tourist parts of the increased traffic made me very proud to have learned the Nepali phrase for “may I take your picture?” Seriously. It’s just polite to ask, all right? But anyway. As part of our clever plan to get to Namche Bazar in between huge bursts of tourist traffic, we stopped early on October 24, not far from the entrance to Sagarmatha (Everest) Park, the better to start the next day ahead of the crowds flooding out of Lukla first thing in the morning (the even more insane crowds would sprint up to Namche the same day they landed at Lukla). Anyway.
We stopped early and had a fantastic lunch of tuna, mustard greens saag, a nice sour coleslaw, boiled potatoes, tasty veggie noodles, rice, and Nettre’s magic tomato sauce we all loved putting on everything:
And now I’ve rambled on for long enough that I’ll start Foto Friday’s post with more about the other cool stuff we saw in Monjo. Hint: it’s boozy!
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Dad Boothe
