One goal achieved. Onto the next - Cho La (la being Tibetan for 'pass'). We'll be camping just below the approach to the pass. To get there, we have to cross the Ngozumpa Glacier. It takes us over an hour to do this - the glacier is huge and the trail is rough. Oh, and we keep stopping to toss rocks onto the frozen ponds and lakes below us! The glacier creaks and groans around us and every now and again there's a rattle of stones falling into a lake - loosened by the glacier's movement.
Eventually we make it to the tiny settlement of Thagnag...and keep on going. Darn it! I hoped for morning tea. Now it's a seemingly endless slog up the valley towards our campsite. Slowly slowly we trudge up the trail alongside a half-frozen stream. Eventually, I catch a glimpse of a bright purple tent. We're here! We all collapse to the ground in front of our tents, tired and a little gobsmacked at how hard that hike was. That night, dinner is served in each of our tents and we're all tucked up by 6.30 cos it's too dark and cold to do anything else! It's cold cold cold and when we wake up (at 5.30am), there's ice on the inside of the tent - frozen condensation - and the water has frozen in my drink bottle! We're all so cold - I can't feel my toes - that we're desperate to set off for the Cho La as soon as possible. The first hour is pure misery as we slog up the first hill. Thankfully, the sun has reached the crest of the hill when we get there and we spend about 20 minutes thawing out before going down to the valley at the bottom of the Cho La. This is what I hate about trekking in the Himalayas. You sweat blood and tears getting up a bloody hill only to discover you have to go down its other side! All pain and no gain. But I digress....
There's three huge boulder fields to scramble over before reaching the final approach to the pass. These reduced me to tears in 2003 when I crossed the Cho La east to west. This time, I'm more confident boulder hopping and I'm feeling fitter and stronger. Before I know it, there's just the almost vertical slope to the Cho La to go. I find Nick sitting in the snow feeling lousy and munching on a chocolate bar. He's buggered he says. I give us both painkillers for our headaches, Phuri takes Nick's pack as well as mine, and Nick and I continue slowly on our way. Much of the slope is covered in snow, which actually makes it easier as there are footprints to follow. Inch by inch we make our way to the top - and are greeted by cheers from the rest of the group who arrived before us. It's quite a long wait before Smithy and Hamish join us, but then it's time to take photographs and string up prayer flags. We then move off to a snow slope beside the trail for lunch and our second mountaineering lesson - self-arrest.
Lunch is eaten standing up - delicious Tibetan bread, cheese wedges, dried apricots, cashews, Snickers bars, hot lemon drinks.
The snow was too powdery for people to properly slide down, but Pasang demonstrated the art of self-arrest anyway. This involves gripping one's ice axe close to the body, rolling over onto one's front and digging the ice axe into the snow, keeping one's feet in the air, until one comes to a halt. Easy huh! Some people then practised walking tied on a rope whilst the rest of us began to make our way across the snowfield and down the other side of the the Cho La. If we thought the ascent was almost vertical, the descent was terrifyingly straight down - and over huge boulders. I'm still marvelling that in 2003 I managed to go up that side! Then there was a long, winding trek down to the valley bottom. Smithy, by now suffering from a full-blown chest infection of her own, was really beginning to fade and run out of energy. We had perhaps a further 30 minutes of walking to our campsite when Phuri inexplicably took us cross country. We ploughed through shrubbery, scrambled over boulders, plunged into snow, criss crossed creeks and slogged up and down 3 hills before we finally came out above the perfectly good trail we had left behind an hour ago - with the rest of our group gaily trotting along it to our tents.
Smithy and I were not happy campers that night and I shouted my displeasure at poor Pasang! We were a bit warmer thanks to Smithy's bright idea of putting our biggest polarfleeces down under our sleepingbags - no cold seeped through from the ground this time. And next morning enjoyed washie water in a sunwarmed tent - we even managed to strip off completely and say hello to our skin, it was so warm!
After an alfresco breakfast, it was time for mountaineering lesson number 3: walking with crampons. We all laced ourselves into our climbing boots, strapped on our crampons and stumbled over to the slope on which Pasang wanted us to practise going up. Well, that was a complete comedy of errors as we tripped over tussocks, got our crampons caught in grass, tangled our legs up and generally made it up the slope demonstrating absolutely no command of the techniques Pasang had just taught us! We consoled ourselves that it would actually be easier in snow....
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