Nepal 2 – Tamang Heritage trek

There are not many places in the world where you can walk in the stunning mountains, stopping frequently in  local villages, bursting with culture and interest, and enormous hospitality, to be fed cardamom chais and soups by day and suppers with a glass of beer by night, where the air is crisp and pure, and a bed awaits you AND you are not carrying a heavy burden.

The Tamang Heritage Trek takes you up from Shybru Besi to Shybru, through  lovely villages dotted along this picturesque landscape. The area is largely Tibetan, though the people now call themselves Tamang, as Tibetans were never officially recognised and therefore not offered citizenship. Their culture is rich and evident everywhere, their quaint houses adorned with intricate woodcarving. The women wear colourful skirts and an embroidered hat and apron worn down the back of the skirt. The men look quite dashing with their hat and tunics, with a long sheath tuckedinto their belts.

The terrain is mainly alpine, with flat meadows and rhododendrons (May blooming), interspersed with village crops, rice, millet, and corn and has that off the beaten track feeling, as the villagers are only adjusting recently to tourism, and we see few foreigners on this trail.

On arrival in the villages, Karma disappears into the kitchen and teaches the locals some basic “tourist recipes” – hot chocolate for the children tea with milk and cardamon, as opposed to yak butter (as few westerners can stomach it!) and he cooks our fried eggs in the morning, as the chapatis are being rolled out.

We begin to get into a bit of a routine. Mark and I wake up early at 6 am, climbing out of our sleeping bags to watch the sun rise gently over the mountains, warming the earth to a warm pinky orangey glow.  Karma hands us a steaming cup of sweetened Masala  Chai- the taste is so good, even though I normally don’t take sugar.

It’s cold. I am dressed in the equivalent of what I would  be wearing to go skiing – thermals  multi-layers, gloves and woolly hat. The tea is a welcome start to the day. Breakfast follows with fried eggs and chappatis and hot chocolates for the children. When it finally warms up a bit we can change into our day clothes and pack away our thermals. One of the downsides of this trip and maybe particularly trekking, is the incessant packing and unpacking. EVERY DAY. I’d better not let it get to me as we’ve got a hell of a long way to go still.

We spend approx 7 hrs a day, including our long stops for lunch in Tibetan houses, when the children can play and Mark and I sit and read our books (I mean Kindles) overlooking rice paddies, and field after field growing a Swiss chard-look-and taste-alike, which promptly gets picked, along with the onions and garlic for our noodle soup.

The benefit of having a guide, is not only that he guides you, which may seem very obvious, but we have already seen the Israeli six-some, fresh out of conscription, heading off in the wrong direction on numerous occasions, trying to take shortcuts up the mountain sides and / or following paths on the map which don’t actually exist. But Karma, guide extraordinaire, is also a Buddhist Lama too, he  provides us with expert mountain advice, entertains the children, makes us unique sticks, beautifully carved, which he and Gabriel whittle away. I get the cobra, Mark makes his own dragon, Jemima gets a duck, Gabriel gets Simba the lion cub, Millie loses her stick every 5 minutes so ends up with just a stick, Karma has the almighty Bear. He also makes the kids bows and arrows. So they play at being Robin Hood, darting the arrows, Millie on her imaginary horse pretending to be the feisty Merida from Brave and sure enough a few hours pass by…… Days and then nearly 2 weeks, have gone without the children realising that they are on a trek.

We love the convivial atmosphere in the tea houses. When we arrive exhausted, tea and hot chocolates are quickly made and we put our layers on again, so as not to get cold, and warm our hands around the kitchen fire. Out come the cards, the colouring pens and paper, the kindles and everyone, porters, Finso (who carries Millie when she gets tired) and Karma and any other trekkers around convivially chat and play while we wait for our dal baht for supper, and occasional apple pie, which Karma makes for us as a special surprise.

Then to bed early and a story by torchlight as we huddle in our sleeping bags. I am so relieved that so far (touch wood) there has been no mutiny from the kids, no refusing to walk or “when are we there?” moaning from the kids – so far so good!

Having decided to start filtering our water and be environmentally responsible, we suspend our plastic platypus water system from a curtain pole on arrival at our guest house with a bit of string, and slowly the water drip, drip, drips into the bottle sitting on the floor. This system was recommended to me by an outdoorsy shop in the UK, seems a bit Heath Robinson to me. But hey-ho, that’s what we’ve got for now –  Mark takes on the role, only we are drinking more water than he is able to filter and it’s becoming a full time job for him. I don’t realise that we have a prehistoric water filtering system, or that it is causing great arguments between Mark and me, until we meet a great Scotsman, Graham, at breakfast one morning. He whips out of his bag a filter dip pen, which he inserts into his bottle of water and 20 seconds later, HEY PRESTO! top back on, bottle back in his bag he is ready to be off. I am left with my mouth gaping wide open.

It is Karma who quietly advises us that perhaps if we could change our filtering system.we might save the marriage. What wise words coming from the Budhist Lama.

We spend the next 12 days traversing, ascending to 3200m and descending to the valleys and cross strong rivers on suspended bridges. The views are panoramic. We cross 2 mountains, walking in a loop, ending up in Karma’s village Shyfru, which sits strikingly perched on a ridge. It has spectacular views of the Lantang Peaks 1, 2 and 3 and the Tibetan mountains too.