Jubhing to Paiya

Elevation - 2730 m

Well we have discovered a new use for duct tape! Jon put some sterile gauze over the chafed area and then covered the whole thing with duct tape. It hurt like the dickens when he took it off, and he is now sporting a bikini wax, but the area is healing up nicely.

Today we walked 16 km but it was a mixture of up and down. The scenery is absolutely amazing and, of course, pictures don't do it justice.

We have been running into more and more donkey and cow/yak trains. Cow/yaks are a cross between a cow and a yak. Their horns are different than a yak and their hair is shorter. These animals are harnessed up with wooden devices that sit on their backs over a pad. The gear is then tied to these wooden things. The donkey trains are rigged up in the same way but are quite sad. We saw a few animals with terrible sores and the men driving these trains threw rocks at the animals to get them going. The cow/yak trains were much more civilized and we speculated that because the yak trains are much shorter, they are probably family owned. The donkey trains can be quite long and are probably driven by hired help who don't really care much about the animals.

It started to cloud over as the day wore on and made for a nice walking temperature. Just minutes after we reached the tea house a crazy hail storm hit. We figured the blessing we got from the Buddhist monks had saved us from being out on the trail when it hit! The noise was deafening on the roof of the tea house.

After the storm, we had bucket baths with lovely hot water that was already heated in the kitchen. The rooms were like little cabins and the dining room was lovely and warm with a little woodstove in the middle.
And surprisingly, this family even had a fridge sitting in the corner of the dining room. Someone would have had to carry that fridge over the rough terrain we had just traversed to get it there!Read more