Gho Kholā

James and I both slept solidly for more than 10 hours. It was glorious. We woke warm and well-rested; it was hard to leave our sleeping bags. After breakfast, we said goodbye to the Canadian group with Dil Man who'd been shadowing us for the last 5 days and began our further descent down to Gowa at 2550m. This was to be our last full day of walking, so we pledged to try and enjoy it as much as we could. Thankfully it wasn't hard to enjoy, as the mountains in the background were epic and the rocks quickly turned into lush floral forests, making it hard not to stop every five minutes and take photos. We hiked through lush flower forests, dense clifftop woodlands, through a burnt-down woodland (from where lightning had struck), and finally on a rough dirt road.

Along the way, we bumped into hikers we'd met earlier on the trail, who'd also done the pass the day before. The German man told us how hard he'd found it and how he'd also nearly cried reaching the top. He was especially relieved to hear that we'd also found it incredibly hard.

With about an hour to our final destination, clouds began rolling in through the valley, and after a few very large drops, James and I put on our new ponchos. It was good to get some use out of them. We tried to quicken our pace as we heard lightning and thunder, and the memory of that burnt forest area came back to me, but after so many hours of downhill, our ankles and knees were protesting.

We finally made it to our destination without getting too soaked, to our wonderful cabin rooms which had little skylights and en-suites (with a cold shower!) the luxury. After getting out of our wet things and taking a quick cold shower, we settled down to read and watch the rain. After an hour, James spotted the most humongous spider hanging out right above our heads. It was too big for me to get near (and I'm not usually scared of spiders), so James got it into a vessel and released it outside.

We finally had full WiFi coverage so dinner was a bit quiet while everyone checked their phones, but overall it was lovely as we drank alcohol and ate some very tasty food. Mitra even arranged for us to sample some dried buffalo meat, as we hadn't had any meat for the hike. It was chewy but beautifully seasoned. Now used to an early bedtime of 8 pm, we all went to sleep in our last night in the mountains.Read more