The big dining room at the Himalayan Lodge is filling with tired walkers coming up from Tengboche or down from Everest Base Camp and Kala Pattar.
Everyone is seeking warmth. After a glorious blue morning, Pheriche has turned bitterly cold. A dense layer of cloud has blown up into this desolate valley. Now there's not a soul to be seen out in the cobbled laneways outside. Everyone has retreated into the warm dining rooms of the dozen or so lodges in the village.
Two mountain horses brace themselves against the wind as they scrounge for feed around the courtyard of our lodge. It's very slim pickings, nothing but dirt and rocks.
Pheriche sits on the side of a valley carved out by glaciers long ago. It is inhospitable territory here - the altitude at 4240m has us well above the vegetation zone. There are no trees or shrubs. Not even grasses. Just sparse dry ground cover. I feel sorry for the mountain horses, cows and hairy yaks which have free range up here. There's so little fodder for them and they have no shelter from that vicious wind.
Life in the lodges is very convivial. When the weather is foul there is nothing to do but laze around in the lounge warmed by the stove that's fuelled by dried yak dung.
We read books, write journals, play cards and trade trekking stories with other hikers over steaming lemon tea. We've teamed up with a couple of Canadians and another couple of Australians. It's great meeting up with them here and there.
There has been plenty of drama here in the mountains and it gets gossiped about in the lodges - about the helicopter that crashed the other day at Ama Dablam, just a few kilometres from here; and yesterday a Polish hiker very ill with mountain sickness was taken down to Namche Bazaar on horseback - his expedition had a journalist with them and so it was all over the Polish newspapers or so the gossip goes...
We feel like we're right amongst the action here surrounded by 5000+ metre peaks in all directions. Tomorrow we set off for Dughla as we work our way closer to Everest Base Camp.
Everyone is seeking warmth. After a glorious blue morning, Pheriche has turned bitterly cold. A dense layer of cloud has blown up into this desolate valley. Now there's not a soul to be seen out in the cobbled laneways outside. Everyone has retreated into the warm dining rooms of the dozen or so lodges in the village.
Two mountain horses brace themselves against the wind as they scrounge for feed around the courtyard of our lodge. It's very slim pickings, nothing but dirt and rocks.
Pheriche sits on the side of a valley carved out by glaciers long ago. It is inhospitable territory here - the altitude at 4240m has us well above the vegetation zone. There are no trees or shrubs. Not even grasses. Just sparse dry ground cover. I feel sorry for the mountain horses, cows and hairy yaks which have free range up here. There's so little fodder for them and they have no shelter from that vicious wind.
Life in the lodges is very convivial. When the weather is foul there is nothing to do but laze around in the lounge warmed by the stove that's fuelled by dried yak dung.
We read books, write journals, play cards and trade trekking stories with other hikers over steaming lemon tea. We've teamed up with a couple of Canadians and another couple of Australians. It's great meeting up with them here and there.
There has been plenty of drama here in the mountains and it gets gossiped about in the lodges - about the helicopter that crashed the other day at Ama Dablam, just a few kilometres from here; and yesterday a Polish hiker very ill with mountain sickness was taken down to Namche Bazaar on horseback - his expedition had a journalist with them and so it was all over the Polish newspapers or so the gossip goes...
We feel like we're right amongst the action here surrounded by 5000+ metre peaks in all directions. Tomorrow we set off for Dughla as we work our way closer to Everest Base Camp.