Superheated Metal Cups

Short Version:
Clean! Monks (not monkeys). Moon.

Long Version:
First into the Hotel Hill Top - despite Lovely Wife stopping to play with baby animals of the goaty and doggish varieties - meant that we got the best of the hot water in the showers. Outside the main towns and cities, access to volume hot water is very much hit and miss; usually solar powered, and usually limited to a handful of showers. Stinky and late is a bad combo.

Post-shower, clean and with fluffy hair, we ate delicious foods and learned a new card game: Shitet*, which we played incessantly from here on in the trek, interspersed with the other game Uzir and Ganga taught us: Dumbal**

And then we walked down the 62 steps from our lodge to the main trail through Lower Pisang, up through narrow passageways between buildings, across rickety bridges, up more stairs, past incomrehensibly-mumbling old people, past cows and buffalo, and eventually into the major monastery complex at Upper Pisang, where a monk greeted us with superheated metal cups of hot lemon+honey drink, and where the views were truly spectacular; the Pisang valley stretched away on both sides, Manasalu Himal lurking beyond the curved stone wall at the leftmost, downvalley end. Behind us, Pisang Peak loomed massively. Straight ahead, on the lower slopes of the far side of the valley, we could see people moving, antlike and tiny, at our hotel. Looming above that, though, and dominating the view, Annapurna III. Massive. Glorious.

Closer to us, construction galore, in both Upper and Lower Pisang. Buildings mainly stone in Upper Pisang, with wooden window frames. Lower Pisang had a number of all-wooden buildings going up. Apparently the monastery is very good for business.

Later that night, one of the Quebecois operated on his crushed toenail with his penknife, and the vast snowy slopes all around conspired with the full moon to keep the light bright all night.







* = Someone from Belgium later pointed out that not only were the rules almost identical, but that the name of the game was almost certainly a corruption of "Shithead"

** = We kept score on games won/lost on both games, with beer-buying penalties after the high pass for the most losingest loser