Don't Eat the Salad!

Short Version:
We stagger from Tadapani to Syauli Bazaar

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 21 = 4:30
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 102:30
Beer Time = 29:30

Long Version:
Tadapani Morning:
The occasional night-time toilet expedition is not unheard-of, despite the difficulties inherent in an unlit environment with unstable narrow stairs, holes in the ground on the path and a hole in the ground at the end of the path.
Multiple night-time toilet expeditions generally indicate something awry.
Multiple night-time toilet expeditions followed by in-room vomiting bouts are a pretty solid sign that all's not right in the world.

Of course, Nene's clued-up enough that, even in the throes of some serious not-well, she's grabbed a bucket and parked it next to the bed to catch the detritus.
There is a lot of detritus.

Eventually, the sun comes up, hugely and orangely, and there's a delicious Puppetbreakfast but no Nenefood, and later still we hit the trail, albeit somewhat gingerly, two steps - and a retch - ahead of the complainy old Britischers.



********

Downhill. Lots of downhill. With monkeys. And mountains. And many short stops for Nene to resist vomiting on her feet.

Somehow, she managed the 2.5 hour walk downhill to Ghandruk, where we stopped for lunch. She even managed to eat half of her plain chapati before borrowing a bed for a wee lie-down. Puppetfacestuffing carried on uninterrupted. A chocolate croissant, high in the Himalayas!

Nap over, we walked downhill some more. And by "some more" I mean "for two hours."

Stairs, stairs and more stairs. Sore quads, uneven steps, stream-crossings, buffalo and kids and a woman fundraising for a school for orphans.

And then, gloriously, not long after we were briefly forced off the path by a large uphill-bound gaggle of enormously fat women heading UP the evil hill we'd just come down, we reached Syauli Bazaar, where Nene did some more sleeping while an elderly couple demonstrated appropriate workload-sharing to a beer-guzzling watchPuppet: HE sat atop the haystack, arranging the hay nicely; SHE gathered hay from the surrounding fields, bundled it together, carried it to the haystack, and then climbed a ladder and hoisted the hay up to the top of the 3m-high stack where she held it until HE deigned to take it from her upraised, outstretched hands.

Later on, the stars came out, and were beautiful.



Beer Stats:
Beer Drunk = 3
Beer Time = 5:30
Time to Next Beer = 2:30