Besant Nagar to Base Camp

 We set off at our usual time of 7 am from the Rivendell tea house to our destination for the day-- Dingboche.  As we trekked, we could see the scenery change gradually before our eyes-- glimpses of the alpine meadlowland to come as well as occasional morraines and bare patches of hills caused by recent landslides. In some places the path turned extremely narrow with a sheer drop of many hundreds of feet and we carefully negotiated these stretches, hugging the sides of the cliffs. On our way, we caught sight of Himalayan tahr, grazing on the cliffs below us, standing unconcernedly on sheer slopes with a sure-footedness that only mountain goats possess. The weather also was gradually turning colder and we now began seeing true yaks, rather than the dzos (cross between yak and  cow) that we had seen in Lukla and Namche Bazar.  One of the beautiful things that happened this day was when a horse (probably put to pasture) suddenly emerged from the mist, nuzzled Rathika fo...

We woke up to lovely views of snow-capped mountains on a clear day at Namche. At our usual departure time of 7 am, post breakfast, we left Kamal Guest House, Namche Bazar for our next destination, Debuche. The tea house had been a bustling place, and we saw a group of Westerners, returning back to Lukla, being felicitated with shawls for having completed the trek. Among them was a kid of around 7-8 years!                                                                            We set off again, up hills and down valleys, with the scenery around us gradually changing. The coniferous trees, the pines were becoming fewer, as indeed were any shrubs of reasonable height, and the land around was gradually showing glimpse...