I've mentioned that Hoi An, Vietnam is my favorite small town. That was before I visited Manang. I'll add a new category. Hoi An is my favorite small town. Manang is my favorite village. Consider the issue successfully ducked.
It's altitude is listed in my guidebook at 3,540 meters/11,614 feet, a height at which altitude sickness becomes a serious risk. The guidebooks recommend staying two nights there to acclimatize. After Manang the villages are smaller and the lodges more basic, so it's last place to stay in relative luxury before heading to higher altitude.
I stayed there for three nights. I didn't want to leave.
The setting for the town is breathtaking. It sits in a valley next to a small river. There are clear views up and down the valley of the two 7,500-meter peaks on the other side of the river. The creature comforts here are as good as on anywhere on the trail.
Fresh-baked apple pie washed down with real brewed coffee!Travel books talk about Manang as a comfortable place to rest before heading to higher altitude. I think they should market the place as a destination. I could see myself going back to Nepal just to go to Manang. And eat pie.
There are perhaps a dozen nice side excursions from the village, from a few hours to the gompa (shrine) on the hill above or three days to Tilicho Lake, one of the highest lakes in the world. The food is great. There is internet access -- slow and expensive, but hey, you're online in the Himalayas! But the best of the creature comforts happens at night. Read on...
The altitude is over 3,500 meters, which is daunting, but it's easy to get there. If you don't feel like hiking for a week you don't have to. There is an airport in Ongre, just a few hours south. Someone who wants to visit the Himalayas but isn't a serious hiker, or doesn't enjoy roughing it, could fly into Ongre, hike up to Manang (slowly), spend a week there, eat pie, hike back down and fly out.
The village is Tibetan in style, with stacked stone buildings and narrow passageways. Here is a an intersection with wall of Buddhist prayer wheels and a monument called a chorten.
I ended up in this particular corner because I was looking for the post office. I wanted to mail postcards from here to see if they were ever delivered. The mail here is carried by porters down the valley and then delivered by trucks.This is the post office.
The postmaster lives upstairs and comes down to the office when he hears someone walk in. The cost for a postcard stamp to the US was only 30 rupees, less than 50 cents, not bad considering where I was.
The alleys are so steep and narrow that they block out the spectacular surroundings, but not always. Here's looking down a path at Gangapurna. It's nearly 25,000 feet high, or about a mile higher than Denali (McKinley), the highest peak in the US.
If I were a better photographer I would have gotten a better shot of this child standing on the roof of her house in her school uniform with the Gangapurna Glacier in the background.
The entrance and main road through the village looks like something from the American Wild West, complete with horses tethered to hitching posts.
That illusion was enhanced on my third day, during the first day of the bi-annual Ni festival. Horsemen from all over the region came to town to put on a riding display. Some of the riders were young guys with fashionable clothes and slickbacked hair trying to impress the girls. Others were old-timers who looked like they could have ridden with the Golden Horde.
It was cool to watch them riding with no hands, controlling the horses using only their knees, something I have only ever seen in Mongolia. It was also fun watching the locals tailgating, Nepal style:
Everyone stopped to watch.
I was dining alone the first night when a gorgeous blonde girl sat down at the table next to me. I was eating yak steak, not pie. I thought she was flirting with me but that was just my ego tricking me. She's just an incredibly sweet and friendly person. How disappointing.
Kasia was traveling with her friend and housemate, Rob. They're both Polish but live in London. Rob has lived in England his whole life. He talks (and thinks) like a Brit. Kasia has only lived in England for a few years so she speaks with a lilting combination Polish-English accent. I would pay to listen to her read the phone book.
The three of us became fast friends and I spent the next few days hanging out with them and a young Welshman named Tom. He's a chef who, after his sojourn to Nepal, was heading back to his job in Paris. He was absolutely shocked at the quality of food on the trail. More on that in future posts.
Rob coined a phrase which makes me laugh every time I think about it. Nepalese use squat toilets, but every once in a while you'll encounter a western toilet. Rob's says the sensation of discovering a western toilet where you don't expect it is deja poo.Usually I go to bed at 8 p.m. on the trail because I'm tired, it's cold and dark and, well, there's nothing to do. In Manang I could go to one of two "cinemas".
One night we watched "Hang the Over" ("The Hangover"). I've now seen it three times in three different countries, which must be some kind of record. So I've got that going for me. Which is nice.
I found it odd that two of the staple movies are "Touching the Void" and "Into Thin Air". Do I really want to watch a movie about a mountain climbing disaster before attempting the highest trekking pass in the world? And "Alive"?! Maybe I shouldn't have eaten the "yak" steak...
Cost for the movie is 250 rupees, a little more than $3. For that we got to sit on wooden benches lined with yak pelts and watch the movie with complimentary popcorn and tea.
In the center is a wood stove, so it was warm and cozy inside. The movie "screen" is an old TV. The next night we went to the cinema across the street and watched "Into the Wild" -- another movie about someone dying in the snow...I desperately needed to rest my feet so the first day I didn't do anything except read. And eat pie. The next day I did a couple side hikes. And ate pie.
I got up early to climb up to Praken Gompa. Actually I got up early to eat pie, then hike. About an hour of slow walking above Manang takes you to a small shrine where there's a lama who will bless hikers for a small donation, to give them luck crossing the high mountain pass called Thorung La. Trekkers wear the twine bracelets he gives them as a badge of honor.
I arrived too early. The lama was asleep. Two of the nuns motioned that I should go in and they would wake him up.
NO NO NO, I said, shaking my head wildly. Let the man sleep! Don't wake him up for me!
He's 93 years old!
Even without the lama's blessing it was worth the walk to see the view of the village and the mountains beyond. In the afternoon I would climb the ridge in the center of the picture to the hill on the left.
Looking down the valley into the fierce early morning light washed out the view of the landscape, giving it an almost impressionistic look.
I didn't linger long for fear that the nuns would wake up the lama. I went down to recharge. And eat pie. In the afternoon Kasia and I walked up the other side of the valley and stopped for tea at the Chongkor Viewpoint Restaurant. Here she is enjoying the view and a glass of seabuckthorn juice. Mmm ... seabuckthorn juice.
Believe it or not, here I did not, repeat not eat pie. I could easily have spent an entire day wandering around the ridge. We saw trails going all the way up to the snow line. Looking across the valley we could look down at Manang and across at the gompa I had visited in the morning. It's a barely visible white speck on the side of the mountain.
The view back down the valley was awesome. The entire ridge was criss-crossed with prayer flags, which added an additional pinch of color.
It felt good to be alive.
When I could finally force myself to leave I would be heading up the valley to the right in the photo below. The mountain pass we would cross is just past the mountain in the distance.
The lake at the bottom gets its otherworldly blue color from the sediment in the runoff from the glacier. The mountain, glacier and lake are all called Gangapurna. Kasia and I found a trail down to the lake. She didn't have to tell me to smile when she took my picture.
The sun set behind Gangapurna, which made for great evening viewing. I love the lighting effects when the sun is blocked by the mountains but still hasn't set.
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