Day 14: Tatopani

Nilgri from our room window.

Today we slept in for forever, which turned out to be only 7:30am.  We had decided to spend the day in Tatopani as a mini vacation day, since we built in a couple of extra days into our trekking schedule.  Tatopani is a vacation destination anyway, because of its hot springs, and Nepalis and tourists drive to Tatopani in masses.  This explains why everything was so expensive.  After breakfast, Sam went for a walk and I sauntered up the street we had stumbled down last night, to do some shopping.  I spent a long time looking at scarves and ended up in a little Tibetan woman’s shop. 

Day 14

The entrance to our teahouse.

I sat on the wide plank wood floor and she brought out yak wool scarves to show me; then she joined me on the floor and we chatted while I admired all the brightly colored loomed items.  Her parents fled Tibet when China took over the country and it took them two years to get to some place in Nepal I hadn’t heard of.  She was born in a refugee camp; she said it is difficult for refugees to get a higher education because they don’t have passports and school can be very expensive.  Her children don’t have passports and go to a Tibetan school in Jomsom.  Apparently there are two types of schools in Nepal: schools for poor students and refugees and good schools for wealthy, Nepali students.  She rents her house/shop from Nepali locals and buys her yak wool raw and spins, dyes, and looms it during the monsoon season.  The rain, she said, is very boring and in the winter it is so dark that a person can’t find his/her mouth when eating.  Many old people die during the winter.  She was thrilled to hear that I was trekking without a guide or porters and that Sam and I were trekking the entire circuit, not just bits and pieces of it.  Eventually, I chose seven scarves and a silver ring (the ring she had a local silver smith make according to her design) and paid 2,000 rupees for the lot (about $19 dollars).

I met Sam in our teahouse garden and we took a walk before lunch to tour the garden and find the hot springs.  The spring’s pool reminded us of a zoo pen where spectators can look down on the animals in their cage – it was like watching seals swimming in a pool and sunning themselves on the fake rocks.  The pool was manufactured and surrounded by a chain link fence.  We got a good chuckle over the massage hut that was conveniently located next to the garish blue and white pool – it was misshapen and didn’t look very private or relaxing.  The weather was hot and we didn’t feel even remotely interested in getting any closer to the pool, let alone taking a swim, so we continued along the hot, dusty road and climbed the dirt path back up to our teahouse.

After lunch, Sam made his way up to our room for a nap and I remained seated at a patio table in the garden, under the cool shade of an enormous bottlebrush tree.  I sipped tea and read my Motor Trend magazine – the only non-essential item in my backpack and enjoyed the peace and quiet and warm breezes that made the flowers nod and sway.  When the weather grew cooler, I ordered hot chocolate, which consisted of hot goat milk and melted nutella.

Toward evening, Sam rejoined me and we chatted, watching the weather and the tourists as they streamed past the garden gate.  To our surprise, we saw our friend Johnathan pass us and we called him back so we could enjoy a reunion.  After getting caught up on all our adventures and trail gossip, we suggested John stay at our teahouse, because it was going to rain soon.  He doubted the rain, but sure enough, at 4:00pm, the wind and rain began, just as we had predicted it would.  The weather in this valley is consistent with its daily patterns; it rained off and on, like the off and on of the electricity, for the rest of the evening.  At dinner, there was a trekker who had a big bandage on her head: we were surprised to see her, because she had left in the morning, bandage free, so we asked what had happened.  She had started out okay, but when the weather had warmed she had gotten too hot, passed out, and hit her head.  So she was back at the teahouse to recover.  When we went to bed, the weather changed from rain to hail the size of large peas and we slept to the clatter of ice chunks hitting the metal roof.