Advertisement
Published: October 17th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Rainbow #2
Note the secondary rainbow. Most amazing rainbow I have ever seen So, I finally got my feet into some trekking. This trek was pretty good, we started in Darjeeling and ended up back in Darjeeling, but with quite a bit of hiking in between.
I decided to break the trek up into three blogs since I have so many photos 😊
On day one we met up at the Trekking place in Darjeeling at 8:30 and met our guide Pemba who spoke quite minimal English, which ultimately turned out to be a problem later on.
We began our trek in Maney Bhanjyang, an entry into the Singalila National Park. We got a taxi ride to Maney Bhanjang with a jeep which took about an hour, and had a breakfast of 2 small chapattis, a small omelette, and milk tea. After our (not very filling) breakfast we stopped off at the park entrance where we paid our entrance fee and had our passports checked for the first time. The hike along the ridge crosses the Nepal-India border a number of times so on a few occasions I was actually in Nepal. Add that to the list (sort of).
The beginning of the hike we were hiking uphill pretty much
all day, since Mane Bhanjang is at an elevation of 2134 m and Tumling is at an elevation of 2900 m. We set out on our hike around 11 am and arrived at around 5pm. With plenty of stops. Initially we had a cup of tea in every little village, which was quite fine with me. We covered a total distance of 11 km, and almost all the day was uphill.
On my trip, the other travelers were two Canadian girls and one Polish guy. We got along pretty well, and had a lot of discussions, about a quite wide-ranging set of topics. Canadians are still good in my book.
The weather was quite shitty throughout the first day. It varied between rain and fog and patches of sun, but most of the day was spent with rain gear on. I'm certainly glad I brought mine.
The result of all the rain and patchy sun was some spectacular rainbows. Particularly there was one that was amazing, with the colors all the way from red to violet fully demonstrated, which we saw while we were having a lunch of Ramen-like soup. Some of the others weren't a big
fan of the soup. I didn't mind it, but it sure wasn't filling.
In the evening we slept in a small hotel in Tumling, it's best feature being its fireplace in the main room. The male guides were trying like crazy to get the fire going vigorously, and failing mightily, and finally one of the women came in and blew on the fire, and with one breath it was back in business. It was quite funny. With the fireplace we were able to dry out our clothes which was lovely. Once we left for our rooms we were much colder, but they provided us with a lot of blankets, and we were able to get a decent sleep, fully clothed.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.06s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 22; dbt: 0.0374s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb