We are now officially off schedule –half day behind. I am not sure if that means we are taking it slow??!!
The descents are very hard on me, my legs, knees, feet and toes are hurting permanently . Where is the fun of this adventure? We got to Ringmo on the uphill. Funny, as soon as I trek uphill my mood lifts as well. The days of hiking are all hard now, even though our guide book says it is getting easier. I am still waiting and hoping……..
We are noticing that Sherpa houses and families are mostly anxious to take us in. We negotiate the prices before agreeing to stay, but by the time we leave the next day, they don’t seem to remember some part of the agreement and try to charge us more for either the room, the shower ( which is mostly a bucket of warm water) or the menu. Even though everything is extremely cheap in comparison, we are on a tight budget (as you can imagine there are no ATM machines or banks on the way, nor can you pay with a credit card or even a large bill (like 1000 or even 500 Rps if you need change -1000Rps=$7:60), so we calculated our daily expenditures and brought tons of small bills in cash. In one of the books I was reading, that in the early days, explorers had to bring porters just to carry the cash, which consisted of only coins in these regions)
On this stretch or our trip we experienced a discomfort of having to leave “on a sour note” a few times as a result. – I just don’t like that at all, but we agreed amongst the three of us, that it also really doesn’t feel good to just give in or “not notice”. It just isn’t right! Some of the tourists ahead of us are also distributing candy, balloons and money to the kids along the way, as a result the kids say stuff like: “Hallo Balloon” or “Hallo Bonbon” or “Hallo Pen”. Some of them are aggressive enough to start pulling on our backpacks and point to rings and necklaces they like to have.
A ridiculous long downhill hike almost left me in tears before we got to another little lodge – still half a day behind- in Jubing and that was day 6.
