After a 6am wake up call our group packs up the bus and we start our trip to the Saramthali school in the village of Phalungu Khola.
The purpose of our trip is to trek to the school and together with the locals help restore and repair parts of the school. We plan to spend four days at the school focusing our attention on the vital repairs such as rebuilding a collapsed retaining wall and also hopefully been able to paint and restore the classrooms.
The school is vital part of the local community and has slowly fallen into a state of disrepair over the last twenty years.
We head north out of Kathmandu valley towards the Ganesh Himal just west of the Langtang region. As with most bus trips in Nepal a journey of a just a couple of 100 kilometres can take all day.
The roads are steep, narrow and mostly unpaved when you leave the valley but passing the oncoming traffic and overtaking on the bends always keep it entertaining.
By mid afternoon we arrive at the small town of Ramche the starting point for our trek. We’re expecting to meet a handful of porters and guides but instead are greeted by a group of about 60 people included our porters and their extended families. Children run around vying for photographs as the porters load up the heavy bags.
After a last minute attempt at some futile stretching we start on the track.
It’s only about 2 hours to our first campsite but it’s almost all up hill which we’re informed is a good indication of what’s to come. Along the way we’re accompanied by groups of children from the nearby villages. One young girl of about eight years, darts beside us up the steep incline all the while with her younger sister on her back.
We arrive at the camp to find all the tents already set up by the porters who arrived much earlier. It’s amazing the way they bound along the steep track with their heavy loads as if they were strolling along the beach.
The temperature drops rapidly as the mist rolls in and the sun drops.
Over dinner we discover the school has over 200 students. We’d all imagined it would be a little single building in the hills with a handful of kids. As we turn in for the night and the snoring kicks in, we realise that we don’t really know what to expect from the school, we all have ideas of what to expect but already these seem to be very different – we’ll wait and see.
