The Adventures of Smell and Snott: Langtang trek 1

So after 12 days trekking in Annapurna, you’d suspect we’d have enough of tired legs, sore shoulders and freezing nights but just 10 nights after we stepped off the Annapurna range we were on a bus heading for the Langtang Mountains. Unfortunately it didn’t start quite as we planned. As we were packing up our stuff before heading for the bus, Shell said, “I don’t feel so well.”

Long story short, three days later Shell had developed Giardia, which is a bacterial parasite quite common in the Nepalese water. We’ve read it can take up to three weeks to develop in your system so she probably got it in the Annapurna region.

So we camped out in a town called Lama Hotel (funny name for town, I know) and stayed at a place called Friendly Guest House. We initially chose the place because it offered us a good discount but it ended up more than living up to its name.

The old constantly smiling lady there had some Japanese natural medicine for digestion problems called Seirogan (don’t ask where the hell she got it from), but she gave Shell that for a couple of days and next thing we know she’s good as new – damn those Japanese are the bomb at making everything!!!

Anyway the next couple of nights we climbed slowly up to the peak of the first part of our journey, a village called Kyanjin Gompa at 3730m. It was a beautiful little climb that started through the forest, which always took Shelley ages to pass through, sometimes to poo and sometimes to explain to Scott something botanical that he normally didn’t listen to and said “Yes Dear”

Once the forest cleared we started to get a tantalizing view of the spectacular Langtang range, with its peaks in the distance and all around us slowly starting to swallow us within as we climbed deeper into its belly.

We saw loads of cool little things on the way, including some amazingly brightly coloured Tibetan people, with all the women wearing belts that hung fabric from behind them, starting from their waist and falling to their ankles, decorated with large horizontal stripes of all types of different colours. Pretty much every woman we saw around these regions would wear one of these belts.

But Scott’s favourite sight around this range (other than the mountains – oh sorry yes and of course you too Shell - blurgh) was the yows. What’s a yow you say. Glad you asked. A yow is a cross breed between a yak and a cow. They supposedly give more milk than a yak or a cow but like most things, the male is useless and infertile. Anyway they are so funny coz most the time they just look like hairy long overweight cows but with slightly more placid faces. Its hard to explain. You have to see one to know what we mean.

So on our 5th night in the Langtang mountains, at Kyanjin Gompa, we went to sleep in a cloud. The weather had turned pretty bad and we didn’t have high expectations for the next day but we went to sleep hopeful and awoke very joyful for we had received a fantastic present overnight and the next day turned out to be one of the best days we’ve had on the trip so far....