Inside a gompa

My hotel was the nicest I’ve stayed in, and had excellent food. I had yak cheesecake and yak cheese and macaroni. But the lady kept saying “bad people, bad thinking; good people, good thinking.” Luckily, I was classified as a good person.

The terrain of the valley we are passing through, the Kali Gandaki, was again uninspiring. A flat valley flor covered with rocks, making walking difficult. The strong wind blowing in our faces compounds the problem. However, the hills are starting to become green, as pine tree forests are starting to be found.

Lunch at the Yak Hotel, which featured “a real yak on display inside.” The stuffed beast proved rather gruesome.

Like many villages, Larjung has a ton of guesthouses, and most are empty. We are the only ones at ours. Normally I’d wonder how they all stay in business. But the families that own them keep on doing their normal things like growing crops and herding goats. If they happen to get guests, the women just have to spend the night cooking strange foreign meals in their primitive kitchens that they would never dream of eating (while the men play cards). This time we made their lives easy, and ordered dal bhat, which was tasty. The beauty of dal bhat is that always, always, seconds are offered. Not so if you order “pizza,” or an “enchilada.”