Yesterday was a relatively fast and easy walking day to Marpha, with the only obstacle being the dust and wind the last hour.  I think we could have made it further today, but instead we spent an hour slowly meandering along a dried riverbed searching for fossils.  It was a comical sight—all of us spread out, periodically stooping with our backpacks to pick up a rock and throwing it down against a larger one to break it open.  In the end, all the fossils we found were already exposed and the best specimens came from close to where the river still flows (not by the road where I was looking more forward to lunch than fossils…).

            Today was a longer walk to the village of Ghasa.  We had a couple of stops along the way for a snack at the famed Tukuche Dutch bakery and a few minutes later at a brandy distillery down the road.

 

A little while later we stopped for lunch.  I finally had dal bhat again.  It was my first big meal since getting sick again after the pass and much needed after all this walking.  The dal bhat is starting to get a little bit tastier with a few more spices in the dal and veg curry, and more variety than just potatoes.  The landscape is starting to get more lush again, the air more humid, and we saw our first monkeys in a week.  Right now it’s about 4:30pm and we just got to our guesthouse.  I’m hungry again and Matt and I are waiting for beverages (apple tea and hot chocolate) and a Tibetan bread (like a flat cakey donut with slits instead of a hole in the middle).

Today was a long, but fun day. Unsurprisingly we left Marpha around 8am. By 9am, we had reached the village or Marpha, which warranted a stop to visit its Dutch bakery and brandy distillery. The Dutch bakery was delicious, as its run by a Dutch-Nepali husband and wife. We met a German guy there who was stoned out of his mind and being outrageously funny as he talked about the apple crumble and “real coffee, real filtered coffee!” Imitating him is far funnier than writing down everything he said and did, so you’ll have to ask me about it whenever you see me. After the bakery, we headed farther into the village to the distillery. It was rudimentary to say the least, but the lady that made the brandy had a half-dozen different flavors of brandy. I’d sampled the local apple brandy in Muktinath and Marpha, but I decided to buy a small bottle of cherry brandy for Tatopani, where we’ll be tomorrow.