What a night indeed. About an hour after dinner (daal bhat which I shall never have again) I felt funny about the stomach. Oh fuck, I thought, and indeed it was so. Food poisoning such as I’d never had in memory. The toilet was beyond repellent, think Trainspotting but in a Himalayan village, with an open basket of used toilet paper hanging off the wall and glacier melt to wash afterwards. Nevertheless I became very affectionate towards it over the course of the night, as I spent much of the time till around 3am in it.
It was not all awful. The beauty made up for it. There was a full moon that night, and it shone onto and off the snow-topped peak, so bright that a light was barely needed. Yet even through moonlight and snowlight the constellations shone through.
Anyhow, I had leisure during the night to wonder what I should do and settled that if my stomach didn’t settle by the morning I would hire a horse to take me back to Syarubesi and then, if necessary, a private jeep to Kathmandu, and to hell with it all. There, I would head to the Yak and Yeti to throw myself into the GF’s arms and into the comforting embrace of modern hygiene standards.
But by 3am the cramps and convulsions had stopped. In the morning I felt surprisingly good so we set off for Langtang village at a glacial pace as now, rather than tired, I felt very weak.
The path continued along the river but firmly upwards and at last we did indeed break through the treeline into yak pastures. They are smaller creatures than I had imagined, but my understanding from the guide is that this is a lower altitude breed so maybe the ones further up are the really big ones. The meadows themselves were high, cold, and silent, with the only sounds the tinkling of bells and, early in the morning, birdsong.
Then a lot of walking alon ridges and more snowy mountains came into view. The river receded far below so we could see its white streak but no longer hear it, and the waterfalls cascading to meet it appeared white and frozen, no longer full of movement. A helicopter passed overheadand returned about an hour later, gone to resuce someone with altitude sickness (or to defraud them).
There was a recent landslide along the way, and it was very precarious indeed, crawling along a steep sandy slope, trying to move quickly whilst avoiding kicking off another landslide. My guide was not impressed by my attempts.
The most terrible part of the walk came towards the end of it. The path suddenly went across what seemed a wide, low plain fanning out from the hillside, with a stream filled with white ice gushing through it. It was desolate, grey rock and sand, and a misstep could cause a landslide. This was the burial site of the old Langtang village. The 2015 earthquake unleashed a landslide that buried the village and all within it – residents, trekkers, guides. It was strange to walk over those entombed houses and bodies and I hoped as we stepped over them that those hundreds survive in some form, as fossils or as a snapshot of a trekking village, to be uncovered like Pompeii in centuries to come.
I passed two young Israeli women who were, to my gratification, suffering almost as much as I was, though without food poisoning. They had not got a guide or porter, had managed to get lost at least once, and were clearly finding it very difficult.
It was also revealed to me that my guide had thought he was hired as a guide while I had asked for a porter guide. Much is explained.
Now I have arrived in Langtang, the new Langtang overlooking the grave of the old, and am staying in a far cleanre (and newer) teahouse. It is clearly an important settlement in the region is named after it, as well as a brand of mineral water.
My room (with a blessed private toilet) opens onto a courtyard and outside is a little family scene. An elderly woman sits on the ground and spins a prayer wheel as her young grandsons play a stones game beside her. They all chat, seemingly contentedly, in the sun, in a spot protected from the biting wind. A couple of calves wander in and the old woman hoiks at them to leave, they pay no attention. Sighing, my guide gets up and runs half-heartedly at them, hoiking, to chase them away, but they wander away pretending it was their own decision. Blackbirds caw overhead. A younger woman, perhaps the mother of the boys, appears and unfurls a magnificent cascade of night black hair and begins oiling it.