Day 10: Namche to Monjo.
This morning we had a slightly late breakfast and departure because Bala needed to hang new prayer flags on his mother’s house, or something along those lines. It didn’t matter because today’s walk was short and downhill.
We were only going to Monjo, the place we’d stopped for lunch on our second day hiking. Some treks walk all the way from Namche to Lukla on the last day, and I’m pretty sure that would’ve been possible, but it would also have made for a pretty long hike. I suppose the travel agencies don’t want to take chances on that crucial last day. And it was nice to explore Monjo.
We left the lodge and walked down into town. The steps STILL seemed really large and uneven!
Bala took us to a gift shop so I could by a mala, or set of prayer beads, for my brother. He wanted to make sure I got the genuine article made of real bodhichitta seeds and not Chinese schlock.
The walk from Namche down to the Hillary Bridge was so much easier than the walk from the Hillary Bridge up to Namche it almost seemed like they were different trails.
Because I’d complained about the state of the regular trail walking up to Namche (loose, dusty, steep, and not really a trail at all), Bala took us on the higher trail used by the donkey trains. This trail is wide and well-maintained. I noticed that large sections of it were muddy. This happens sometimes in South Carolina state parks, due to water seeping out of the hill, and I assumed that this was what was going on. But when I asked Bala what caused the periodic mud patches, he said, “All the donkeys in a group pee and poop at the same time.”
Wait… this was pee?
That was when I asked Chris not to walk to close to me, lest we foul one another’s steps and both end up slipping into pee-mud.
We arrived at Monjo around lunchtime.
After lunch, Bala took us on a late-afternoon walk up above town. Unbelievably, we STILL gasped for breath while climbing!
That evening, Bala cooked his special spicy pork appetizer for us to enjoy during happy hour.
He told us a long-promised story about Yetis. Apparently, long ago in the past (distant or perhaps not-so-distant), the yetis lived on the hillsides above the towns in the Pangboche region. They are high-altitude cold-adapted species like snow leopards or yaks.
The yetis were fascinated with human societies. Every day, they would watch the humans going about their business, working in the fields, building fires, and herding animals. Then every night, the yetis would act out their own interpretation of what the humans had been doing.
The humans decided that they could exploit this behavior to eliminate the yetis. One day, they brought out barrels of alcohol and piles of weapons. They pretended to drink from the barrels and then to fight with the weapons.
That night, the yetis came down to the village and found the props still laid out. They proceeded to enact what they thought they had seen, but they actually drank the alcohol. This made them drunk, so that when they came to fight with the weapons, they really fought. They fought so hard that all of them died except for one male and one female. This pair retreated to the mountains, where they perhaps maintained some vestigial yeti population.
This story…. so much to unpack! It makes me think that some group of hominids that could be seen as yetis might well have existed and were genocided by humans, as might have happened with our Neanderthal cousins or with other groups of native human groups.
