Welcome to Shangri-La
But bring your own toilet paper. Z and I just returned from an amazing trek into the foothills of the Himalayas and Singalila National Park, along a ridge bordering Nepal and India where we had views from Everest to the east, all the way west to Chomolhari, the highest peak in Bhutan. Smack in the middle was Kanchenjunga, India's highest peak and the 3rd highest in the world. We watched the sun set over Nepal, Tibet, India, and Bhutan and it was still and utterly beautiful. At the top of every hill, however remote, we were greeted by an array of prayer flags fluttering in the wind. There is nothing like being met by colorful prayer flags when your body has had enough of this "going up" stuff to really lift your spirits and remember why you're up here.
Bouncing baby farm animals greeted us at our overnight guest houses and restful tea houses in between. Baby cows, goats, kittens, puppies, chickens made the visits much more enjoyable. The mama cows and goats provided us ample fresh milk for our tea and porridge. Z, handsome in his new red puffy vest that he bargained on the streets of Darjeeling, professed his love for me by lugging a glass(!) jar of Nutella throughout the trek for me. Alas, we also discovered that the vegetable oil content of Nutella has a rather high freezing point so my jar of nectar could only be enjoyed after relentless scraping from my mini-Leatherman's pliers.
Never to do things the easy way, we set out on this trek in the middle of winter so the higher we climbed, the more the temperatures plunged. Our high point was at 12,000 feet in the village of Sandakhphu, and at night the thermometer dropping well into the teens and the wind chill was much lower. I've never in my life had to wear everything I owned to bed while wrapped in a double down sleeping bag with another human and still be cold. At one point I needed to use the toilet at night and found that the bucket of water to flush had a layer of ice on top. Never mind then. But the locals aren't exactly privileged enough to heat or insulate their huts. So we huddled with hot mugs of tea and stared at the mountains and Milky Way straight from an Art Wolfe photo gallery and daydreamed how we could be up there forever.
Alas, we had to descend, back to the world of beeping taxis and garbage and population overload. Somehow having experienced the mountains like we did and the wonderful people up there, makes being down here in the modern world a tiny bit more tolerable because we know of a Shangri-La that exists and that we will return some day.
