Day 12: Pangboche to Thare

Put in another massive effort today and travelled all the way to Thare. Possibly the hardest stage of our trip since the walk into Namchee. The weather was beautiful but there was so much ascending and descending (hard on the knees) which caused it to be quite a difficult trek.

We left Pangboche at about 8am and got into Thare just before 3:30pm. A solid 7.5 hours of trekking. Again our lodge owner was surprised to hear that we had come so far. The path we choose to travel to Gokyo is not often used by foreigners and as a result Thare only has one tea-house (the only building in the town).

The walk was beautiful, we travelled at a very high altitude most of the way and passed around 6-8 beautiful waterfalls, some ice caves, shepherd stations and also passed up above the snowline again. Passed by the big town of Phorse but didn't stop to check it out. Some of the buildings along the way were incredibly beautiful, stone walls and stone slate roofs, they really looked like something out of a fairytale.

We stopped at 2:30pm for lunch at Thore before continuing on for 30 minutes to Thare, where we got a room for 250/- per night. These two towns were marked incorrectly on our map which led to some confusion. The lodge in Thare has no power and there is only 3 rooms (separated by 5mm plywood sheets). Pillows are hessian bags stuffed with plastic bags and then covered with a pillow case and when I went to open the window the whole frame came out in my hands. Looks to be a cold one tonight, but at least we are indoors.

Day 11: Gorak Shep to Pangboche

Woke up early feeling great after my best nights sleep since Namchee. Our room was still incredibly cold, around -10 Celsius, but I think I had finally acclimatised to the 5140m of Gorak Shep.

We hit the road with a plan to get at least as far as Pheriche (4240m) on our decent down the valley. Our plan is to head up the Dudh Koshi River to Gokyo within the next 5 days. We travelled really well (fast) and got to Pheriche by 2pm so we had lunch then continued walking till we got to Pangboche (3930m). In total we descended over 1200m in about 6 hours. We would have continued further but it was starting to get dark and we were unsure about accommodation at Phorse. The lodge owners at Pangboche were  very impressed with our trek as most people would do this in 2-3 days.

The walk was beautiful,  we started well above the snowline, followed the Khumbu Glacier all the way down to its end near Dughla where we crossed the terminal moraine and then headed through a beautiful riverbed which led down through the snow line to Pheriche. After this we had a small ascent up to the Pheriche Pass before we continued down the valley to Pangboche. Trees suddenly appeared out of nowhere and we realised that it had been a few days since we had seen anything green at all. Passed some paintings on a rock face that were pretty interesting, possibly done by monks as they appeared Buddhist in nature. Got held up by groups of yaks all the way but it was nice to have the change of pace.

After our horrible accommodation in Gorak Shep we were amazed with our rooms in Pangboche. Not only were they clean, warm, painted and spacious, they also had windows that opened out to incredible views of the mountains (our window in our room at Gorak Shep was basically buried in snow).

We were able to sun out our clothes a little, change, have a good wash and even dry our socks! Its been a good day!!!