There’s another encounter with Yaks and a trip to a monastery in store for Fahd Abu Aisha, in part three of the Druk Path Diaries.
Day 5, November 3rd: The Life of a Monk
The fire had kept my body warm throughout the night. However, I happened to fall asleep on my left shoulder, thus leading to a tremendous amount of discomfort the following day. I lay mummified in the sleeping bag, willing the sun’s rays to hit my tent before I had to emerge -but they never did. Not a good omen. The sun hid between the skirts of a gaggle of clouds while fog clamoured over the looming mountains and swept down upon us. We hurriedly ate our breakfast and set off on our way to the other side of the lake and up the trail over one of the mountains. The weather was cold but my body started to warm up as my thighs tautened with every stride, trudging upwards on the slope.
Eventually after traversing over a series of hills we encountered our biggest obstacle, greater than Mr. Alpha-male Aggressive Yak we had previously played Super Mario with. This time there was a whole colony of them standing before us and unlike last time our only option was to surge forth. Any attempt to maneuver around them would have resulted in a very long fall down the mountain. There were no yak herders in sight and Tashi was again hesitant. I urged that we didn’t really have a choice, our only option being to wait for the chef and the horseman to arrive, and who knew how long it would take them.
There were baby yaks amongst the adult yaks. As we walked past two babies, one of them let out a little shriek. It caught its mother’s attention. Like the boy who cried wolf, the ‘threatened’ baby rushed between its mother’s legs and nodded accusingly toward us, with what I thought was a smug smirk on its face. The mother stared at us reproachfully, but Tashi and I were having none of it as we pushed through the creatures, continuing our trail. We carried on over a ridge and then descended into another valley, which also had a massive, (albeit smaller than the previous night’s) lake. It was there we met the yak herders and Tashi had a few choice words for them about leaving them unattended.
We walked a little further along the Dried Lake (legend has it the lake was enormous, but throughout time had evaporated into a much smaller size) and it was here where we finally met tourists that were not Frank and Nancy. They were American as well and were doing the trek in the opposite direction, from Thimpu to Paro. We said our hellos and exchanged small talk before continuing on our way. After traversing up and down through different valleys for almost four hours, our chef and horseman were still nowhere in sight. It was slightly worrying as the horses were expected to have caught up by now in time for lunch. Tashi instructed that we climb to the peak of the hill we were walking up on, so we could see if the horses were coming in the distance.
It took about 20 minutes before we heard the bells of the leader horse coming over the valley with our dear chef in tow from the opposite side of where we were perched. By then we had begun to freeze. The sun had never come out of its shell of clouds, smothered by a grey blanket that seemed to also be draped on us. We had reached the highest point on this trek at 4000m and it wasn’t the best of places to sit for lunch, but we did it anyway. The chef explained they had left the camp a little later than usual and the steepness of the slopes slowed them down, hence their tardiness. By the time we were done eating I had almost frozen so we got up and started walking again.
Over the course of an hour we trekked against the beautiful mountains of the Himalayas, most of their surfaces virgin to the fingerprints of climbers. This is because the government has decreed their peaks to be sacred; they are believed to be the dwellings of the deities. We reached our final campsite of the day, another lake SimkotraTsho.
|
The wind was blowing hard, turning the air particles into frozen needles that burned my skin. I imagine that this was how it felt to attain body piercings. It was only 1pm and I told Tashi it would be impossible to sit around in this freezing environment for the next 8 hours before it was time to sleep. He agreed and informed the chef of a change of plan; we would head directly to Phajoding Monastery, which would take another 3 hours of walking. The cold had injected me with enough jittery adrenaline to make it.
It was evident we were approaching our destination as we passed by tourists and Bhutanese locals on the trek. It was a special religious day that Tashi was not entirely aware of; the day Buddha descended again. It was also Tashi’s birthday, a fact he was reminded of after bumping into a few locals he knew, who were good enough friends to remind him. A lot of them were hiking up to Dong Tsho Lake, the magical lake, where it is said a mermaid resides within its waters. We were almost at our destination, reaching the small watchtower at the peak of the final ridge, where the city of Thimpu lay on the other side. It was a view I could enjoy only briefly as the incessant fog caught up with us again and jealously obstructed our view of the capital. We continued down the final slope to the monasteries.
The trail was now crowded with the locals paying their respects to the various monasteries scattered along the side of the mountain. It was a welcome interruption, as we had been in isolation for three days.
We visited Thushedaa Monastery, where the monk shared its history. Built in the 13th century, most of it had been restored throughout the years. We drank some holy water, thanked the monk and headed to our camp.
The tents were set up a stone’s throw away from another temple (of which I do not recall its name). Inside our main tent, a local group of Bhutanese women were seated inside having lunch. The chef had made me some snacks and tea and we took some pictures together with the monasteries in the background. The women emerged and requested if they could take a picture with me. Tashi joked that the women wanted to go back to town and make their husbands jealous with me draped on their arms. I laughed and happily obliged, finally feeling a semblance of home. The chef, who knew the monk of the monastery we had camped outside told me to go and sit inside the monk’s home with the heater on where it would be warmer.
The monk came to sit with us once he had finished his duties and explained some of the daily rituals that were required of him. This included emptying seven cups of water that were placed on his altar by himself, which he refilled every morning. The seven cups represent the first seven steps Buddha took when he was first born and it is a ritual that honors him. He sat with us for the rest of the evening sharing his love for his beliefs and his ambitions to be a role model for the younger generation and to spread positivism throughout the country. It was a very enlightening experience and we shared a cup of warm tea before I retreated back into my tent for one last night out in the open.
Words + Photos by: Fahd Abu Aisha
