Oct. 4
It seems to be an abnormally rainy fall. Monsoon season officially ended but we continue to slog through foggy, muddy, pissy conditions. A cold has been making the rounds and I've just succeeded in kicking it, with the help of various pills and collapsing in my tent as soon as possible each day. Putting on damp wool clothes in the mornings is only marginally less pleasant than peeling off my mud-and-donkey-poop-saturated socks in the afternoons.
But then a glorious thing happened: the sun came out and revealed a glacier spilling from high peaks, and the next morning the colossal rock face was dusted with fresh snow. Instead of the usual huddling in my tent with weak instant coffee, lazily packing up to face a dreary morning, I hustled outside to watch the sun creep along into the valley and intensify the electric blue glacial river.
On this stint of the trail we've hired some yaks to carry our stuff along with the mules. The yaks will come in handy if we encounter heavy snow; and, they look cool. They wear bells and some have decorative sort of feathery cloth on their heads and tails.
We faced a culinary gauntlet on our rest day in Laya. First, butter tea, which is popular here as well as Nepal. It's salty, redolent of yak, and topped with rice krispies. We also tried a type of yak cheese that is boiled and dried until rock hard, then strung in chunks like a necklace for convenient transport. It was akin to gnawing the rind of Parmesan. Finally, I was defeated by the uniquely bizarre cordycep, a highly sought-after natural medicine particular to this area: it's a three-inch long mushroom that grows from the head of a caterpillar. The fungus and host are consumed as a unit, chewed whole or steeped in tea or alcohol, and considered a general promoter of health and virility. Despite such virtues, I opted instead for "American Style Cream and Onion" potato chips, sold in a tent beside the archery field where the home team pulled ahead of the neighboring village.
