Oct 31 2024 – Phakding to Monjo

I took it easier on the trail today. Made sure I ate a good breakfast, had plenty of hydration, and paced myself.

There are multiple river crossings on the trek, and today was the start of that process. They’re all cable suspension bridges that seem sort of dicey, but thousands of people and untold numbers of pack animals cross them yearly. The only thing that unnerved me personally was the bounciness. Once you got out to about the halfway point the bridge would bounce in resonance with your foot steps, so when you went to put your foot down the bridge wasn’t where you were expecting it to be.

Today the trail also started making up all the altitude it lost yesterday – Monjo and Lukla are at roughly the same elevation. I actually made decent time to Monjo. Debated pressing on to Namche, but ultimately decided to not push myself.

Spent most of the afternoon just hanging out in front of my teahouse petting the trail dogs that wandered up and down the trail, and watching a woman harvest a crop of some sort using hand tools. I don’t actually have internet access here, so for the first time in over a decade I can’t just fill my downtime with mindless internet use. The withdrawals are real…

Tomorrow it’ll be onward and upward to Namche Bazzar