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Welcome To Shangri La
The upland part of the Nepal Adventure takes us to the serene alpine valleys of the Khumbu region, the domain of the Sherpas-- the “East People”-- who migrated from Tibet centuries ago.
We stay in cozy alpine lodges, and walk an average 3 ½ miles each day to the next lodge. These isolated valleys slumber in a medieval existence, allowing you to step out of the modern world, and into a timeless realm. There are no clocks. No calendars. The wheel is largely unused.
You walk through little farming communities of stone cottages, set amid green meadows. You share the broad trail with colorfully dressed sherpanis driving their herds of shaggy yaks to pasture, and monks hurrying to prayer at nearby monasteries, as they have for centuries. It’s an ancient way of life that few outsiders ever see.
 As you stroll through a village, you discover the sacred is always close at hand. The main square is filled with prayers written on large flat stones, in the distinctive white-on-black fashion. You be sure you pass them in the traditional manner, on your right side. There are also colorful prayers flags flying in the breeze carrying the prayers upward, and usually a large red prayer wheel to spin, that's decorated with gold and silver prayer characters. As you walk, you might have an apple in your daypack, and feed it to a Tibetan pony who pokes her head through a fence. And when you hear the sound of lessons drifting out of the window of a nearby one room school house…. you follow it! You catch the teacher’s eye, and find she is so happy to accept your gift of pencils, rulers, and other school supplies, that are also in your pack. The Dhanybhad Ritual that you receive from the children as their thank you, is very heart-touching. Welcome to the village.
In another settlement, you enjoy a cup of tea in a bhatti, a trail-side tea shop. Pretty soon the village children come over to investigate you. The youngsters all meet you with hands in a prayer gesture over their hearts, and a “Namaste” greeting. You watch them giggle in delight as they look through your binoculars. And many of them have never seen their own image in a digital camera display. Big Smiles.
Children are well-loved and greatly honored. You make friends with them, and the next thing you know, you have a baby in your lap, and a Sherpa mom is offering you a piece of the family’s homemade yak cheese. Big smile—this time yours. Welcome to the family.
The most memorable experiences aren’t on your itinerary. You stop beside the smoothly rotating water wheel of a mill, and watch an old man grind the barley from his family field, into tsampa– barley flour. He laughs and gives you a taste, and you find it’s still warm from the millstones.
You continue on toward the next mountain inn, through pine forests dotted with magnolia, past terraced green farmland, and rushing waterfalls, with golden hawks soaring overhead, and views of snowy peaks
“I walked very slowly on the last mile of the trail each day.
I wasn’t tired.
I just didn’t want it to end”
---an Inn-To-Inn Hiker
Even when you are at the next lodge, warming your feet at night by a pot belly stove, it’s tough to stay indoors. And you always bundle up, grab a cup of hot chocolate and go out see the stars just before you go to bed. Overhead you see the
 Akash Ganga-- The River of Stars-- which is shines in a way you’ve never seen in American night skies. These stars don’t twinkle, because with 12,000 feet of the Earth’s atmosphere below you, the heavens you see have a brilliant, diamond-like quality. Your cocoa is gone and it’s getting cold, so you head to bed, but not before you take a slow 360º turn and soak in the night view. As you pull a crimson, hand-loomed Tibetan blanket up to your chin, you fall asleep to the sound of gusts whistling down from Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest), and perhaps Buddhist chants borne on the wind from a distant monastery.
Welcome to the heart of Nepal.
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