Posted on by Joel Topf

Day 7 of the #MM4MM EBC Adventure: We meet a real teahouse

After a rest day in Namche it is back to the dusty trail as we hike from Namche Bazar to Tengboche.

Up to now our rooms on the trek have had amenities like electric outlets and in-room bathrooms, well we made it to Tengboche and the teahouse had neither of these. There are two wash closets down the hall but even these have their idiosyncrasies like padlocks on them until 5:30 PM. Why? No one knows. It is the way of Tengboche.

The other cute feature of the bathroom is that the toilets don’t flush. There is an 80 gallon drum of water and a coffee can floating in the water. After you do your business, you simply flush the toilet by pouring water into the toilet. This took me more than a few moments to figure out.

The electricity is no longer included in your rent for the night, but they will be happy charge your device for 300 rupees, about $3.

But let’s start at the beginning.

We woke at 6:00 and had porridge and eggs with naan bread for breakfast. Eating porridge made me want to complain that this bowl was too hot and that bowl was too cold, until I finally found one that was just right.

Then our packs were loaded on yaks and away we went. The hike was up out of town as we went over the ridge the city is built on.

We hiked along the the ridge with a great view of Ama Dablam. Ama Dablam means Mother’s Treasure Box. The mountain has a central peak with a subsidiary peak on either side (you can only see the one on the left in the picture below.) The image is supposed to look like a woman’s head and two arms. In the middle of the central peak is large hanging glacier that is supposed to represent a broach or “treasure box.”

The weather was perfect. Cloudless blue sky. Visibility for miles. Stopped for some pics.

After a few hours we stopped for a tea break. Zonder broke out the chili spiced dehydrated mango. This is an amazing hiking food.

Then we continued onward and downward as we left the ridge and headed for river level.

We crossed the river on another epic bridge, this time over rapids.

Then we had lunch. The place teased us by advertising donuts, but it was too early in the season for the bakery to be open. They promised us that they would have donuts on our return trip later in the week. (We’ll see.)

Then after lunch an ascent, a big ascent. Just like the hike into Namche Bazar the hike to Tengboche had a 2,500 foot vertical climb packed into the after lunch hike. This is a Mount Democrat climb packed into the second half of a day. This part of the climb was particularly busy with lots of Yaks. There is a biological heir by to the animals in the Himalayas. Tengboche was about as high as you would see donkeys, and in the climb to Tengboche we saw our first long-haired yaks. Below this point we had seen yak-horse (or maybe donkey?) hybrids. But up high it was the real yak.

During the climb the clouds began rolling in. Then we were in the clouds. We hiked in the clouds all the way to Tengboche.

After this epic climb with endless switchbacks, rolling into Tengboche was a magical moment.

We had dinner, played around with the pulse oximeter (strangely the Sherpa’s had lower oxygen saturation than the trekkers) met some college students going on the same hike we were. Ben, the photographer, played Spoons with them and relieved them of some of their excess rupees.