Sunday, 20 October 2013 17:30 Hrs at 3930m (Pangboche)
After a morning of retracing our steps to Porste Tenga, we made the climb to the village of Portse where we had lunch overlooking the small potato farming town. The potato harvest had taken place a day or so before as in a number of small rock-walled paddocks, villagers continued to sort their harvest as we passed them by. We then proceeded up the Khumbu Valley to where we are presently wilderness camping in a field in Pangboche.
The trail was narrower here than in the Gokyo Valley and the drop more sheer. Above the tree line, yaks and naks challenged gravity as they grazed both above and below the trail on a mountainside that was for any large biped, such as ourselves, impossibly steep. It was here that we saw our first glimpses of Ama Dablam and Lhotse amidst the afternoon cloud. They loomed high above the Khumbu Valley and one could almost believe that they erupted from the sky and not the earth. Their infamous neighbour Everest, however, could not yet be seen.
Pangboche is home to a very small, very old monastery. Older even than the more famous monastery in Tengboche. Upon entry into the village from our camp, we passed by a large prayer wheel that is continuously turned by the water rushing beneath it. Mani walls line much of the short walk there and we see also two small stupa fallen into varying stages of disrepair. As with all Nepalese villages visited thus far, prayer flags hang from almost every rooftop and from the trees. Yaks also populate the small paddocks and they wander freely the narrow streets, occasionally to be shooed away by one of the villagers.
The people of Pangboche and Portse are, according to our leader Meet, Sherpa climbers. These are the people that take Westerners to the summit of the great peaks such as Ama Dablam, a technical peak more difficult than Everest. They are a small and hardy folk, with the wide, flat faces of their Tibetan heritage as it passed into this valley 400 years before.
(Postscript: Leaders, sherpa guides, cooks and porters supporting non-technical treks in and around the Khumbu region are often from the mid- and lowlands. It is not uncommon for them to be sustainence farmers that find work during the busy tourist trekking season to better support their families and send their children to be privately educated that they can live a life of greater choice. Our leader was from the Annapurnas, while our guides were a few days walk further down the valley from Lukla.
Sherpa people from Khumbu are generally accepted as being climbing guides and elite mountaineers supporting more technical treks and climbs at higher altitudes. Their greater acclimation could be attributed to both genetic high altitude adaptation as well as being born and raised at higher altitude and therefore having a greater base of acclimatisation to build upon. Climbing guides make substantially more than their less technical counterparts. Many young men from the Khumbu villages go on to be expert mountaineers but it comes at greater risk as evidenced by the 2014 avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall's Popcorn Field.)
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