Tag: mountains

More adventures, etc. with lots of hiking

Day 3 began at 4:45 AM when we woke up, pulled on our heaviest clothing, and began our hike up Poon Hill to catch the sunrise. Poon Hill rises to 10,531 feet above sea level. (Granted, we were starting at about 9,430 feet.) Abby remarked that, in Nepal, this is called a “hill,” while in the U.S. east of the Mississippi, people would call it a “mountain.” Maine’s Mount Katahdin is 5,269 feet high. Vermont’s Mount Snow is 3,586 feet. And Georgia’s Stone Mountain? A piddling 1,686 feet.

Come on, people.

Anyhow … as we neared the top, I turned around and saw this:

More photos, from the top:

The mountains as the sun begins to hit them.
And a little while later.

Once we’d had our fill of the view, we went back down, ate, packed, and set off.

The same mountains from further away.
There’s a “This is Uncle Ted at the front of the house” Spanish inquisition vibe here …
… so this is the mountains with prayer flags.

We arrived in Tadapani that evening. Tadapani is a tourist village built on the edge of the valley. There’s nothing to do there except eat and sleep, but it offers beautiful views of the sunrise if you get up early enough, which is what we did.

After that, we ate, descended the mountain, found our van, and went back to the airport to catch our flight home.

One last image:

the first post about ladakh

abby and i are just back from two weeks in ladakh, which is at the northernmost tip of india, bordering both china and pakistan. the ladakh region was under water before the continents fully formed. although it is now a himalayan desert, you can still see the rocks that must have littered the ocean floor.

it was hard to avoid taking photos from the car window.