Under Construction — This post is a work in progress. Thoughts, structure, and content may change.
Day 7 / 15 : Samagaun to Manaslu Base Camp¶
date: 16/5
Today we started really early. We had breakfast at 53o and we started walking by 6.
Niranjan decided that he wanted to rest for the day and stayed back.
It was very cold in the morning but fortunately we were blessed by good view of Manaslu. This was the first time on the trail where I got a clear view of Manaslu. It looked beautiful.
The trail today was pretty nice. Initially it was not too steep at all and most of the trail was paved with stones. The real trail that went upto the basecamp was quite steep.
Throughout the trail we could see the birendra lake and a beautiful mountain behind it. It was lovely.
We paused to rest for a bit and managed to see a live avalanche on the glacier.
The manaslu glacier looked majestic.
We kept climbing untill 10:15 when the weather suddenly turned bad. We were at 4400m and we still had about 1.7km to cover. We decided that the best thing to do would be to descend down as the weather was bad and we would not get any views from the basecamp. This decision was very sad for the entire group. I was happy as the basecamp was not something that I had in my bucket list and honestly I didn't care. I just like to walk / hike.
During the descent we took a detour and visited the Birendra lake. I was ravenously hungry, so I finished my lunch in like 15 mins. We stayed for sometime at the lake and started returning.
While returning we came across Niranjan who was visiting the lake for the second time. Apparently he had explored the village and stuff on the rest day.
We returned soon after. We had a lot of time to explore the city. We decided to go to the local monastery today. It was beautiful. This was the first time I had visited a monastery and I was astonished. The intricate artwork in the interior of the monastery was absolutely stunning. A monk there helped us pray and we lit candles.
Hassan from our decided that he wants to go to the basecamp and thus he will attempt it again and start at 4 the next morning.
I decided that my other plans of annapurna etc will have to take a backseat as the weather is really bad.
I decided to use the next day as a rest day.