5/4/2022
Day 5:
Yak Kharka (13,484 ft) to Thorong Phedi (14,501 ft) – 5 hours
Destination: Thorong Phedi Guest House
Today was going to another short walk, we started later around 8.30am. It was another spectacular sunny day.
We were leaving the views of of Annapurna Range, and heading towards the Phedi, also known as basecamp right before the Thorong La Pass.
There is also High Camp with a few options for accommodations, but our guide Dol had decided for our group to stay a night at Phedi for better acclimatization and to avoid altitude sickness ensuring safety for everyone.
The walk was going to be short one, more like 3 hours, Mitul decided to take a detour by going down to riverbed. (basically, follow the route the yaks would follow to avoid the bridge-crossing created for humans)
This route added another hour and half in our journey and tons of fun playing in the river!
We got to our teahouse by 1pm, and had lunch. Some folks decided to take nap while all the others, including our guides and porters decided to take advantage of warm day. We headed to the courtyard and played a game of `sherbajaar’ (wall street) that Kalpu taught us. This game made us run around and everyone surprisingly was able to move fast at the pace of the game.
This game made us laugh so hard, it was tons of fun, our team of guides and porters also enjoyed playing this game with us.
This gave us confidence, now we knew that we were ready to tackle the difficult climb tomorrow!
We had early dinner today, everyone was still holding onto good amount of blood oxygen! Dol said we would wake up at 3am, eat breakfast and start walking at 4am.
We packed plenty of bars and energy and electrolyte chews for tomorrow as we were not going to have any formal much spots/breaks in 12 hour day.
Show me the Trail 