90 kg Pack

This is another one of my very favorite photos from Nepal. I took it on our first trip.

 

Pictured is a very small porter with extremely thin ankles. To his right is the 90 kg pack he was carrying. Next to it is Chhongba’s fairly large backpack.

 

For those of you not familiar with the metric system, 90 kg is approximately 200 pounds. Porters get paid by weight and distance, and this guy was going all out for weight. He was carrying roughly 10 times the weight I was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were distributing fleece jackets to school children a few days before this photo was taken.  Then we climbed to just below the Taksindu Monastery and camped there, as seen below. What a wonderful spot, and our first tent site in Nepal. 

We visited the Taksindu Monastery and then crossed the Taksindu pass. From the pass we took a detour uphill to get a view of Mount Everest.  But we got a better view from Salung where we met the porter with the huge pack.

At the spot above Taksindu pass we posed for a group portrait. The sherpas walk with us, but the porters normally go ahead. The one porter who sometimes was an exception to this is Alawa Sherpa, seen at the far right of this photo. What a neat guy he is.

We descended along a beautiful trail to the village of Salung where I photographed the porter when we took a rest stop.

Salung provided us with excellent views of Mount Everest.  In the photo below, Mount Everest is at the far left.  It looks smaller than all the nearby mountains in this view. The village in the valley is Ringmu below the Taksindu pass, which is along the ridgeline at the far right in this photo.

Here are zoomed-in views of Everest from Salung.

We headed back down across the valley, as Chhongba says, “A little up, a little down”, and a long climb to the Chiwang Monastery for a fantastic Mani Rimdu celebration.