At 6.30 the bus sounded it's elaborate horn and started to inch away from the kerb. We rushed onboard and squeezed into the only seats left, these were on the back row and later we were to find out why they were called the "sick seats" by a fellow traveller. The blasting of the horn and the inching continued for about another half hour - until we were nearly fully out of our parking bay and then, when there really were no more passengers left to get on, we were off!
The Tarmac road was bumpy, nudging us clean off our seats more than once. After 3 uncomfortable and nauseating hours of twisting along the forested valley sides and over the rim of the Kathmandu Valley we arrived at Trisuli Bazaar, lunch stop, end of the good road and start of 5 1/2 hours of slow, rutted, bumpy and lumpy road.
We pulled away from Trisuli in the usual manner, amidst the noise of horns and the revving of engines just as the last passenger had darted onboard from the nearby cafe.
The road worsened all the way to our terminus stop at Syaprhu Besi. The road was so bad in places that the bus would leer from side to side giving us spectacular views straight down from our window into the valley bottom some several hundred metres below. At on point we had to be inched passed a landslide and at another we squeezed along an overhanging cliff that left exactly a one bus width between itself and the drop on the opposite edge of the road.
We stumbled off the bus and into the "Potala Guest House" where we took a while to get around to eating some food and then an early night.
In the morning we were woken by the horns and revving of the busses setting off back to the city which we tried to ignore and caught an extra hour of sleep before breakfast.
We started our trek by first crossing the surging torrents of the Bhote Khosi and then the Langtang Khola by way of steel suspension bridges and then followed the Langtang Khola valley on narrow crumbly paths. We stuck to the wall of the valley, climbing through pine, bamboo and rhododendron forests looking very hard for the native red pandas -like we had seen on so many calendars and postcards. The pandas were obviously too busy posing for photographers to show up for us but we did see monkeys, exotic colourful birds, cows, yak and one mouse.
We made good time and stopped for a drink at one of the many Tea Houses that dot the route, the sun hadn't quite reached the bottom of the valley so we didn't hang around. We continued passed porters carrying great weights from slung from their foreheads. This is the about the only method of taking goods up into the Langtang region, porters can carry up to 80kg in this manner - which is more than a Yak can! People power is also cheaper than Yak. When we asked a local where he had got the materials for his house he told us everything except the local timber, used for the frame, had been carried in the 20km from Syaprhu Besi. The huge timber beams had only been carried from a nearby village 12km away!
We continued beyond the traditional day one camp at Lama Hotel and stopped at Goratebela, a further two hours up the steep trail.
There are only two houses, both lodges with spectacular views of the Langtang Himalaya, here and we stayed with a very hospitable third generation Tibetan family.
In the morning we continued up the craggy path as the valley opened out and the trees thinned giving way to scrub and grassland. The views of the mountains got better as we climbed and by the time we reached the town of Langtang the peaks loomed over us. Langtang is the biggest settlement in the valley with narrow stone slab alleys and a monastery overlooking it.
After Langtang the trail leads up to where Kyangen Gompa nestles below Kyangen Ri and massive summit of Langtang Lirung. The town of Kyangen Gompa is a collection of 19 guesthouses (and one monastery - the Gompa) which has quadrupled in size over the last 7 years. Having collected numerous recommendations for places to stay along the route we opted for a small lodge called "Lovely". We stayed with another Nepali family originally from Tibet. We spent what remained of the daylight sitting in the sun and reading before retreating to a warm living room for a dinner of Dal Bhat. Dal Bhat is the Nepali national dish consisting of lentil soup (dal), rice (bhat) and mixed veg curry (takari).
After a chilly night we started to climb Kyangen Ri and two other peaks above the town. The lower two peaks were decorated with prayer flags and the higher had spectacular rocky pinnacles and views of several massive walls belonging to the surrounding mountains, we could also see the Glacier that runs down the middle of Langtang Lirung. Before we headed back for lunch we stopped and took in the view. We could see an avalanche tumbling down the face of Lirung, the snow seemed to be falling in slow motion because of the sheer scale of the mountain.
The following day we retraced our steps to the town of Langtang where a festival had begun at the monastery, there wasn't much to see apart from a few hung-over locals who had too much chang (barley beer) and dancing the night before.
We broke our descent to Syaprhu Besi with an over-night stop at the Friendly Guest House in Lama hotel, another settlement of lodges where once there was just forest. Sixteen Koreans arrived at the lodge a little after us much to the delight and amusement of our hosts.
Visit border cycling for more information on guided cycle trips.
