Nepal Day 8: Muktinath to Jomsom (via Kagbeni)- Oct 19

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I thought that this day would be about getting from A to B, no major adventures involved. Well, I was wrong! Once you leave Muktinath you have to walk on the side of the road for most of the trip. In about half way, you can either go straight to Jomson or take a detour and visit Kagbeni on the way. We left the choice up to Martina, so (of course) we took the detour. I was personally not dying to go to Kagbeni, but retrospectively I am glad we did.

Kagbeni is a village like I have never seen before. It is very small, full of old unchanged buildings and has a monastery from the 15th century that you can visit for a small entrance fee. We walked around for a while and headed towards Jomsom around noon. Some bikers advised us to go to Jomsom as early as possible because the wind gets “unpleasant” on the afternoon. Well, “unpleasent” was the understatement of the year!

The way from Kagbeni to Jomsom is 11km. It goes either though a dried out river or along a car road. With car road I mean a wide sandy dirt road. In combination with the wind, pretty dusty. The further from Kagbeni we went, the stronger the wind was getting. After about 3km it was pretty dramatic. I felt like in an old western movie. We pulled our buffs up our faces, pulled our caps as low as possible and filled the last empty spaces on our faces with sunglasses in order to avoid getting the sand everywhere.

The first couple of kilometres I thought that we must have gotten lost because no one would ever voluntarily walk that path. However, as soon as I saw 2-3 other groups walking in front of us I realized that this was the actual path. We eventually made it happy and healthy all the way to Jomsom. A hot shower never felt so great!

Evening program was as usual - cards.