Hiking

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day. Blue sky, almost no clouds, good view, and not even too warm. After having gone to the market early in the morning, I decided to give the mountain next to Samtse a try. It's a good chance to have a glance at the local environment and to get a bit of exercise.

Together with Karma, a friend of mine, we left the Samtse College of Education at around 10am to climb this mountain. From Samtse it doesn't look like this is a huge mountain and our destination seems to be quite close but it took us a bit of time to get up that mountain and my GPS confirmed my feeling - it is a climb of about 600 meters.

On the way up, we met many locals that either went down to the Samtse market or returned from the market. Karma insisted on carrying my backpack and I wasn't allowed to carry it during the whole trip. I felt a bit stupid but Bhutanese people are very serious about that and independent of how hard you try, they will carry things for you.

As Karma had to be back by 3pm, we were staying only for a few minutes at our destination and then returned. Running down the hill, we enjoyed the scenery that was now in front of us.

It was a really fun day although my legs are a bit tired now. This comes to no surprise as I haven't been eating a lot during the last couple of days due to my stomach disorder :-). And while talking about eating: running up and down the mountain, I imagined how much fun it would be to be able to go to a ColdStone. Or to the ice cream shop in Mountain View. Or any ice cream shop for that matter. Well, it's going to take another couple of months until I get my next ice cream...

Pics and gps log (kml, Google Maps) from today's trip are available.