Poirier-Tyler 2011 trip

Tsum Valley Trek, Nepal April 2011
This was quite a trek, harder than we expected wrt the food and lodging. Andre and I had previously done the Annapurna circuit and base camp and the Everest area Gokyo with my parents and brother Peter. These treks were full tea house treks, meaning reasonable/good accommodation and food is available throughout the trek and many little “villages” have developed purely to support the trekking industry, and there are a lot of trekkers on the trails. The Tsum valley is very different, in 14 days we met about 10 other trekkers! It was really nice to be quiet, on our own, with the locals. The few people we met always commented that the trekking in Tsum was like it was elsewhere in the 80’s and 90’s, so very interesting for us and the children to experience. The trekking was reasonably tough, average 6 hours/day with a minimum of 2 hours! The kids did great with only a little complaining on the uphills for Alex every once in a while. The only concern about the trails was the incredible exposure on many occaisons. I held Alex’s hand for a lot of the trek … the drop offs beside the trail were quite something, one slight slip and you were gone! Pierre P. would never have made it!
The Tsum valley takes off from the Manaslau circuit trek which has some trekking lodges, at times good and sometimes pretty basic (mattresses almost non existent and no toilets) – we even stayed at one place that had quite a few animals (rats, etc) that we didn’t want to share our beds with so we put up the tent in the room … didn’t sleep very well needless to say. The Tsum valley only had 2 trekking lodges for the 10 days we were in the valley. Some places had nice camping areas, but we were not set up to do a full camping trek (and the tent tended to leak a bit!), the porters and guides always slept with the locals and we always ate with the local families and sometimes put our matress (very thin – almost hard as a rock!) on the floor in their extra “room”.
The Tsum valley was quite spectacular for the Tibet style people and living/farming existence and of course the mountain views. Their houses are pretty basic. All the animals live within the small compound (hens, roosters (very early morning wake-up), dogs (often barking all night), cows, yaks, goats, etc.), there is no where to walk without being in the ‘poo’/merde, and the washing facilities are minimal at best. The animals live down below and the people above. There were often no toilet facilities, so you had to go out of the compound and find somewhere – often we liked this style better since it was much cleaner, and you could see something! (often the tiny outhouses had no windows so when you shut the door it was completely dark. Also they were almost always low, never possible to stand up, except maybe for Alex. Just keeping everyone healthy and fed (forget about clean) required quite a bit of effort.
We often ate in the kitchen/living room where they cook over a type of wood (or manure) burning stove that most of the time doesn’t use any chimney and fills the room up with smoke. It is quite amazing the food that they and our guide/cook was able to make in these kitchens with the limited ingrediants (Dal bhat, macaroni, noodle soup, tea, coffee, dal baht, macaroni, noodle soup, tea, coffee, – the menu was pretty simple! For most of the 18 days).
The people were very friendly and helpful. The Rhododendron trees were in flower and people offered us the flowers on a few occasions, just to be nice and part of their religious beliefs. There was lots of interest in the kids, especially Alex who many people wanted to keep. Nepalis were always supprised at the size of our kids for there age (the Nepalis are quite short).
We visited a couple of Monasteries (Nunnary) and had a lot of fun with the nuns. Most of the monks were still down in Katmandu or elsewhere for the winter. We met quite a few on their way back up, very educated, travelled to Canada and elsewhere, look rich, not poor. The monks that spent the winter up at the high monasteries were quite different, poorly educated, poor and living a hard life – virvre la religion! The nuns showed us around a lot, including their living quarters, must be very cold life most of the time. Their praying is quite something and overall they seemed to be a happy gang. At one nunnery they welcomed us with some tea and special food which we had a very hard time to eat!! We had to hide and throw it out since we didn’t want to insult them.
We had a lot of fun with the guides and locals and other trekkers (when we met some!) for singing. We met a really nice couple from France that taught Alex and Heidi some good songs that they continued to sing for the rest of our travels! We hope to visit with them for a few days on the way back.
We had some long days to hike back to the road and then a bumpy and long drive back to Katmandu – 8 hours included a traffic jam for one hour because people were going to the temple for the mother’s day prayers! – Happy Mother’s Day! Back in Katmandu we splurged on a hotel and got clean and had a good nights sleep.. ready for the next trek.

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