Day 23

Saturday 20 Oct 2018

Today we leave the isolated district of Lunana, it is bound in all directions by high mountains and difficult passes. Electricity has not arrived here yet but our last horse contractor is optimistic that it won’t be long as he has bought a washing machine- I hope he doesn’t have to wait too long!

Our yaks are incredible, 2 were tethered about a metre from our tent and made no movement or noise in the night- preferable to the scary snorting and trampling that we are used to with horses. We woke to a very hard frost but each yak had a halo of thawed ground around them, if the tent were bigger I would have invited them in.
A low cloud had shrouded our valley and we were less optimistic about views but as we climbed, the the sun burned it all away and yet again we were blessed with views.

Our path took a gentle rising traverse onto a moraine ridge to the Rinchen Zoe La (5320m), our highest pass in the trek.
Thankfully the track had little snow- we had heard tales of previous years being knee deep. Yaks are expert path finders and in the event of deep snow they successfully follow the route with pin point accuracy where even the most experienced guide or yak herder would fail.

Glacial lakes of all shades of blue punctuate our foreground with the familiar backdrop of Table Mountain bidding it’s farewell. The pass is warm and windless and to our pleasure we gain our first view of Gankarpunsom (7541m), Bhutan’s highest mountain which means ‘great white mountain of the three siblings’- we got to see two.

Some years ago, a Japanese climbing party managed to get a permit from the Chinese to climb this peak, but before the expedition could start, they realised that the summit lay entirely within Bhutan and not on the boarder with Tibet so had to withdraw. Gankarpunsum remains the highest unclimbed mountain in the world and the Bhutanese Government does not allow climbing on any of it’s peaks as they all hold spiritual significance. After a gentle descent and another 5000m lunch on table and chairs we descended further to camp at Chukarpo (4600m). The site of our little orange tents is good to see at the end of the day.


Distance 14km 8hrs

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