River People
We woke up to find that it had snowed last night on hills all around. The sight was visually pleasing and physically chilling. Morning chores contacted with any bodily contact with water were naturally trimmed down to minimum. One great thing about outdoors is that people find out, how much you can do without as far as the urban concept of personal hygiene. We are told that in a day or two we will pass some hot water spring and some of us are even looking forward to a bath, while others feel that wetting yourself voultenterly on a river trip is not such a great idea. Circumstances keep doing it for you, all the time anyways.
River was cold, calm and places became very shallow when it braided into many channels. Largely an uneventful day except that enroute we show some local boatmen drying their Yak hide boats. This tube like vessels are Yak Hides stretched on a wooden framework that is about five feet by eight feet. These boats can be run in water for about a half a day and then must be dried to make the limp hide water worthy again.
Today we did about hundred and two km and reached Troduka at an altitude of 3760 meters. It is a place with mountains one side has fair amount of snow and there are small hamlets on one side. A beautiful place that kept the photographers busy all evening, with an interesting sunset.
A hilarious thing had happened as we were stopping this evening. Nishant stepped out of the boat into the soft wet sand and went knee deep. His effort to excorticate himself resulted in his further going waist deep into the mud. It was amusing to see when Jed tried to uproot him out of this soft casing by asking him to hold on to the boat while he reversed the engines. It did not produce the desired result, but Jed finally managed to pull him out. The event sprinkled off some serious thinking about putting him on diet for safety reasons. After all he is youngest and darling of the crew and we want to ensure that no harm comes to him on account of bulk.
