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Jeff Robson's Travels
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Location Date Pakistan 1707091200 South Korea 1531004400 India 
1530918000 Thailand 1529967600 United Arab Emirates 1503097200 -
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Location Date Mon, 28 August 2017 1503930460 Sun, 27 August 2017
1503843750 Sat, 26 August 2017 1503757118
- Was woken up early by one of the 4 other guys in the room. He has a plastic cover on his mattress & seemed to be tossing & turning all night. Found out later he has a fever so that explains a lot!
- Then the Sikhs started chanting very loudly at about 5am ... and, well, might as well get up!
- Everyone feeling very excited as today is the day we do the trek we've all been waiting for!
- I roamed around the village a little before breakfast to take photos then came back by 7am.
- After our briefing & stretching, we were off, just after 8am.
- Perfect day for seeing the valley: blue skies, a few clouds here and there but we could see the snow on the tops of the mountains & the glacier quite clearly.
- Quite a hike to get to into the valley: only about 3-4km but very steep.
- We were very pleased to reach the valley as it's all mostly flat from there.
- The valley is so beautiful! Flowers blooming everywhere, carpeting the slopes of the mountains, huge rocky outcrops, tall wispy waterfalls tumbling down into the cascading river below.
- You can smell many of the flowers when walking past them.
- Some stream crossings over rickety corrugated iron bridges.
- Visited the grave of the lady who helped make the valley famous.
- It was discovered by accident when a climber went up one of the nearby mountains, decided to hang glide back down & landed in the wrong valley (in the 1930's). He took a few photos then returned a little later to document the valley in more detail.
- Quite an amazing story for something so long ago.
- We then split the group in two. One group decided to press on towards the end of the valley. The Other turned back. You can guess which one I was in of course!
- We made our way down to the edge of the river then a few more turned back while the rest of us continued on towards the glacier at the end of the valley.
- Unfortunately we didn't quite make it that far as one of the kids in our group started throwing up. We stopped for a while to let him rest & he seemed to be ok so we continued.
- Unfortunately he threw up again so we eventually turned back. The poor kid threw up a few more times on the way back! Feel sorry for him but also a shame we couldn't go a bit further. But we still saw most of the valley anyway.
- Over 32,000 steps in total, 24km & 220 flights of stairs climbed. It was a big day!
- Got back & they measured my blood oxygy level. It had dropped to 84 (should be over 90!) but apart from feeling tired, I didn't feel any symptoms of altitude sickness. Ate some noodles they'd prepared as a pre-dinner snack & felt a bit more energised after that.
- It should improve now that I'm back at more normal altitudes.
- Played UNO with Natasha, Hasneet, Jugmeet, Sandeep, Nitin, and a couple of others. Hasneet's family is very serious about UNO & has their own version of the rules that makes it even harder to win. I introduced them to the term "playing for sheep stations"!
- Not having WiFi means that everyone has to sit around & interact with each other, rather than being on their phones. It's kinda nice!
- Jagmeet tried to teach me the names of the smashed eggplant curry & the dessert made from some kind of long white gourd, but to no avail!
- After dinner, Rajul stopped by our hotel to chat with us. Went to bed about 10pm.
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