Day 6: In Braga

10.9.08

Braga: New Yak Hotel (no joke!)

In Braga, we are staying at the new yak hotel. It's a nice establishment, much more like a small business than the homey places we've stayed at thus far. Good food though! The tsampa porridge is smaller in portion. After Ngawal, where I was unable to finish my porridge and had to stuff myself in spite of the fact that I had help finishing it, I decided to share the tsampa with Alex. Of course, this time the portion was more normal size unlike Ngawal and I was to get hungry pretty fast at mid-morning. As such, Alex already calls me the `ever hungry' person - but there is just no way to know how big the meal will be :-) .. besides, as we're doing more acclimatization hikes, my appetite is also expanding.

We visited Milereppa's cave and the Annapurna glacier for our second acclimatization day - it is beautiful. Milereppa was a 12th or 13th c. Buddhist monk and poet who meditated up here. It was about an hour and 15mins to the cave. The lady who owns the New Yak has been to India a few times: to Bodhgaya, Dharamsala, Amritsar. Her daughter is studying to be a nurse in Kathmandu. She was always a good student but can't afford medical school so is studying nursing. People are very friendly, especially to me as I look like them - they always ask if I'm Indian then start chatting. We also visited a 500 year old gompa.