Dispatch 6: Descent to Marpha; Plans Change

Nilgiri viewed from our camp at the shepherd’s hut

Today, Ryan, Jeremy and I woke up at 6:30am to a beautiful view of Nilgiri. We waited for our tents to dry a bit, and after some time, our breakfast and water arrived from below (we went to sleep last night without water or food; only what we had left from the morning and the bars we had packed for the day). We ate, then began our descent to Marpha. We were told that the group gear (kitchen tent, cooking equipment, and tents) would be sent up from Alu Bari to Yak Kharka today so that when we leave Marpha tomorrow, we are assured to have a camp to arrive to. We arrived without incident to Marpha in the late morning and had lunch. While we were eating, our trekking guide informed us that the remaining porters had run away AGAIN; this time apparently due to the fact that a couple of trekkers and their porters had disappeared days before during bad weather on that same route. Having already changed our plans once due to the fiasco that had occurred just the day before, I told him I needed some time to think and decided to visit with a friend who was in Marpha. Jeremy and I spent the afternoon visiting with Eva Zarzuelo who was on K2 with me in 2016. We hiked up to a temple high above town and were joined by a very friendly temple dog, who followed us all over on our walk. After this, we returned to the hotel and had dinner and discussed a new plan that had been made to bring down our bags from the stone hut on donkeys and take a bus in the late morning back down to Beni to begin the trek via the longer, easier route that starts in Darbang. We discussed possible alternate plans at dinner and went to bed not knowing what to expect the following day.