Lower Pisang 3200m to Dharapani 1860m (34km)

After a quick breakfast we got out on the road quite early and the path was much easier to walk than the day before. Most of the snow melted away and we even started seeing the ground in some spots again. However, we also saw the reason why none of the towns we passed through so far had power or communication. A huge amount of power masts were broken down and bent and power and communication lines were snapped. This stretched for multiple kilometres. In Nepal, it seems that predetermined breaking points are unheard of.

I can't imagine that fixing these power lines takes less than 3 or 4 months, especially in an inaccessible area like this.

Anyway, not our problem anymore. We kept walking, and the snow kept retreating ... until we got to the aforementioned avalanche that we had heard of from people coming up the mountain. We have seen and heard smaller avalanches along way but what we faced here was from an entirely different league.

It was a mountain of snow, 5 meters high and more than 30 metres wide, that seems to have come from nowhere. There was no slope that was cleared of all the snow, from where it could have come from. The snow was quite compressed to smaller roundish snow blocks and the only way across it was to pass over it.

There was already a little path trampled into the compacted snow, so it was not hard to get across, but the size and assumed power of this avalanche was (apologies for this word) "awesome".

We continued on down and soon the snow was all gone and it was a clear road. My feet had stayed dry so far and I was confident this was going to stay this way until we get down all the way.

We still passed many people going up the mountain and head rumours about dead and missing people from everyone. Everyone saying different things. Still no offical information had reached us or anyone we met.

Walking further down we met a group of people just about 15 minutes before the town of Chame, the first down with power and communication, that told us they had news (CNN apparently) about 20 dead and many more still missing.

Since it was on CNN we assumed it must have made the news in Europe as well by now and all our loved ones would be concerned. So we added a step or two to our speed to get to Chame in order to remove any anxiety from our families minds.

It took a bit of time until the Mobile data started working and I got a message. Luckily no one (aside from Basti :-)) was concerned about me. I assume that was because they haven't heard the news yet... (it was still early morning in Europe - but the storm was already 3 days ago). I left a quick message that all was good and then tried to get some proper information from the news.

Indeed, many different renown news sources stated numbers between 12 and 20 dead. As stated in the news we could confirm the feverish attempt by the Nepalese government to fly the survivors (and dead) out by helicopter as we saw one every 15 minutes passing either way above our heads.

I also got a through to Yuni as she was already on the way to work. It was very nice to hear her voice again after so many days and so many events, but I believe I shocked her more than calmed her down with the story. But it was all good again and we were safe and on our way down from the mountain.

The rest of the day was filled with fast paced walking down the hill to get as far as possible, which in this case was Dharapani.