We got up at 5:30am for a fast climb up to Poon Hill, to watch the sun rise over the Annapurna range. Unfortunately for us there were at least 200 other people doing the same thing; no wonder I woke up at 4am to rockery of people going about their stuff. We arrived at the top five minutes before the sun rose, perfect timing.
After doing the stereotypical tourist thing of franticly trying to push the shutter release button as fast as possible we headed down to get some breakfast from our beautiful positioned hotel. A bowl of porridge with honey, Tibetan bread with our notorious mix of jam and peanut butter and we were off again on our journey.
We first climbed for 40minutes or so then we got some downhill action. I wish I could have ridden all of it, but there were some pretty nasty drops involving roots and rocks, and I didn’t want to take a greater risk than I had too. Ollie with his mad skills managed to ride a fair bit of it, but mostly we had to carry our bikes over the nugget descents.
We spent the day largely climbing and descending through the rainforest. We descended down to Ban Thanti, then climbed to Tadapani and dropped downwards Kimrongkholagaon. Half way down we came across a nice hotel and had the usual fried potatoes for lunch. Ollie demonstrated some of his bike tricks to the hotel family and we were on our way dropping down the steep valley. Once down at the bottom the track climb steeply back up again. This proved to be a tiring climb, as we were still mainly in bush and the temperature was high. I had to stop often to cool off and drink from my camel pack.
When I finally arrived at Chhomrong Ollie had all readied called it and found a hotel where we could keep our bikes at for the next two days, whilst we hiked to ABC. The hotel was currently installing a new water tank for their shower, so we had to wait a few hours before they finally got it going. Despite having the infrastructure for a gas hot shower, the gas bottle was empty. I ended up having a cold shower which was nice and refreshing. We had a generous serving of Dhalbut for dinner and a really good cup of lemon tea. Two English and another European also stayed at the same hotel, the English were complaining about everything, from the hot shower not working to the size and cost of their meals. We were simply grateful we got seconds with our Dhalbuts.
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