The Land of the Thunder Dragon, Part 4: Shana Zampa to Thangthangka

"This is a long, hard day with lots of short ups and downs ... made more strenuous because of all the rock-hopping necessary," read the Lonely Planet guide to Bhutan. "Today is a hard day," Bhutan Footprints told us. "Lot of distance to cover; altitude gain is also above the limit and the trail after lunch is tough due to many ups and downs with many stones sticking out."

Day 2 of our trek was, simply, the hardest physical thing we have ever done.


"Today we have to go a little faster," Namgay said as we ate our breakfast of porridge and tea. We hit the trail at 8:15am, ascending through rhododendron forests. We shared the trail with a young European couple and their mother/mother-in-law. We were amazed and humbled to see a woman 15 years our elder tackling the same trail. Their pack animals caught up with us halfway through the morning.






Here the trail split. The path to the right was our track. To the left, the trail continued on to the border with Tibet. ("Bhutan" means "the end of Bhot" -- Bhot was an ancient name for Tibet.) This is an ancient invasion and trade route, and some Bhutanese still sneak over the border at night to buy cheap Chinese manufactured goods and smuggle them back into Bhutan to sell. "Four or five hours to walk to Tibet," Namgay told us.



Sonam carried a hot lunch in a tiffin box for us every day of the trek. Patrick had stomach cramps throughout the entire day, so he didn't end up eating very much.


The trail got tougher after lunch, just as advertised. How could something so beautiful be so terrible, we wondered. Glaciers and floods had thrown huge stones down the mountains over millennia. Birch, fir, maple, pine and larch trees watched us stumble over seemingly endless numbers of moss-covered rocks. At least we weren't the only ones stumbling -- our mules caught up with us mid-afternoon on a treacherous descent.




We didn't speak much during the day -- Sonam and Namgay pushed the pace, and we struggled to keep up. We were gaining a lot of altitude and our lungs started to sense the lower air density. (At this point we were getting about 30% less oxygen with every breath.) Patrick's stomach cramps got worse; Jennifer's counterfeit boots kept her ankles steady, but they felt heavier and heavier with every step. "Just get to the top of the next hill," we'd think. "Just 10 more minutes." "Just 10 more steps."




We reached our campsite at 3:30pm, after seven hours and fifteen minutes of hiking. We were utterly exhausted, but we had done it -- we had completed what we thought would be the most difficult day of the entire eight-day trek.



Fifteen minutes later, the snowstorm hit.


We didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so we decided to crawl into our tent and sleep for a couple of hours. Namgay got us up for dinner, which we ate in a cold, dark dining tent the crew set up for us.


The snow continued to fall as we shivered once again into our sleeping bags, wondering what the morning would bring.

Distance: 14.5 miles (23.3 km)
Altitude gain: 2,494 feet (760 meters)
Final altitude: 11,844 feet (3,610 meters)
Estimated time: 8-9 hours
Actual time: 7.25 hours