Day 20 was an unintended rest day in Chharka Bhot. Actually, my memory of the plan had a rest day all along, but Kinna had been planning to press on until he discovered the person who had promised to arrange yaks had never followed through. In any case, we were happy to have the day to restore our bodies and to explore this rather pleasant area.Bhot is a word used by Nepalis to describe a frontier village of Tibetan culture that is at the fringe of what Nepali consider civilization. Chharka Bhot is six days' walk for us over several high passes to the nearest town with a road, though locals hoof it in as little as two days.
In a way, though, Chharka has feels closer to Nepal than the even more inaccessible depths of Dolpo. Trekking stores are springing up with English advertisements for the hundred or so foreigners who come through annually, and one shows a mobile phone number, even though there is no signal here. It is telling that Nepalis don't even bother to use bhot to name the other Dolpo villages, considering them truly beyond the frontier.
Chharka is very compact, almost like a medieval fortified village. Houses are closer together than in other Dolpo villages, and they seem to be built higher, three stories in some cases. There is only one entrance into the old town, and the houses' yak pens form a kind of wall around the town. It may be that the narrow valley limits the amount of arable land, so the locals have chosen to limit sprawl.
We bathed in the morning, and after lunch walked out to a Bön gompa. No one was there but it was unlocked and we were able to go inside. Bön practice seems to go heavy on masks of human and yak heads with scary features, used to frighten away evil spirits.
The Chharka Stampede happened just after we returned to our guest house. We had been warned that "more than a hundred" yaks would be coming into town around 4pm as the herders drove them down out of the mountains where we would be headed. Eventually they will all be driven to lower elevations where they can escape the harsh winter weather, which can dump several meters of snow and cover all the grazing. In earlier times, the yaks would have been taken to Tibet, but now that border is closed.
The first sign of action was townspeople driving about 30 yaks into household pens in the old town, probably to avoid mixing them with the yaks about to come through. I followed them in with my camera, and it got a little hot with a few stray yaks running back through the narrow lanes. I kept my wits and jumped on a rock wall when a local person signaled one was coming. Yaks of both sexes have horns, and they can be deadly if they run you down unintentionally.I was taking pictures back at the hotel when I spotted a cloud of dust at the east edge of town. I went out to look from a safe place, and soon there were hundreds of yaks arriving in wave after wave. By the end of the afternoon, close to a thousand had arrived.
Everyone was out, with both townspeople and nomads directing herds of yaks. Out in the pastures, different families' yaks mix on an open range, but when they return to the city, they need to be separated. Gradually, the herders moved groups of 20 to 50 yaks into separate pens all around the town.
The herders knew what they were doing, and I didn't see anyone hurt. Many were women, in some cases wearing babies on their backs. A single person with the right noises and arm motions can stop a herd in its tracks, and the herders are accurate and effective throwing stones at errant beasts. Although I was in a relatively safe place on a side lane, I needed to imitate these motions in a few cases where yaks started to come in my direction.The action didn't stop even once they got the yaks in their stone-walled pens. Several men needed to go inside and remove harnesses from animals and to flush out stray yaks that belonged in different pens. These men seemed amazingly calm right next to half-ton beasts that were fighting and humping each other. But I imagine their life expectancy is short.
Yaks are amazing climbers that never fall, like mountain goats. During the rush, I saw huge yaks going down steep slopes that I would not have tried. One yak got away and ran among the tents of a Swiss party that was trekking in the opposite direction. Sensing he shouldn't be there, the yak ran up a 3-meter-high rock to the next terrace.
Now that they have arrived, three of those yaks will carry our bags the rest of the way to Jomsom.
