Hiking from Dakchhinkali to Pharping

Title	Skipping Leech Therapy
Start Date	09/12/2010
End Date	09/12/2010
Duration (hrs)	4 hrs.
Distance (km)	8 kms
Hike coordinator	Abishesh Joshi
Participants	Abishesh Joshi, Amit Nepal, Asim Shrestha, Jehen Joshi, Pawan KC, Ravi Sharma, Surendra Maharjan
Photos by	Abishesh Joshi, Asim Shrestha, Pawan KC, Ravi Sharma
Captions by	Amit Nepal, Asim Shrestha, Jehen Joshi, Pawan KC, Ravi Sharma
Report by	Surendra Maharjan
Creative Support	Dijup Tuladhar, Prerana Pradhan, Sangharsha Bhattarai

Surendra recollects:
I was very much excited as this was going to be my first hike from D2. Although it was raining the whole morning, I, with Pawan, waited for the D2 van at Gwarko chowk, as we were planning to hike from Lamatar to Godavari. A cup of tea, in the wet morning, while waiting for D2 van, with the excitement of my first D2 hike was what I needed to cool my head down.

At Aaround 8 am, the van reached at Gwarko. Probably due to the continuous raining, the number of hikers was quite fewer than expected. As it began to rain quite heavily, we made slight change in to our plan. Instead of hiking from Lamatar to Godavari, we planned to hike somewhere around Dakshinkali side. Without wasting time, we headed towards Dakshinkali.

Around 8:30 am, we stopped at Taudaha Lake, the only lake in Central Nepal which is known to harbor more than 40 varieties of birds mostly dependent on wetlands. At Lasun restaurant (on the other side of the lake), we sat to have light breakfast. After fulfilling our hunger, the camera personnel’s (Ravi, Abishesh and Asim) started taking some photographs of the pristine lake.

Then we drove ahead and at around 9:30, we reached Dakshinkali from where we planned to hike all the way through Pharping to some top hill resort. At that time, the weather was partly cloudy and turned out to be a nice day to hike and we felt that it was a wise decision that we changed our plan to hike to a instead of going to Lamatar, where we were supposed to go initially. We left the van and started hiking to our destination. After hiking for a while, we went through different short cuts instead of taking muddy road. It was slightly steep and slippery as well. Many of our folks were about to fall but luckily nobody fell. We stopped on the way for a while and took a break, except Pawan Dai (the newly born photographer) who was busy in capturing snaps of tired hikers, and of course the scenic beauty. After a while we again moved ahead to our destination. Around 1:30 PM, we finally reached the Resort. The view of Himalayan ranges were was awesome and even the crowded city looked good. All of us were quite hungry after the hike. Around 2.30pm we had sufficient lunch which made us feel sleepy and everyone had took a nap in the Lawn outside, except Ravi who was busy taking photographs of different insects that were present in different plants. After having a sound sleep we woke up and suddenly it was time to go. No one wanted to leave the place but we had to. We liked the location so much that some of us wanted to go to the resort again.

All in all we had a great time and thanks to the organizer Abishesh for organizing such a wonderful hike.

Please click on the image to see its large version.