Chame (2670m)

So Chame was a slightly larger village than those we’d been used to seeing. After dumping our stuff off at the guest house, we took a stroll up the street and came across a deserted internet café. After peering in the front gate, a woman saw us and went to wake up the guy who runs the computers. He showed us to a computer and quickly ran off. Yen managed to check her email and put up a quick blog post just as the guy was returning with a pot of hot coals to put behind us to keep us warm. He was working hard blowing the coals to get them going for at least 4 or 5 minutes straight, so we felt kind of obligated to do something a bit more than check email on the dreadfully slow connection. He seemed quite intrigued by our activities as well and was watching every page and keystroke carefully. This made for a nice relaxing excursion.

Anyway he was very friendly and quite nice, although we had a tough time understanding his few English words. As we were guiltily leaving the warmth of his effortful pot of coals, he insisted we watch a video he had on the computer. It was of people playing in the snow outside his shop and then turned into a slideshow of pictures of some dude in many different outfits and locales. We somehow concluded he may be the mayor or other figurehead for the Manang district, but we’re really not too sure. In any case, our internet guy was quite proud of the video and in his frantic sliding of the video scroll bar, I think we managed to see the entire thing in various bits and pieces about 5 times. It was awesome. Definite two thumbs up for your next rental.
Although I wasn’t eating like a champ yet, I think I kept something small down. We ‘d be crossing the 3000m mark tomorrow, so we started on the Diamox after dinner as well -- that’s the altitude sickness drug of choice.