Tirkedhunga (1577m)

After the walk up to Poon Hill, we headed back down to Ghorepani and had breakfast (half of which I gave to the dog). The walk today was all downhill. Easy peasy, as our guide Indra liked to say. Well, after walking down a section from Ulleri called the infamous 4000 stone steps, our knees were weak, our calves were sore, and our legs were shaking with fatigue. The steps were too short to comfortably step on with my little size 5 feet, so it must have been worse for everyone else. Our heads were always looking down at the next step to make sure we didn’t trip and fall over the rather treacherous stone steps. Some parts were wet and slippery, and I fell on my ass once. But nothing could be worse than having to climb UP those steps! We saw several trekkers climbing up and we did not envy them.
When we reached our teahouse, our muscles were aching in ways we’ve never experienced before. I guess our climbing up muscles were in pretty good shape by this time, but we hadn’t used our climbing down muscles so they were pretty sore. We even bypassed a walk through town when we realized that there were more stairs going down! After sharing my lunch with our fuzzy companion from Marpha, we sat outside and relaxed in the sunshine.