Trekking in the Langtang National Park

by Vincent

The hike starts in the forest.

The teahouse where we slept the second night, close to Langtang village.

On the second day, we got closer to the high peaks...

Tamang woman. Is she small or am I a giant?

Little Tamang boy

Prayer wheels. Always walk on the left!

Typical Tibetan house in Langtang village.

A woman and her baby walking along a Mani wall. Prayers are inscribed on it.

Porter, a really hard and common job in the mountains of Nepal.

Yak Yak Yak!

Tibetan Buddhist mantras in front of the beautiful mountain of Gang Chhenpo (6388m)

The impressive south face of Kimshung (6781m), viewed from the village of Kyanjin Gompa.

Walking in the Lirung valley, on the way to the glaciers

Langtang Lirung (7246m) dominates the valley

Following the river upstream to Langshisha Kharka

Berit walking towards the huge ice/snow block of Pemthang Karpo Ri (6830m), marking the border with Tibet

Langtang Lirung (7246m) hidden in the afternoon clouds

Climbing up to Kyanjin Ri, the view gets better and better...

Summit! We are only at 4619m but Langtang Lirung (7246m) seems so accessible. It's more than 2500m higher!

Langtang Lirung (7246m) and Kimshung (6781m)

Women at work in Thulo Syabru

The view on rice terraces from Thulo Syabru

Meeting happy kids on the way to Sing Gompa

The amazing view from Laurebina Yak, from left to right: Annapurnas (8091m), Manaslu (8156m, the eighth highest mountain in the world), Ganesh Himal (7422m) and the mountains of Tibet.

Gosainkund, the holy lake at 4400m

Better not to try to walk on it...

A sadhu we met next to Gosainkund lake. He came from Cachemire in India by foot and planned to stay 3 years there. "But it's god who decides!"

Rhododendrons. We can see a lot of them in spring time.

A trip to Nepal requires to visit the mountains of Himalaya and there is no better way than trekking to do so. Since I heard about the Himalayas in my young days, I always dreamt of exploring them. And this was also one of the main goals of this travel. We hesitated a moment between going to the Annapurnas or Langtang for our trek and we finally chose Langtang which sounded like a little hidden paradise.

No guide. No porters. 90% of the tourists in Nepal go trekking with a guide but, honestly, it is quite useless in the regions where you can do teahouse trekking such as the Annapurnas, the Solo-Khumbu (the region of the Everest) and the Langtang, except maybe if you have no experience in walking in the mountains. Even if there are no signs, it's generally very easy to find the tracks and there is always someone to help you anyway. Walking in the Himalayas is not more complicated than in the Alps or the Pyrenees. For teahouse trekking, the only thing you need is a small backpack with some warm clothes, a rain jacket, a map, a compass and a Uno game.

The Langtang National Park is located north of Kathmandu, just next to the border with Tibet, within a day's drive of the capital, and includes the Langtang Valley, the sacred lakes of Gosainkund and the farmland of Helambu. When you go to Langtang, the first adventure is to get there by bus. It's hard to imagine how any bus can take 10 hours to cover 115km! We had our seats in the first row, just next to the driver, which gave us the best position for some adrenaline rushes. The beginning of the road is quite OK but it gets worse and worse, more narrow, without asphalt and with high cliffs. It was really scary and dangerous. Sometimes, we were even wondering how a Jeep would pass on the road, and we were inside a bus! On top of that, the driver (who was using just one hand to drive, was talking with his friends behind him and was calling with his mobile phone) was constantly turning with the left wheel just on the edge of the cliff and I don't know how many times we thought we would fall down the cliff. We were actually checking if there were buses at the bottom which had fallen before... When we finally got to Syabrubesi, our destination and starting point of the trek, the first thing we thought about was to find a way to come back by Jeep.

We spent the first three days to walk up the narrow valley of Langtang to Kyanjin Gompa, the last village of the valley, at 3900m. By following the river upstream, it offered us the opportunity to explore small villages and pass through forests of pine, bamboo and rhododendrons, ascending pastures to arrive to an alpine landscape, surrounded by high snowy peaks. It's possible to spot monkeys, red pandas, snow leopards, many yaks and even the Yeti... Well, we saw only yaks and a few monkeys. This isolated region is inhabited by Tamangs whose religion practices, language and dress are very similar to Tibetan.

During those first three days, we also founded the "Uno clan" with an English couple, a guy from Finland and a girl from Ukrain. We met every evening at a teahouse and played together with others tourists and guides. We had some very funny nights! Teahouse trekking is a really nice and easy way to explore the mountains. The only problem for me was the food. One day, I ordered lasagna and got something which didn't look at all like lasagna. My stomach got quite bad the next two days and I couldn't eat the food from the lodges anymore. The only thing that attracted me was Snickers bars!

From Kyanjin Gompa, we did three excursions. I first went alone up the Lirung valley to see the huge glaciers of Lirung and Kimshung. Then, we went on a day trip to the end of the valley, at Langshisha Kharka, which offered us a spectacular mountain view in a very peaceful and quiet environment. We met almost nobody except yaks. That place is said to be the site where a lama found his lost yak he was running after, leading to the valley being named "Langtang" ("Lang" is Tibetan for "yak" and "teng" means "to follow"). The last excursion we did was a climb of a peak next to Kyanjin Gompa called Kyanjin Ri where we had fantastic views of all of the high mountains around.

Then we walked down almost all the way to our starting point and climbed steeply again to the holy lakes of Gosainkund, at 4400m. The lakes were still frozen and surrounded by snowy mountains. The place was really beautiful and allowed us to enjoy an amazing Himalayan panorama at Laurebina Yak: from West to East we had the Annapurnas, the Manaslu (8156m), the Ganesh Himal, the peaks of Tibet and the Langtang Lirung! Just that! The last day, we went down to Dhunche to take our Jeep to Kathmandu with the English couple we had met during the trek.

We spent 9 days trekking in Langtang and we can only recommend it. It was a beautiful region which offers a wide variety of landscapes with a Tibetan culture and many options for side trips.

Berit had the wonderful idea to offer me a GPS for Christmas and I immediately couldn't stop using it during the trek. So here are some statistics of our 9 days in Langtang National Park...

Trip length: 137km
Total ascent: 11456m
Max elevation: 4619m

Here is the map of the trek in Google Maps:

Display the map in Google Maps