Saturday 18 October 2008

Moonlit procession

This is the view from the top of Poon Hill which is near Ghorepani in Nepal.

For a start the name is a massive misnomer... I didn't see a single poon up there! Probably because it was far too cold for that kind of nonsense...

Getting this photo involved waking up at 4.30 and trekking up a hill for 1 and a half hours.

Of course, this is a pretty famous viewing point, so I wasn't the only person to think of doing this. In fact it seemed like there were hundreds of us, all trekking up the side of the hill, all wearing the standard issue LED head-torches, trudging in single file in complete silence.

It was a kind of strange experience, almost like watching some medieval pilgrimage, it was easy to imagine that all of the lights shining up the hill were from flaming torches, all the hooded and swaddled trekkers were monks.

In fact it reminded me of a scene from an old game that I used to play at my mates house on his Amiga 500. The game was called moonstone, and was basically a glorified fighting game, the highlight of which was the ability to slice off your enemies head from time to time...

Aaaaaaanyway, the point was that in this game there was a scene with a load of monks going up a hill all carrying torches, and the sight of the procession up the hill reminded me of that.

Nice sunrise though.

2 comments:

the blogger said...
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the blogger said...

Surprised! We did the same trekking. I went to Poon Hill as well in Oct 2006. And I went to Egypt in Dec 2007. We always missed to meet each other, huh? lol Lucky you. You've got the sunrise scene. I was there it's too cloudy so when we realise the sun is already properly risen. It's beautiful, peaceful and very COLD!!