Monday, July 20, 2015

Western mountains trip day 4: around town

After two big days we decided to spend Saturday staying closer to home.  And by home, I mean, our hostel.  This place is just so cool.  We have two rooms in the annex (I stood on the annex porch to take this picture).  The main hostel is the gray brick building, and the girls are on the swing in the courtyard.



This is the kids' room :)  It's a hostel, so you pay per-bed-per-night. Since this is a six bed room we just 'claimed' all six beds for the duration of our stay.  The kids are in bedroom paradise. With five kids in a family it's not often that everyone gets their own bed when we are on the road :)


The only other room in the annex is a double bed room (perfect for us) and in the hostel set up, both these rooms and all their inhabitants share a bathroom.  So essentially, we have the entire annex just our family.  It's perfect.

Town is captivating.  It sits in a narrow river valley.  The buildings creep up the sides of the steep mountains - from our hostel to the river is about ten minutes hard walking.... straight up hill!


The river is so loud that you can hardly hold a conversation when you are standing next to it -

After lunch we decided to walk to a monastery on the edge of town.  Matt actually has a buddy there from previous trips and we thought it would be nice to say hi and have him meet the whole family.  We have covered many many miles on foot, but it's nice to have no real agenda and just take it slow.

If we go slowly, stop to let the kids goof around and jump off steps and make silly lines and play games while generally walking in the direction of our destination... the miles go by and we eventually do get there :)  This particular time the kids started a marching game on the steps of a restaurant .... Matt and I actually sat down on a bench to just watch and wait :)


All the monks in training were on holiday so the place seemed super quiet.  Matt's friend was still in town and it was neat to meet him.  His family lives quite far away so he didn't use the 7 day holiday to go home.  It's free for his family to send him to the monastery (room, board, 'education') so it's a desirable spot for many young men in this area.


And then we took a short cut, walking alongside the mountain instead of going back down to the river and back up to the hostel.  The path led straight through this construction site.  You have to admit that it's an enviable view for any backhoe operator.


We spent part of the evening gathering information about our Sunday destination.....

1 comment:

Grandmama said...

The town looks lovely - would love to have seen the old town before they 'concreted' that rushing river! Granddaddy says we're heading up there on our next trip!