I slept badly, so I was already awake at 4:45 when it was time to get up and climb Poon Hill again for the sunrise. The weather was nice, so I had no excuses.

There were about 200 people who made the 400-meter climb in the dark, creating traffic jams on the trail. At the top, a tea shop was doing a booming business.

The sunrise itself was nice but ordinary. Even at the 3100-meter height of Poon Hill there is not enough air in the way to make a really colorful scene. Today’s was supplemented by the rising of a planet just before dawn, maybe Mercury.

The early morning light did allow some good pictures of the mountains, especially Annapurna South and Dhauligiri. Because Poon Hill is set off to the south, it allows views of as much as 100 kilometers each way along the crest, from the mountains south of Dolpo in the west to Manaslu in the east. To the south, foothills drifted off into the mist of the lowlands of Nepal and India.

After breakfast back at the guesthouse, we took the trail over the ridge towards the entrance to the Annapurna Sanctuary, which will be the final phase of our trek. This required climbing over the top of the hill above Ghorapani, which gave a last great view of Dhauligiri. I waved goodbye to this monster mountain that has stood above most of our trails of the past six weeks.

From the ridge, the trail dropped down a long series of steps to our lunch place. The afternoon’s trail to Tadapani was short as the crow flies, but required dropping into a deep canyon and then climbing the other side. It is common when crossing the grain of this steep country to spend half a day in sight of the trail that one must climb across a valley. In this case, though it went fairly quickly and we were at our rather shabby guesthouse by the time the afternoon clouds had really settled in.

Until dinner we read and talked with fellow travelers including a couple from Thun, Switzerland with a classic Bern accent (“Annapurna Äes”). Four young women from Thailand looked a little cold. At the end of the dinner, Sonam helped translate for the Swiss couple, whose porter had gotten drunk and was trying to hit them up for more money. They held the line and he rolled off to sleep, hopefully somewhere indoors.