The next three days were to fill a gap we left in November when we took a bus down the Kali Gandaki valley. Although it was the right thing to do at the time, resting our muscles and getting us to the Annapurna Base Camp while the weather was good, it sped us too quickly through some of the most beautiful mountain scenery on the planet. This time we planned to walk.

In a way, we had earlier been victims of our 21st-century thinking that if there's a road we must naturally take a vehicle. Even with the strike lifted, there was very little traffic on the rough jeep road, so apart from having a wider trail and having to cover our faces from the dust a few times a day, the trail was just as nice as it had been in its earlier times when it had been considered one of the highlights of the Annapurna loop. It had only been in our minds and our tour books that the road had “ruined” this trek.

Since we had already done the 90-minute walk to Marpha on Day 1, we had planned to take the bus that far. But because I needed to do a few essentials on email before leaving Jomsom, we missed the only bus before noon. So we decided to walk even that stretch and then continue on to our destination, the next town Tukuche.

The only trouble was the wind. Because the Kali Gandaki cuts straight through the Himalayas, it makes a 25-kilometer hole in the range. Every day as the plains of India heat up, the winds use this gap to move surplus air toward the Tibetan plateau. The result is a wind tunnel that starts up every day around 10am. We wore facemasks and occasionally had to turn backwards as dust clouds blew by.

On this short day, we were in our guest house in Tukuche by noon, which was fortunate because a big thunderstorm hit immediately after. We spent the rest of this partial rest day relaxing, reviewing Chinese and reading books.

Tukuche's houses were markedly different from the Tibetan styles up the valley. With wooden balconies, they seemed closer to the styles of Kathmandu.