Remember this? A speck of a monastery floating in the mist on a far ridge above the village, a whole valley away. Back when we first spotted it, it was barely a smudge in the fog, the kind of place that looks like it’s deliberately not wanting to be found. Nicholas took one look and decided it was a main quest he absolutely had to complete.
He was still sick, still coughing, and the smart move was to rest. So obviously he went looking for a way up instead. And he reached it, eventually, three-quarters of the way up the hill before the building finally stopped hiding and resolved into something real.
But getting there is the whole story, so let’s back up.
The Hunt#
Here’s the problem: there was no marked trail. Just a hillside full of paths that all looked promising and then dead-ended, or split, or wandered off toward someone’s potato field. Nicholas spent the rest days doing reconnaissance. Up one route, back down. Up another, back down. Slightly higher each time, mapping the hill by trial and error like he was clearing fog off a minimap.
Eventually he found one that kept going. Up through the pines, past stone walls and prayer flags, higher than any of the false starts. This was the one.
And then he hit the gate. And the gate won.
He climbed all that way, found the right path at last, and ran straight into this thing: a few wooden bars laid across the trail. And he stopped. He looked at it, concluded the monastery was closed, and walked back down the mountain.
It’s a cow gate. It is the lowest-effort obstacle a Himalayan hillside can produce. The bars just slide out and lift away. Its entire job is to inconvenience livestock, who are, on average, smarter about it than he was that day. A wall of sticks meant for cows successfully repelled Nicholas like a confused heifer.
He only figured it out later that you can just move the bars. Slid them out, walked through, slid them back, because he’s not an animal. (For the record, I was in the backpack the whole time, judging. Both times.)
Getting There#
There were ponies working the village, hauling supplies around. The cows, on the other hand, mostly just wandered the trails getting in the way. (More on the cows later.)
And then the steps. The final approach is a staircase of rough stone climbing straight up to the building, because of course the reward for finding the unmarked path is more climbing.
There’s a large, beautifully painted prayer wheel, and directly behind it, a sign for the toilet. The sacred and the practical, sharing a wall. Even monasteries have priorities.
Inside, a covered courtyard with a mandala painted right into the floor, leading toward the prayer hall. I stayed in the bag for this part. You don’t bring a bear out in a working temple. It’s disrespectful, and I have a reputation to maintain.
Young monks were out on the lawn, robes drying on a line, a dog supervising. Regular life, at altitude, with the entire Himalaya as a backyard.
Bringing the Girls#
Pokin and Po On had heard all about the monastery and were, understandably, jealous. So once they started feeling stronger, Nicholas became a guide.
It didn’t happen all at once. Pokin was still weak, so it was a build. A little higher one day. A little higher the next. Until the day they both made it all the way up.
The climb also produced the cow incident. Somewhere on the way up, Po On vanished. Five minutes pass. Nicholas is standing there going where the heck is Po On, and finally trudges back down the trail to find her frozen in place, held hostage by cows. A few of them had claimed the path and she was too scared to push past, with no idea you can simply tell a cow to move. So it stood there. And so did she. Indefinitely. A standoff she was losing.
Nicholas groaned, walked up, went “sha! sha!”, slapped a few rumps, and the cows grudgingly shuffled aside about three steps, exactly enough for Po On to scurry through. Then he made fun of her the entire rest of the way up for getting held captive by cows. Correct response. They’re cows.
The viewpoint at the top is the payoff, and it does not disappoint. Mountains on one side, the whole forested valley dropping away on the other, and the village they’d been staring up at it from now a cluster of dots far below. From up here, the smudge was looking down on everything else. Role reversal. I respect it.
Evening Prayer and the Third Monastery#
Nicholas went back up alone that evening, because of course he did. This was now his fifth or sixth lap of the same hill. He sat and listened to the monks chant for a while, and recorded some of the music they made up there.
Afterward, someone mentioned there was a second monastery. Higher up. Secret. And the directions to it were the kind of vague that gets a tourist hopelessly lost on a mountain in the dark.
Rather than wander somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, Nicholas asked if someone could actually show him. One of the young teenage monks volunteered and led him up the hill to it.
This one was a platform with an outlook, the entrance guarded by a pair of carved stone lions. No monks living there yet. The interior was being rebuilt, so that part stayed off limits, which honestly only made it better.
The payoff was the viewpoint itself. Golden deer flanking a dharma wheel along the parapet, the young monk who’d brought him up there leaning on the wall beside them, and beyond all of it, nothing. The mist had rolled all the way in and swallowed the entire valley. You couldn’t see the mountains, you couldn’t see the village, you couldn’t see anything. Just two golden deer, a guide in maroon robes, and a wall of white.
So the main quest, the smudge in the fog he’d stared at from the village and refused to let go of, turned out to have a hidden second stage. A half-finished secret monastery on a mountaintop, reachable only if a teenager decides to take pity on you, with a viewpoint that showed you nothing at all. You don’t find that by resting when you’re sick. You find it by being too stubborn to.