Namche, Nepal. 7 May 1986

A common phrase I heard from Sherpani women in the lodges I stayed in when ordering a meal was: “eggs finished” or “pancakes finished” – there seemed to be a lot of food shortages. I think it was a strategy to steer you towards ordering the national dish – dal bhat – which tasted as good as it sounds. Essentially it was a boiled vegetable slurry drenched in a watery dal soup over old rice. It was never “finished” – they would come round after you had eaten it and re-fill the plate.

So it was on the trail to the village of Thame, a day hike from Namche, that I started to get hungry and wondered whether there would be any homes offering lunch. Inevitably they too would be subject to food shortages. Coming in to the village I could see a scattering of stone houses separated from each other by stone fences used to confine their yaks. In a field close to the trail I stopped to watch a mother with her child cutting off the hide of a dead yak. She looked up at me and cheerily called out “Yak finished!”