Description
Manasarovar to Everest starts with a pilgrimage to Lake Manasarovar, the holiest lake in Western Tibet. From the lake, we drove to Ronghbu Monastery, the highest monastery in the world from where we start a hike to Camp 1 in the Everest and returning towards Lhasa through a high pass from where we can see a cross-section of the entire Himalayan range.
We reached after an hour Lake Manasarovar, which is the most sacred lake in the entire Tibet, a place of pilgrimage since ancient times. Most of the Tibetan lakes are sacred, the two most notable ones being Nam Tso and Yandrok Tso. Besides being the most sacred lake, Manasarovar is one of the most beautiful lakes in entire Tibet. At 4560 meters it can be surrounded on a 90 km kora in about 4-5 days, through marshes and riverbeds. In the Indian tradition, the lake caring a Sanskrit name, “manasa sarovaram”, represents the emanation of Brahma mind.
Mount Everest represented for decades a fascination for the entire world. In 1849 the Great Trigonometric Society of India, mapping the Himalayas from its base, marked on the map, as XV, an undiscovered peak that looked to be the highest in the range. This came as a surprise, another peak being considered till then the highest, and the society started looking for a name for this high mountain. But because the names coming from the locals were confusing the Society proposed to name the peak after its president, Sir George Everest. This produced an outrage considering that would have been more appropriate to give the peak a local name but the name stacked in time and it went together with the Tibetan name, Chomolagma that translates as “Goddess Mother of the Universe”.
In the first half of the 20th century, many British expeditions tried to conquer the peak, probably the most famous being the one lead by Mallory and Irvine. Finally, on 28 May 1953, a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Sherpa from Nepal, succeeded to finally conquer the peak.
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