Stone walls like in Southern France, Dingboche

The trek is starting to move higher up in the mountains. Dingboche is a village with about 200 inhabitants at 4.530 meters. It has, like France in the south, long walls of stones. The stones have been taken out from the ground to clear the soil for agriculture.

Modern concrete versions of the hand-built terraces you can find all over the mountains in Alpes Maritimes, this is a view from Baou des Noires in Vence. This used to be our go-to hike, starting directly from our yard when we lived there. Only 300m of height difference, but nice views.

The terraces or long stonepiles of Southern France have in my mind always been one of the real wonders of the world, they are all over the mountainsides and the amount of physical labor put in them has been immense. The forests in the mountains behind Nice may look wild and untouched, but when you look closer you often see that there are those terraces underneath the current vegetation.

By DARIO SEVERI (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Here in Dingboche the situation is the same, except for the forest, there are kilometers of walls that are piles of stones taken away to make working and sustaining the soil possible. Incredible!

Tomorrow is a resting/acclimatization day, we will climb to 5000 meters and back. Jessica and some others are laughing about the sherpa-view of resting. Well, I enjoy the climb! 

We are all well. I eat a lot, just had a three-course lunch with chocolate pudding for dessert. That is normal for me, but having three cups of ginger tea is not so usual. I normally only drink water, but for this project I have tried to learn two things: to drink tea and to turn back down when It's necessary.