2024 Shey Festival Dolpo
A great Dolpo trek to the 67th 12-yearly Shey festival
The spiritual community of Dolpo comes together for the Shelri Dugra, four days of celebrations, archery, meetings and festivities every 12 years. Alternately serious, dramatic and humorous, the atmospheric gompas and surrounds will be buzzing with humanity. It will be fun and photogenic, and a great chance to share a kora or two of Shelri, Crystal Mountain with pilgrims.
Dolpo is a dramatic landscape of nature's colours and bedrock textures, water-sculpted gorges of sheer rockfaces and translucent turquoise rapids, steep hillsides of fragrant pine and alpine grasses crowned by soaring mountains, and all on a Himalayan scale. Meditatively blended into this are red ochre gompas with chanting incarnate lamas, jingling yak caravans driven by jaunty cowboys, snotty ragamuffins and their more circumspect parents living sustainably in once fortified stone villages. Our trek route is an appreciative, adventurous journey where we immerse ourselves in all that is Dolpo.
Our carefully thought-out, adaptable route takes in the best of Dolpo's picturesque villages and gompas, avoiding new dirt roads as much as possible, and also getting remote, well off the beaten track. Although Dolpo is said to be a rain shadow area, during the monsoon there are life-giving rain for the crops, none yet harvested, (rarely) thundering, overflowing rivers and glorious days of wildflowers and bright cloudscapes.
We begin with a road trip to Dunai. Attempting to fly to Juphal is normal however during the monsoon many flights are cancelled - there are mountains in those clouds! Instead we share a chartered bus with our crew for a true, classic road trip experience.
We begin trekking from the still surprisingly rustic district headquarter of Dunai, spending the next few days in a rough and deep gorge. A day from Dho-Tarap, we meet the road being pushed down through it. We soon leave farm tractors and motorbikes behind for a couple of days of wilderness trekking over a high pass to more charming villages and terraced fields. In Upper Dolpo proper, we take a grazing trail to kharkas with panoramas over to Tibetan mountains to Bhijer and Shyamling Gompa. Then we head to the Shey festival.
Which of the three passes will we take for our exit? Let's see which is most appealing and the least busy. All lead to the turquoise jewel of unmissable Phuksundo Lake though, and back down that crystal bubbling stream and to Juphal, for a - fingers crossed - flight or the alternative road exit, which we have the time for.
There's definitely a "before it's gone" feel to trekking in the region now, and the almost medieval villages of Chharka, Tinje and Shimen are now linked by road to Jomsom reducing the charm of trekking (but helping out the locals substantially). So instead we head through Chagaon and Bhijer before looping back to Shey. Our exit is still road-free until Suligad, a couple of hours from Juphal.
The brunt of the monsoon falls against the high ridge south of Dolpo however a strong wave of the monsoon could push over meaning there could be a burst of heavy rains over a week, and this happens perhaps twice during the rainy season. However, for much of the time, the weather should feature fine mornings with developing cloudscapes, sometimes building to a light shower. The crops are bright green, the villages at their vibrant best and it is the prettiest time to trek through both the villages and the alpine areas filled with wildflowers.
All in all, our trek is a unique, fabulous Dolpo journey of variety.
