The next morning, I woke up early before my alarm went off. Nobody was up yet and breakfast didn’t begin for another hour, so I went on a walk by myself around the perimeter of the campus in the morning light, really taking in the scenery. After my walk, I ate a breakfast of lentils and bread called “chipote” with peanut butter on it. We then were off to begin our day.

On this day, we had a hike planned to a small village named Phey. “This hike takes about 30 minutes- for the locals,” they told us. Well, it turns out, we were much slower than the locals. After about two hours we finally made it to the village. Even though it was much longer than expected, however, the hike was lots of fun. Both the Nat Geo group and a group of around 10 students from SECMOL went on the hike together. I walked with my friends from SECMOL Namla and Chotak, and we talked about everything from the differences between our schools to the fact that Ladakhis love Justin Bieber.

Once we arrived in the town, we explored the streets and touched the wide array of prayer wheels which were scattered throughout. Everyone then split up into two groups to go to different houses to enjoy tea time with a local. In this house, we had two kinds of tea: milk tea and butter tea. Milk tea was delicious, however butter tea tasted like I was drinking purely a cup of melted butter. I’m glad I tried it for the experience, but I would not at all recommend it.

After we relaxed in the Phey villager’s home for some time, we were off to make our way back to SECMOL. Instead of taking the same route home, however, we instead climbed up a small mountain to visit a monastery school. In this school, there was one main teacher, who was a monk, and twelve young students. After we arrived we all drank mango juice while the monk taught us the basics of Buddhism. He then gave us time to talk to him and as any questions that we might have. We even got to meet some of the students from the school, who did not speak English but were all extremely nice.

When we finished at the monastery school, it was time to make our way back to SECMOL for real. I took an alternative route back with Chotak, and we stopped at Indus Beach, the shore to the Indus River, where he taught me how to skip rocks. This 30 minutes hanging out with him by the beach learning to skip rocks (which he was amazing at and I was absolutely terrible at) may have been one of my favorite parts of the whole trip.

Once we finally got home from our hike, I was extremely tired. I managed to help Chotak water the greenhouses that were on campus and to take a shower in the camp’s solar showers, but then after eating some dinner I immediately fell asleep. It was such an amazing, yet tiring, day full of hiking, learning about new cultures, and friendship.