first sight of snow-capped mountains...

Beginning an all day trek after (an early!) breakfast is not something I would normally choose to do... It's knackering. My legs shake, I'm puffing like a steam train as I stumble behind the others... I have serious doubts about the remainder of the trek... I note in my journal the first bit is grim. really grim.
But the landscape is beautiful. Incredibly beautiful.
And all the people we pass clasp their hands together in that lovely gesture of greeting and sing the lilting Namaste! to us - which we return delightedly.
Inside my head, I'm lilting my own mantras... they help me keep going. That and the wonder of our surroundings.
The path levels off and it starts to get easier.
We look in front...
...it's truly breathtaking. The snowcapped mountains don't look real somehow - hyper-real, as if they belong to a world only loosely connected with the one we normally inhabit and this, this is higher existence (which, of course, in at least one sense, it is).