Apple cider and apple crumble

Apple cider and apple crumble
Originally uploaded by bastchild.

I stopped in Marpha for a mid-morning splurge. All through the trek, I had usually been spending about 250 Rs a day. For a room, Emily and I were able to bargain them down to 50 Rs for the two of us, and dal bhat cost 120 - 150 Rs. Breakfast was usually a shared cup of hot milk (that we mixed with some packaged museli cereal we had brought along), and lunch was trekking bread (from a "German bakery" in Pokhara) that lasted all week without getting moldy or hard, hard cheese, and bhaji mix (dal mut). Water was free filtered stuff from the guesthouses that I refilled in the mornings and evenings.
This was our last day of trekking, so we splurged and had some apple cider (20 proof) and apple crumble (absolutely delicious) in Marpha, the declared "apple capital of Nepal". We had left Maoist territory when we entered Tatopani and a government-sponsored program in the valley grew various fruits in orchards. There was also some apple brandy that we picked up in Tuguche (where there is a distillery), but it was horrible-tasting.