Sing Gompa
"I came to Sing Gompa for the trail junction. I stayed an extra hour for the cheese."
A single-street cheese-making hamlet on the ridge between Langtang and Gosaikunda, where a Swiss-founded dairy has been turning yak milk into surprisingly good cheese since the 1980s.
Sing Gompa is the kind of place that exists because of a road it doesn’t have — a ridge-top hamlet in the Langtang region that most people pass through in under thirty minutes, on the way either up to Gosaikunda or down toward Dhunche. Lia and I stopped there for lunch on our way to the lake and ended up staying the night because the light on the pine forest surrounding the monastery was doing something we didn’t want to walk away from.
The cheese factory
The Sing Gompa Cheese Factory was set up with Swiss agricultural assistance in the 1980s, part of a wider effort to establish yak-cheese production across highland Nepal, and it’s still operating in a low wooden building at the edge of the village. You can walk in, watch the process, and buy blocks of hard cheese that taste like a distant, grassier cousin of Swiss gruyère — a strange thing to find at 3,330 meters, but a welcome one after days of dal bhat and instant noodles. I bought more than I could reasonably carry and regretted nothing.
The monastery and the forest
The gompa the village is named for sits above the main trail, a modest Buddhist monastery surrounded by old-growth pine and rhododendron forest that somehow survived the logging pressure that’s stripped so much of the mid-hills. In the late afternoon, low light comes through the trunks at an angle that makes the whole forest glow amber, and the only sound is wind moving through the canopy and the occasional prayer bell from the monastery. It’s a small, quiet, unphotographed corner of the Langtang region that most trekkers walk through without stopping.
The junction point
Functionally, Sing Gompa is a decision point: continue up toward Laurebina La and Gosaikunda, or descend toward Dhunche and the road back to Kathmandu. But if you have a spare night in your itinerary, staying here rather than pushing straight through gives you an evening in one of the more peaceful stretches of forest in the whole Langtang-Helambu circuit, plus a shot at watching the cheese-making process without a trail deadline hanging over you. It’s a minor detour that pays back more than its modest scenery suggests.
When to go: October and November offer the clearest skies and driest trails. March and April bring blooming rhododendron to the surrounding forest. The monsoon months of June through September make the trail muddy and leech-heavy; winter (December–February) is cold but passable if you’re continuing only as far as Sing Gompa rather than over Laurebina La.