SEAT S4 Chapter 5

A-Day +2
Everest Day 1
16  Sept 09

Deepak showed up. That’s a good start. Then he got in a fight with a taxi driver!

The three of us boarded a small airplane bound for Lukla – a mountain town in the Himalaya range. I’m still amazed we even landed at Lukla. The entire length of the runway is 400m and it’s attached to the side of a mountain. On a slope.

You can’t even park a buss in 400m, let alone land a plane!!

It was fresh. The sun hadn’t yet breached the surrounding hills. It was almost frosty. A sort of blue glow covered the village. We hustled into the village centre and met three Nepali men who were our prospective porters. One lad, aged 20, named Haka, spoke very little English, got the job! The team was set.

Haka set the pace, smile intact, backs in tow. Five minutes into the walk and into the fog, we got a taste of how life with Deepak was going to be. When I tell you that he is the type of person that knows everyone, you truly have no idea what ‘everyone’ means. We round a corner and he bumps into someone he knew. While they banter away in Nepali, the English tourist who looks as though he was about to have a heart attack proceeds to tell us how terribly hard his journey has been. He almost home, the final few yards until he reached Lukla. Surely he wasn’t Super Extreme Enough for Nepal.

Our first day was coveted in the lush greens of the Himalaya. Something we should be sure to miss in the coming days I’m sure.

We got our first taste of life up here as we passed through small villages with colorful houses, school kids on their way home, and locals going about their business in their fields.

Our stop for the night was Phakding a tiny village with, of course, great views.

An acclimatization walk to a school perched on a hilltop, accompanied by a Spanish Señorita (Silvia) we had befriended, and a plate of momo later we turned in for the night, at 645pm, in a cold, intimate wood cabin…


A-Day +3
Everest Day 2
17  Sept 09

Today was the day that Deepak had told us was the hardest. I’m not sure whether to believe him or not? Was he going to say that every day? Or was he being serious? If this day was hard for a Guide and a Porter – then we were screwed.

Silvia, who was heading on roughly the same path as us, was already long gone by the time we dragged ourselves out of bed.

We left the kind hospitality of our hosts at Phakding and headed…up. Eight hours of up.

It was beautiful, no question, but it was hard to take it all in when you’re constantly out of breath.

It was about half way up a hill that I discovered a problem with this region of the world. You get so tired walking, so you stop to rest a while. Problem is, the moment you stop, you just feel more and more motivated to go on. Which makes you more tired..and so on. But we were rewarded. We caught our first view of the Himalayan peaks today, and with clear blue skies, the warm sun, the waterfall running behind us; what a view it was! But then we were un-rewarded. Around the corner, Deepak showed us where we were going by basically pointing into the clouds. With a harder look, we could just make out the tiny houses that were scattered on the hillside. Namche Bazar. 3440m. Up.

Being greeted by the young school kids was a lovely touch. They all wanted their picture taken, they all wanted to know what was going on, there wasn’t a shy bone between them! The welcome feeling quickly faded as our attention was drawn to poster after poster of people who went missing in the region…

We climbed the elevetly-billion stairs to our hotel and again were greeted with that overly kind Nepali hospitality. And they all thought I looked like ‘Nekiel’, a famous Nepali movie star. So I milked it for the remainder of my time in Nepal.

A-Day +4
Everest Day 3
18  Sept 09

At this altitude, the weather changes so quickly, we’d have had all four seasons by the time you read this sentence! The view out the window of the hotel diner was perfect weather, clear blue skies and a slight breeze. I had breakfast, and the weather had turned to shit. Thick fog had rolled into the U-shaped basin of the village and made it impossible to see more than 20 meters.

We were to spend another night here in Namche after spending today walking up and down some Himalayas to acclimatize. I was hoping tonight may be a bit more peaceful than last night – the locals had chained up about 20 yak’s outside our window, all with cow-bells around their neck, and because they were all one one single long rope, when one moved, they all moved. It was initially quite a pleasant sound.  Eventually it was annoying - like a Yak-chime, all night long.

Namche, I was told, is a fairly new village, which evolved pretty much for the tourists. Even so,  there’s still some amazing Nepali ways of life going on up here. In the middle of the village was a new building site, with boulders lined up ready to be stacked into a house. James and I together couldn’t even move one, and admittedly we felt pretty useless when a local came bounding around the corner with five or six on his back.

We set out on our day walk and headed, up, of course. Up into the cloud. About now is where Deepak decided to tell us all the horror stories about the airports up here, including planes crashing at Lukla. Thanks Deepak. I was fascinated by the little Himalayan flowers up here and kept stopping every few steps to take photos. James and Deepak disappeared into the fog leaving Haka and I to our ask-in-English-answer-in-Nepali conversations.

Around lunch time we arrived at the school Sir Edmund Hilary founded in Khumjung. The people here love him. We had lunch with a couple of locals here. This consisted of potatoes. And butter.

Now is a good time to tell you that up here, poo is gold. Its used for everything. Building, cooking, growing… you name it, poo can do it. So these potatoes we were eating.. yup, you guessed it. Everything that went down the toilet (which was little more than a hole in the ground) was used as compost to grow these little gems. Yummmy!

We returned to Namche after using most of the day on this walk, and rested up for the walk tomorrow with conversation and game of cards over dinner with Silvia and a handful of other travelers we met.

Consider us acclimatized.

A-Day +5
Everest Day 4
19  Sept 09

Now this was more like it.

A frosty morning, kept us cool as we trekked over the mountains above Namche. From the cliff edge road we could see…well.. fog. But that changed as the day warmed up. The sun burnt off all the fog revealing the valley below us and the mountains in the distance that we were heading for. We saw our first signs of AMS here as well. Large billboards with warnings about altitude sickness.

From there we started heading down, strangely. Across rivers, over bridges, as the green-ness that was once all around us started to ease up and give way to the grey rock underneath. But after lunch, which was a Deepak special – packet noodles which of which he was very proud to have ‘cooked’ himself, we started to climb again. The incline itself wouldn’t have been all that hard either, but for the amount of steps that lay ahead. I didn’t count them – I’m not even sure I would be able to count that high. Watching Haka run up the hill, finding all the little short cuts, and the ease at which he did so with all of our gear on his back made me feel useless. However, that was all about to change.

As we finally reach the summit of stairs, and passed though a gate of prayer wheels into the tiny village of Tengboche we were rewarded, if only for a moment, by the Gods of the mountains.

It had been another eight hour day of walking and we were pretty tired. We were sweaty. We hadn’t showered in four days. We hadn’t had amazing views for a lot of today given we were walking through low forests after fog coated valleys. But here, where the clouds were dark and threatening, as we passed through the prayer wheels (which you spin for good luck, by the way), Deepak was hurrying us over.

“Quickly!” her shouted, and pointed towards the sky.

And there, right there, in the cloud filled sky, was a hole just the right size to see the mountain it was revealing.

Everest.

I couldn’t believe it! There she was, within sight! After the last two days,  especially, I felt this was the biggest motivator we had been given yet. It’s as if Mother Nature was egging us on.

I barely had time to pull my camera out and snap a photo before, just like in Namche, the clouds rolled back in within minutes, and Everest faded out of site.



Tengboche is also home to a monastery. The monks had just finished three weeks of worship being locked within the grounds of the monastery, which again, was perfect timing for us. They let us it and showed us around their playground. Most of the monks were celebrating their release by sitting around playing card games.



A cup of chai later and we began to walk our final stretch of the day. Onwards to Pangboche accompanied by one of the monastery’s wild dogs. That was a lovely touch!

Shortly after we arrived here was the first time I started to feel weird. I had a headache, felt a little light headed and lost my appetite. Even for momo. Deepak said this was normal (worryingly!) and ordered me a cup of ginger tea. Then it was straight to bed as far as I was concerned, and given how cold it was – I didn’t even bother taking my clothes off.

A-Day +6
Everest Day 5
20  Sept 09

 I think it was about six am when Deepak started banging on our door.

“Wake up, it’s a beautiful day! You’ll love this view!”

A beautiful day? It was shithouse yesterday… oh wait, lets not forget we’re in the Himalaya where the weather is changes every two minutes.

James stayed in bed. I didn’t. I didn’t get out of the sleeping bag either. I sort of bounced out the door, rubbed my eyes and looked towards the skyline.

I think I turned and started pulling James out of bed.

“Holy shit man, get up before the weather changes and you miss this!”

Yesterday we had arrived in cloudy, close to nightfall conditions. This morning was crisp, clear blue skies. Albeit a bit nippy, but we were 3939m, and surrounded by mountains. Everywhere we looked we could see snow capped Himalayas. It was tremendously beautiful.

The walk to Pheriche was rather pleasant as well. There wasn’t much of an incline – 3930m to 4270m. Wildlife was everywhere, the sun was shining.

Pheriche was the largest town we’d seen for two days since we left Namche. The tundra had noticeably changed by now. Bare rock and low brown grass was all we had to admire.

Deepak insisted on another acclimatization walk. To 4500. Of course that doesn’t sound very high to you sitting at home reading this, but every step from here on, every breath, every move your body makes, is starved of oxygen.

On the crest of the mountain overlooking Pheriche, which looked like a toy village from up here, we made what Deepak described as a good luck charm. A cone shaped pile of rocks called ??????????????

Took some photos and played a game of cards at  4500m to give our bodies time to adjust.



At dinner, Silvia has asked if she could join our group, officially. I guess she wanted the safety of travelling in a group incase something did go wrong. We welcomed her on board to our team of now five.



That night, was the first night I found it slightly harder to sleep with lower levels of oxygen.

A-Day +7
Everest Day 6
21  Sept 09

We woke and it was cold. The clouds had already rolled in. Today we were to push on to ????m to Lobuche.

The first couple of hours of walking were easy. Enjoyable. Flat open plains surrounded by mountains, a slow-flowing glacial river, fresh air. Once we started walking we didn’t feel the cold at all.

Then it got hard. The incline started and soon after it was harder to breathe. Deepak got us to rest on the hillside as he massaged our heads to keep the blood flowing. Haka played a game of ‘find heaviest rock I can lift.’ Bastard!

It wasn’t even that far to our lunch stop in Duglha, but it was damn hard work. In Duglha Deepak showed me a photo of Nikel. I don’t think I looked anything like him, but whatever! I started to feel a bit weird here, lost my appetite a bit.

We pushed on, and the incline increased. Every 15mins or so I’d have to stop and catch my breath. The pace was slow. We finally made it to the top of todays big hill where a grave yard of rock piles lay as respect to those who had lost their lives on the mountains. There were so many of them, so, so many of them!

Past this, the tundra really changed. Grass started to give way and the cold really picked up. It was like an Arctic Desert. It was absolutely quiet. Absolutely beautiful. Even though it was relatively flat, it still felt like hard work. My headache started to get worse. I was hoping to hell that it wasn’t AMS.

By the time we got to Lobuche it was killing me. Aspirin did nothing.

We had another acclimatization walk, just up the hill and back. I cannot tell you how cold it was when we eventually go to the ‘village hill.’ It was raining only a little, but the wind chill was intense! We took a few photos of all of us up there at 4500m and got the fuck back down!

Deepak gave me another massage which seemed to help for a while. I ate dinner and went to bed, hoping I’d survive the night..