Namaste Sagarmatha

The Everest Base Camp trek begins one of two ways, a drive out to the end of the road at Jiri and a 5 day trek to Lukla, or a flight in a small twin-engined plane to the scariest and most dangerous airport in the world, at Lukla. It’s known as this as the runway is cut into the hillside, it’s only about 450m long and at the end of it is the rest of the hill!! This means that any pilot coming in to land must commit to the landing as there is no option for second chances, if you don’t land and stop you will crash into the hillside. Trucker Chris and I flew to Lukla and enjoyed a beautiful clear flight with mountain peak views and valley views and a textbook landing in the crazy airport. The flights are all first thing in the morning so once we arrived we were fit to start our first day’s trek, and we were off!

The trekking was incredibly scenic, the path clear to follow, the cloud was high so we had a good view of the surrounding hillsides and their many cascading waterfalls and houses dotted around the hillsides. Combining 2 days into one we continued up the valley in the monsoon rain surrounded by low cloud and finished our first day off with a relentless 800m uphill climb to our destination of Namche. It was great to finally arrive; we’d taken a wrong turn somehow and ended up walking uphill for an extra hour then had to go back down to cross the river, so after the final push to the top we were pretty wiped out. We both had a fantastic bowl of Sherpa stew in our guesthouse and though it was basic it was the best stew I had ever tasted!! Mainly just a vegetable based soup with big chunks of potato and gnocchi and various other veg, but it was warm and filling and we had no trouble dropping off to sleep that night.

Along the path we had to cross about 9 wire bridges, these are set up at various stages, are usually about 100-120m long and cross the river using wire supports and metal grill flooring. Each bridge is swathed in prayer flags and everyone uses them, even the yaks, proof of this is dotted along the bridges as they leave trails of poo!

The next morning we left Namche at 5am to climb the hill to the viewpoint 400m above us, an hour and a half later we were rewarded with a stunning clear view of a range of Himalayan mountains! All these stunning peaks and in among them the summit of the earth, Mount Everest!! Yes!! At this height it doesn’t look like the highest point in the world as the peaks close by appear to be higher but it was still recognisable and a nice Sherpa man in Namche pointed it out from my photograph when I asked him which was Sagarmatha, the name by which Nepalis know the mountain.

All the way up the path we are constantly meeting the Sherpa porters who manually transport all the goods from the planes at Lukla up the mountain to the other villages. Each Sherpa will carry 100kg each and the goods will be strapped to a bamboo frame hanging from a head strap that they suspend from their forehead. We passed all manner of packages, mostly food and building materials, some of the men walk the whole way bent over at the waist as they have huge boards of wood maybe7 or 8 feet long and 3 feet wide, they can’t be too wide as the Sherpas then have to fit through all the wire bridges previously mentioned. Some carried lengths of wire reinforcement for buildings, windows, various food packages and the most unusual we passed was a huge big prayer wheel, I bet he felt safe taking that up! They come in all ages, some look like they’re only teenagers and they wear just simple sand shoes or plastic sandals, there were loads of them streaming up the paths, I can’t imagine how busy this must be in the high season when there’s endless tourists as well as all the items needed to keep them fed and watered along the way.

We trekked down the hill after our Everest viewing and made it as far as Pakding before we decided it was enough for one day, over the last 2 days we’d walked for about 16 hours and having sat on a truck for 3 months our feet were pretty sore by now. Here we decided to pay the extra for a shower and 300 Rupees later I had a bucket of hot water to take up to the bathroom as my shower, I enjoyed it hugely though I was blissfully unaware that it would be my last for almost a week.  The following day we completed the final 2.5hours to Lukla, just as we were arriving into the village we watched a plane take off and disappear into the clouds, if we had left a couple of hours earlier we might have caught this flight and been back in Kathmandu that day, the Tuesday, as it would turn out we didn’t manage to leave Lukla until Sunday due to the weather closing in.

The general rule for flying is that if you can see the other side of the valley then the plane might manage to land, this isn’t a hard fast rule but it helps you to know whether or not to get out of bed at 5.30am every morning. As the days went past we didn’t see very much of the other side of the valley, our guesthouse was right next to the runway and we could barely catch sight of that most days. On Thursday it became apparent that the bad weather was part of a large front that was moving over the whole of Nepal and India and so it seemed unlikely we would be catching our flight to China on Sunday with the rest of the group. We weren’t alone in this fear as other stranded tourists were also starting to worry about their flights and so we ordered helicopters to try and get out on time. The other problem was that we were running out of cash, I ran out on Thursday while Chris ran out on Friday but luckily found some dollars in his bag we could exchange for rupees. The mountain phone lines were down so we had no internet and no ATMs, the bank couldn’t give us any money without a phone line. This is the reason we couldn’t have a shower! We ran out of wet wipes too and eventually had to give in and buy new underwear! We had soaked our spare set of clothes on the first day and nothing would dry, it was too cold, we were minging! With no planes or helicopters on Friday or Saturday it was clear we were not going to catch our flight and had to organise ourselves. Chris had a Nepali sim card so we called one of the other truckers who took charge of our stuff, arranged for our luggage to be left with the truck and also phoned my mum to ask her to call Chris’ mobile in order that she could cancel my flight. I also had one of the keys to the truck safe so they had to break into that to get people’s valuables out as the truck is staying in Kathmandu. We arranged with the guesthouse to run up a tab and Kinley’s good name allowed this to happen, we could pay Kinley who would in turn pay them, however later on the phone lines came back on and the bank manager opened the bank especially for us stranded tourists to withdraw cash. Thank you! Kinley is the former trekking guide who had arranged our trip for us, and was now sitting in Kathmandu feeling really bad that we were stuck and missing our Chinese flights.

Sunday was pretty clear when we woke up, but would you believe the weather in Kathmandu was bad! We waited, pretty resigned to not getting out for another day, when the excitement began! Helicopters started to arrive and drop people off and pick people up, it was the only activity in 5 days and even the locals came out to watch the helicopters. We got excited about each and every one but then were disappointed to learn none of them were ours. The guy who’d arranged ours eventually asked one of the pilots who’d landed to come back for us as his company was still telling him our helicopter hadn’t left Kathmandu yet! As it turned out, further up the mountain a Lama (high up in Buddhist religion) had requested a helicopter and we had therefore been dumped as a lower priority, well that works two ways as that company were then dumped!

Eventually helicopter number 8 arrived to take us from the mountain, it was a lovely little 5 seater with lots of glass for maximum viewing, and it was amazing! The flight was stunning as we ducked under, over or around the clouds. The views were incredible, we glided close to the mountainside where possible and looked in on people’s lives on the terraces; we watched all the waterfalls streaming down the hillsides into the river we were following to Kathmandu. It took us an hour to reach the city and I loved every second of it, to the point where when they asked for money at the end I really didn’t mind giving it to them!! It was certainly a bit of a dent in the budget but was worth it to make sure we caught up with the group as soon as possible and at this early stage we could still catch them in Beijing which means we’ve only missed out on two days in the city. So our short stay in Kathmandu was far from relaxing as we quickly organised ourselves, spent some time with our abandoned truck driver and his girlfriend and then flew to Beijing that Tuesday. That was 3 quick weeks in Nepal, it’s a fantastic country, earmarked as a future destination!