After a long awaited break... back from EVEREST!!!

  Mount Everest, Nepal
Sunday, October 7, 2007

We did it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Let me first just start by saying:  HOLY SHIT... what an incredible past two weeks we've had.

Everest from afar.

I think I can honestly say I've seen some of the most beautiful sights I will ever see in my whole entire life.  I'm still on a high from Kala Patthar... but ah, okay, I guess I should start at the beginning rather than at the end, huh??  

So two weeks ago we found ourselves sitting in the lobby of the our guesthouse at 4am,  groggy and full of anticipation, waiting for the bus to take us to the domestic airport.  I could probably write a whole entire blog entry about domestic airline travel here in Nepal but I'll leave that to your imagination (with the aide of a few pictures and anecdotes). I will say this though, security consisted of a uniformed woman asking me if I "have smoking?", to which my confused answer of 'no' seemed to be enough to get the security stamp on my "boarding pass."

Check in, Bagage security, scanning, and ticketing

I know I'm using a lot of quotation marks but I really have no other way of describing this stuff... the boarding pass was a generic piece of paper with the airline name on it and a handwritten FLIGHT 1 as the only personal details.  I could go on, but my parents are reading this and there's no need for them to be any more worried than they already are :)  Anyways, the flight itself was unbelievable.... we were just flying between massive Himalayan mountains and Random was worse than a little kid in a candy store, looking out the window and into the cockpit the whole time.

Cleared for Takeoff, Lukla.

We landed in Lukla, the only airport that supplies the Mt. Everest region and from there grabbed our bags and walked into town.  (Yes, we walked about 100 yards from the airport into the heart of town).  Check out the runway in the pic... it was literally in the middle of the mountains and just dropped off after about 2500 ft.  

After breakfast we started the (Random taking over here) trek.  It was about 5,500 feet altitude and we had gotten our first taste of the tea house menus..... omelettes ranging from burnt to slimy (nothing in between) would continue to plague us the rest of the trip.  The scenery was gorgeous, there were villages and teahouses scattered all up the valley.  We climbed and climbed, stopping often- the guides did not have much faith in our physical ability! 

Another beautiful view!

The 'trail' was the main link to the Everest region.  This was the superhighway for all the goods and supplies for all the hotels and restaurants along the way. All of the things we would eat and drink for the next two weeks would have been hauled up on the back of porters, or possibly a cranky yak, or dzoom (cranky yak + cow = dzoom.)  These porters were all skinny and under 5' 8", and some of them carried loads of up to 220 pounds... all suspended from their foreheads.  They would pile loads into reed baskets suspended by ropes to their foreheads.

Porter in action.

The loads would often pile up over their heads and when looked at from behind were just two spindly legs with a little wooden cane/support that they used when they stopped to prop their loads on.  Besides a staggering (no pun intended) amount of beer, I saw things such as freezers, 25 ft piles of lumber, and honda generators piled on these little guy's backs as they trudged up valley.  
Okay, Maia again here... this might turn out to be the longest blog we've written yet.  The first week we pretty much spent trekking about 8 hours a day in the rain/snow and eating veggie fried rice with egg (I liked burnt better than slimy, and this'll come up again in a couple of paragraphs), and playing cards with our new Swedish friends.  It was Random's paradise, by 7pm we were too tired to shuffle the deck again so 7:30 pretty much became the regular bedtime.

The assistants, always happy!

Our guides were hysterical- Gele insisted that garlic was the prevention for altitude sickness and we had "compulsory garlic soup" every day and one day the little sneaker even gave us garlic tea!  Deepak, the youngest guide by about five years (I'm glad we found out he was seventeen AFTER the first week) ran circles around us with his endless energy.  We'd show up to the tea houses at night totally drained from the day of hiking and Deepak would get into song and dance taking our dinner orders and making sure we had plenty of 'chiso pani', cold water in Nepali. Ha- I don't know why I have to mention the cold part because everything was FREEZING... it really rained/snow every single day for the first week.

Winter wonderland!

Either we've gotten to be sissies or heating by yak dung just doesn't do it.    Each tea house was basically a common room with a yak-dung stove for heating and usually had one or two hallways of plywood where our bedrooms were.  I'm sure Random would love to get into the details of their construction system, or lack of a system,

Tangboche monastery!

but I've got to say- for being dependent on whatever the porters can carry on their backs, these things were palaces.  Even though we complained about the food, it's pretty incredible that these villages exist in the middle of the mountains and can actually offer a menu and an iron heating stove.
 
So the first week went off without a hitch and although we could definitely tell we weren't hiking at sea level, Random and I were in pretty good shape.  

Mountain Maia on top of the world!

Gele, our guide, was good about spending a couple of days acclimatizing and regularly hiking up higher during the day than where we were sleeping.  It wasn't until Day 9 that we realized why they said you must be in "incredible fitness" for the trek.  All along Gele had been warning us that Day 9 would be the most physically challenging... we started in a town Labouche (about 16,000 ft) and after three hours of walking, made it Gorek Shep (16,700 ft)... a "town" of two teahouses- the last bit of civilization before Everest Base Camp.  After a 10am lunch, we had a five hour hike to the Base Camp (17,600 ft).  So climbing 1,600 ft in 8 hours may not sound too impressive in it of itself, but I can promise you that at 17,000 ft, you notice every single foot.  Of course, it still sounds doable right? 

On the Khumbu glacier.

Well, like I said, I preferred the burnt eggs to the slimy eggs but apparently luck was not with me and I woke up the morning of Day 9 with the worst stomach cramps I've ever had.  Can you think of a worst place to get the shits?!? On our three hour hike to Gorek Shep I left my mark on the trail SEVEN TIMES.  I didn't think I was going to make it.  I took every drug we had- antibiotics, ammonium, orange disgusting salty rehydration powders- but I seriously figured I'd have to miss out on base camp.  Well, it's incredible what you can will your body to do... food poisoning at 17,000 ft is no match for the determination of someone who's been planning on getting to base camps.  I'm sure you don't want these details, but ha, you're reading so too bad- the final count of "bathroom breaks" during the base camp hike was SIXTEEN... but we made it!  
 

Base Camp, tired......

Base Camp was absolutely nuts.  We were there just in the beginning of the season so there was only one expedition set up and it was still amazing to see how they can just make a city on a glacier that relies solely on yaks and people carrying stuff up.  There were cooking tents and sleeping tents and a big generator in the middle and satellite phone setups... It was cool.  Just seeing everything gave me all sorts of new energy... our whole team had been hurting on the hike over but being in the middle of all of this made us forget our ailments and just admire the scene.  

The hike back to Gorek Shep was incredibly difficult, at this point everyone in our group had run out of water, two other girls were suffering from the same food poisoning, everyone had a pounding headache... needless to say we all collapsed and went to bed as soon as we got back.

Kala Pattar, 5am..... first clear day!

Which was a good thing because at 4am we got a wake-up knock on the door... Like I said, it had been rainy/snowy all week so we had never really gotten a great view of the mountains.  Well, someone must've been on our side because we go outside at 4:30 only to see the most clear, incredible moonlit mountains surrounding us. 

Dawn on the trail.

Gorek Shep is about three miles away from Everest and at the base of Kala Patthar, a 18,208 ft "peak" (It's hard to really describe it as a peak compared to the other mountains in the region) that is famous for having the best views of Everest and the surrounding mountains.   The thing is, it's only really worth climbing it if it's a clear day and we had kind of resigned ourselves to the fact that it probably wouldn't be worth it given the weather the past week.  

But somehow the weather had totally turned and we found ourselves hiking up the steepest mountain we'd done at 5 in the morning.  

Sunrise over the top of the world.

It was a tough, tough, hike and out of our team of twelve only five us us made it all the way up, huffing and puffing the whole way.  Now is when I can honestly say I can't believe anyone could articulately describe what we saw.  We got to the peak just as the sun started peering out directly behind Mount Everest.  

.Maia's pick....

Everywhere we looked we saw 20,000+ ft mountains, glowing in the morning sun.  I seriously think that moment in time will go down as the most breathtaking (pun not intended) moment I've experienced.  

After that, the rest was easy.  

Ahhh... the sun is shining.

Every day was sunny, my food poisoning was gone, and all of the grueling uphills we'd done the past week were just a quick sprint down.  Two days later we were back at our starting point, drinking beers and laughing with our team, who at this point we'd become really good friends with. 

You're lucky you can't smell us!

One more hysterical and beautiful domestic flight later, we found ourselves back in Kathmandu, smellier than ever before (14 days of NO SHOWERS) and more exhausted than we'd been in a long time.
 
And now we're sitting in an internet cafe, hungover from a great night saying bye to all our new friends (who we'll definitely be seeing again, now that we have places to stay in Melbourne, Sweden, London, and Toronto!) and desperately trying to capture what we just experienced into one travelblog entry.  Please go through the photo album as I can't put every picture into the entry directly...
 
And quick update into what's next:  Random is sitting next to me sending out resumes to skydiving places in New Zealand seeing if he can get a flying a job, and until then we've got a ticket to Thailand in two days... who knows what'll happen :)
 
Miss you guys so much and send us emails and updates!!
 
Much love,
Maia and Random