Part I - Gokyo to Cho La to Everest Base Camp

My cousin Nick and I meet up for the first time either of us
could remember away from Christmas Eve, in Kathmandu

Getting to Lukla was a piece of cake. Blaze’s flight was scheduled after mine but he magically arrived a half hour before and scoured the town looking for me until my plane landed. I didn’t have enough money because of stupid debit card rules so I got a cash advance at the bank. Details.

12% graded runway in Lukla

Blaze and I only met two days before leaving but we made the best trekking partners. We pushed each other in equal amounts, took care of each other, made fun of each other and riffed off of the other’s jokes. He was not in fact filming underground pornography in Kathmandu and Malaysia as I had been told but was filming and working with an organization that led non-violent conflict resolution workshops in Bhutanese refugee camps, among other places. The upshot is he’s a professional photographer with a substantial SLR so he took great pictures.

Namche Bazar

The first day was long. I wanted to stop early as per the recommendations of Lonely Planet but Blaze convinced me that we should make the push to Namche Bazar so we arrived exhausted at 7 pm all but begging for dal bhat. We took our sleep satisfied. The next day was the recommended acclimatization day so we hiked up to the little village of Thame (3900m) and back. It was a long day hike but beautiful and we did our first path-finding and met a guy who had summited Everest four times. (We ended up meeting several other people who had also summited Everest and Lhotse but it isn’t so impressive when you meet them in the Himalayas…it’s still cool, but, you know, they’re a little devalued.)

Yaks before the Gokyo turnoff

Ama Dablam 

The next day we hit the trail and made the long climb to lunch in Mong La (3975m). Blaze ate an uncooked pancake for breakfast and started feeling sick on the way up. He nearly collapsed when we got to the top. We walked an hour down the hill after lunch and he fell on his bed at 2, woke briefly for dinner and slept through until 7 AM. I spent the evening with two Kiwis and a Nepali woman who lived with her family on the way to Thame but attended Laurelhurst Elementary and University in Wellington, NZ. They taught me the Nepali card game Callbreak and I won Rs 30 before losing back half. I woke up to Blaze happily eating a granola bar, good sign, so we headed out.

A picture of a picture of Ama Dablam advanced base camp

On our way we met a man with a potato chip bag full of boiled potatoes. He offered us some and told us he owned a guesthouse in Gokyo, that his cousin owned one in Dole and that we could stay for free. Great! We walked the last hour with him behind a trail of yaks and became the lone guests at the Cho Oyu Lodge. Blaze started going downhill again that night and the next day he was no better, a cocktail of raw pancakes, altitude sickness, and this weird virus/allergy from a jackfruit that made his hands burn and peel. So we stayed another day. I climbed several hundred meters on a lonely trail above the village and spent a wonderful few hours exploring among stunted juniper bushes and rhodies, sneaking up on a herd of yaks and sketching the landscape in my journal. Most of the next 8 hours was spent in 14^th century England reading World Without End.

My climb above Dole. Cho Oyu in the background, 6th
highest mountain in the world

Blaze and the Danish Guy above Machhermo

Blaze was on the mend the next morning so we got up to Machhermo by 10:30. (Because the Gokyo valley is quite steep, we could only go a few hours per day to avoid altitude sickness.) After being alone in Dole for two days we thought it would be nice to have company so we followed the crowd to the Yeti Lodge. (Apparently a Yeti attacked a woman and some goats in Machhermo in 1974!) It was actually a bad place – they skimped on dal bhat and rats chirped under the floorboards for several hours. We met the Danish Guy for the first time – he told us he walked for four weeks from Jiri to Lukla (the helicopter did it in 45 minutes) and a group of Canadians who, especially the French one with pointy eyebrows, seemed to like Blaze more than me for no good reason. There was a daily Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) lecture at the Machhermo health clinic that we attended put on by European doctors, one of whom we had met on the trail escorting a yak-chasing Shih Tzu back to Dole. A blizzard picked up as we walked over but it melted quickly under bright blue skies. We took pictures of Yaks. That night a thundersnowstorm rolled in.

Baby yak in the Machhermo afternoon blizzard

5 AM. Three inches of snow. Shit. Back to sleep. 5:30. Fuck it. At 6:15 we were the first ones on the trail, once we found it. Blazing a trail all alone through fresh powder under bright blue skies – man it was good. It was Blaze’s favorite day and would have been mine too if I’d eaten more than a Snickers and two hardboiled eggs. We followed the footprints of a porter along a dirty roaring river that snuck out under the Ngozumpa Glacier. Almost as soon as it emerges from beneath the ice the pristine runoff from the Gokyo Lakes joins the glacial torrent.

My camera broke temporarily but this is exactly what it
looked like from the top of Gokyo Ri

Looking across at Cho La Pass

There are six holy lakes in a straight line along the moraine. The first is quite small but surrounded by cairns and with snow on the ground it looked like thousands of little people watching us. Erie. The next two lakes were quite big. The village of Gokyo is build on the moraine on the banks of the third lake – it looks like a resort and we could have stayed a week. The guesthouse gave us free hot mango juice on arrival, a free room, outstanding dal bhat and free coconut biscuits when we left. It was our gold standard and though every older woman is didi, our Didi was from the Namaste Lodge. We walked to the fourth lake but I was still quite fatigued so we walked back and watched yaks mating. Our trip was thus complete. That night we met a man that looked like the devil incarnate and an Israeli girl who had come from Cho La pass that day, where we were headed the next. The girl had taken a rock to the head and was vomiting from her concussion on the pass and all night in her room. Outstanding news for us. (She ended up getting airlifted to Kathmandu.) I also wished my Mom a happy mother’s day. I had a headache and what felt like growing pains in my legs but with a hearty dal bhat and some sleep I was good to climb Gokyo Ri the next morning.

Top of the pass!

The doctors in Machhermo said it’s common for people to have irregular night breathing at high altitudes, like your body forgets to take a breath and you wake up winded. I experienced it each other next three nights and it was a pain to be half awake but be out of breath because you weren’t conscious enough to regulate your breath. Anyway, climbing up Gokyo Ri, the 5370 meter HILL rising above Gokyo was steep, obviously, and the views were fogged in so we couldn’t see Everest. The clouds weren’t going to lift and I was freezing my balls off so naturally just as we came down the clouds parted. We weren’t about ready to go back up so we were content with gorgeous views of the first three lakes and the enormous glacier we were about to cross.

We did so around 1. It was actually quite cool, up and down and up and down over piles of rock and around little lakes. The only eventful part was meeting a guy from Vancouver about an hour in and chatting about happy hour in Seattle. On a glacier. In the Himalayas. We stayed in Dragnag. It snowed in the evening and didn’t stick. I finished my 1200 page book so I didn’t have to haul it over the pass. We created the Team Ukraine joke but it’s been repeated so many times to blank faces that I won’t tell it again. We alone thought it was hilarious.

Our path intersecting with the EBC trail cutting across the
right of the photo

In the morning we leached onto two Spaniards and their guide over the 5330 meter Cho La pass. I’d been nervous about crossing the pass for some days. Should we find a guide? Is it safe to go alone? Would there be too much snow? All of those worries disappeared when we got to the top. The last 200 meters up was a breathless, pathless rock scramble. Every few steps I had to stop and ease the burning in my legs but it was fine, just really hard. I fell on Blaze with my pack still on and sat for a while basking in the sun and the satisfaction that comes from accomplished goals. It was the last challenging thing I had to do in Nepal and the capstone of my trip, and I was proud of myself. From there we walked over a little section of a big glacier, down the other side of the pass and were all alone with the yaks across a flat valley surrounded by snowy mountains. This was my favorite day. We got to Lobuche by three o’clock after several more hours of tired, lonely trekking. Our path merged with the Everest Base Camp trail about 30 minutes before Lobuche and we joined the stampede. We saw more people in 10 minutes than we had all day.  

Halfway up Kala Patar, Everest is the short black peak to
the left of the bigger-looking one, Nuptse

It another long day but it was a relief to know the pass was behind us. We arrived in Gorek Shep by 9 o’clock, the last village before EBC. Most people get up at 4:30 to climb Kala Patar and see Mt. Everest up close but the weather was good so we took advantage and made the climb to 5550 meters. (The next two days were completely socked in all day – nobody saw anything, so we were extremely lucky.) Everyone had descended already so Blaze and I were again all alone. We saw Mt. Everest. It was really, Really cool. I can’t describe why it was so great, but it was.

Everest through prayer flags atop Kala Patar

Everest

Entrance to Base Camp

Memorials to fallen climbers

Once we came down at noon and ate our third meal we figured we should just cram in base camp and head home early the next day so dragged our asses two hours up there, took a ton of pictures to prove we’d see it and headed back before Blaze’s head exploded from his altitude headache. It was six months to the day since I’d arrived in Pamohi.

Blaze eating apple pie in Tengboche after we learned that
the mobile bakery in base camp closed down for hygienic reasons 

From there we just tried to get the hell off the mountain. We descended 1300 meters to Tengboche and almost kept going to Namche but stopped because it didn’t matter. Through the window of our guesthouse we could see a long trail climbing steadily along the mountain across the valley. I thought, man, what a windswept, badass trail. Only basasses must walk there. When I looked at the map though it was the trail to Mong La we had taken nine days before where Blaze almost didn’t make it on his raw pancake stomach. We are those guys! We made a quick walk to Namche the next day, showered for the first time in mrmrmrmr days and had our first, second and third beers of the trek. We spent the afternoon drinking espresso. Lukla was farther than we thought and the strap on the right side of my pack was suddenly killing me. The bridges were still missing 10%-20% of the bolts that held them together but it didn’t matter – we would soon be in Kathmandu for momos, moonshine and massages.

Blaze and I walked through the Lukla arch and finished out trek. We hugged…

Part II (preceeding part I) - The Easy Part

Over the rivers and through the woods, pizza and beer and momos and moonshine…thus ended my month in the Himalayas.

6 days earlier. Blaze and I walked through the Lukla arch and finished out trek. We hugged. It had been 13 exciting days since we walked through the other way. We found the Danish guy (we called him “The Danish Guy” for two weeks until we learned that his father named him Joe Sony after the boxers – “Fuck my father”), drank beer, played pool, ate dal bhat and went to bed, ready to get on a standby flight the next morning. I woke up sick and we didn’t fly out despite decent weather though the Danish Guy, who got stoned and slept in somehow got on the last flight. We were disappointed and the next night we spent playing pool, pathetically, alone, in the same bar. But we’d get out the next day.

We had arrived 3 days before my scheduled flight, so the plan was to get waitlisted and fly out after everyone else. The Lukla airport is considered among the most dangerous airports in the world, owing to the 12% grade of the runway and notoriously bad weather. Tara Air was run from the back of an envelope without concern for customer service. Blaze had rescheduled his flight for two days before mine and although I had planned the itinerary, I didn’t think I really needed to change my flight. Bad call. I would go to their office at 2:30 and they would write my name down and say come back at four for more information. At four, if they hadn’t locked up early, they would say Come tomorrow at 8:15. Come at 9:15. Come at 10. It never mattered. I tried for 5 days to get on a plane but only 2 days worth of planes got. The day of my actual ticket, my fourth morning, I couldn’t see the runway 50 feet from my window.

After our pathetic night, Blaze got on his scheduled flight and caught his connecting flight the next day to Kuala Lampur. While he was staying in a 4-star hotel with a pool on the roof, I was the only guy in my large guest house despite its proximity to the airport and the influx of trekkers. Somebody knew something I didn’t…

The next four days followed the same pattern – bad news and rude airline workers, aimless wandering to coffee shops, veggie burgers, internet, cards, watching movies and trying to keep a smile on our face so we didn’t start crying from boredom and helplessness. We would sit around until 6:30 when I went back to eat and go to bed.

In India I realized the importance of keeping myself in good positions of leverage so people would rip me off less. We didn’t have it. Our options were: 1. Wait an indefinite period of time for a new flight with no accurate weather report and more people competing for my seat with each passing foggy day. Additionally, the Everest climbing season was wrapping up and Lukla was about to be inundated with climbers coming from base camp. 2. Pay $500 more for a helicopter ride to Kathmandu. Helicopters are also weather dependent, of course, though better than planes. However, two people had recently died on Everest and several more died in an avalanche on Kanchenjunga so helicopters were scarce. 3. Trek 3-6 days to Jiri, take a bus for 7 hours on paved road. 4. Trek 2-3 days to Phaplu, take a jeep for 13-23 hours on unpaved roads.

On day 6 in Lukla myself and guys from Victoria and Portugal were prepared to take the fourth option. Last minute we learned that we could walk 45 minutes, pay $400 to fly to Jiri and take the bus. Now, $400 may seem like a lot of money for a 45 minute flight but when it’s that or staring down another week in Lukla it was a relatively easy decision, especially knowing we were flying in this: a 24 seat Russian cargo chopper. We were about to eat our last veggie burgers waiting for the fog to clear when a kid from the tour company ran in and told us to go so we ate our burgers walking down the street.

This massive machine was parked on field in a serene village below Lukla and the fog bank. The flight was fine. We flew over rivers and valleys and uncountable terraced fields, covering 6 days in less than an hour. The bus covered the type same landscape, just slower. The drive was up and down on a single-lane paved road, often through rain and white out fog, slamming on the brakes around wet corners to negotiate the road with dump trucks. Leeches snuck onto the bus on the American tour groups’ shoes, we stopped twice for a man to vomit on the side of the road. It was nerve-racking. But we made it. And after Lukla, everything in Kathmandu is magical.

 

Monks playing giant horns. I could play that!

Looking through the village at our escape

Across potato fields 

Mi-8amt

Hahaha!

Bags packed in the aisles to eye level. They told us to stop
taking pictures so we figured this was illegal. The guy in
charge looked especially happy when we landed, like he was
nervous we wouldn't...

ABC

I don’t have much time to write. Travel plans are getting crazy. Tomorrow I fly to Lukla to trek to Gokyo, over the Cho La Pass and up to Everest Base Camp. I return to Kathmandu and fly to Bangkok on the 24^th for a week, then back to Kathmandu for two days, followed shortly by HOME.

Tracy and I trekked to Annapurna Base Camp (ABC) with two porters and our guide Milan. (See Mountain pictures below.) It took 7 days to get to base camp, walking about 4 hours per day. The sky was usually clear in the mornings until it warmed up and the clouds rolled in, revealing the mountains from time to time. The trekking itself was beautiful and hilly, but generally not too exciting. I like the routine of getting up every morning, moving my body, thinking, and watching as the scenery changes around me. We got to our guesthouse early most days and I read through three books. (For the Everest trek I bought World Without End, 1200 pages, so hopefully I won’t finish it too fast.) It was great to spend so much time with Tracy. We ate biscuits together in the afternoon and talked about baseball and travel. I got to know Tracy a lot better and our conversations improved with the trip.

Machhapuchhre Base Camp (MBC) was the stop before ABC. The canyon up to camp was only as wide as the river at the bottom and the views downstream were the best non-mountain views of the trip. Views from base camp were spectacular. Machhapuchhre (Fishtail) has never been summited and its triangular face rises more than 3 kilometers above the base camp to a double peak that resembles a fish’s tail from Pokhara. The other side looks a little different, as most mountains do. Milan asked us if the mountain still looked like Fishtail, to which we would say yep. But he would say Noooo…it looks like blahblah mountain in the Everest region (a mountain Tracy knew but I did not). He thought it was sooo funny. So it because a running joke between Tracy and me: Does it look like Fishtail today?

Annapurna Base Camp at 4100 meters was outrageous. The guesthouses are perched on a big moraine made by an old glacier much larger than the current one. Walk 50 meters and you’re looking over a crumbly cliff down to the current glacier. Every few minutes we heard rocks falling down the moraine and sometimes a big boom meant the glacier was shifting, but the amphitheatre reverberates sounds well so we rarely saw something move. It was exciting though!

Hium Chuli rises directly above the camp to 6441 meters. Annapurna South is nearby at 7219 meters. Annapurna 1, the tenth highest mountain in the world at 8091 meters rises almost 4 kilometers above the glacier below like a 13,000 foot cliff. And Fishtail is directly opposite Annapurna South. The scale doesn’t compute with what I know about mountains.

We stayed two nights at ABC. The first day we explored along the edge of the moraine and looked at the names of dozens of people who have died on the mountains. The second day we scrambled part way up Hium Chuli to get a better look at the mountains and the piles of rock on the glacier below. I could have stayed up there all day basking on a rock if the clouds hadn’t rolled in. It would have been nice to take a helicopter back when we had accomplished our mission, but, unfortunately, we didn’t. Took us 3 days to get back to Pokhara where we had our final meal. Tracy and I parted ways the next morning and I caught a bus back to Kathmandu.

Last night I met up with Blaze, the New Yorker that I will be trekking with for the next two weeks. We drank local liquor and ate at least 20 momos with his friends…a good first night excellent night. Today I ate donuts and drank espresso with a dreaded German guy. I bought tickets to Bangkok and got my trekking permits, generally wading through the masses to run errands. I met up with my cousin Nick for the first time I can remember away from Uncle Jim and Aunt Wendy’s house and finally met his girlfriend Olivia. I ate 20 more buff momos. I cannot think of a better way to spend $1.25.

Well, all is set for tomorrow. I’ll be back in a few weeks. Wish me luck!

First day

First amazing views. Annapurna on the left, Fishtail on the right

Third guesthouse. Proof that we REALLY went trekking

Tracy's typical afternoon look

The canyon leading up to MBC. Layers of the sea floor
tilted on their side...reminded me of the Lord of the Rings
for some reason.

View from MBC facing east towards Fishtail

Aaand facing west towards Annapurna South

Big 'ol rock perched on the moraine

Pretending to fall to my death

We made it!

Annapurna South

Fishtail in the clouds. It was gone when I got done peeing...

Tracy doing his business 

Moonset over Hium Chuli

Halfway up the hill on our second day at ABC

 

The Beast, Annapurna 1

And again 

South again

Left to right, our two porters, Tracy, me, Milan

Incredible expanding clouds on our last night, though
they don't make much of a picture 

Five Days in Dimik

Peace Corps volunteers Nick, Chad and Tia

I’m writing from Pokhara, back for the third time. Each stay gets shorter – this one is only 2 nights until Uncle Tracy gets here and we start trekking. The town has lost its novelty but the coffee is still good. The last five days I spent in Alex’s village, Dimik, four hours by bus southwest of Pokhara and the days melted away as fast as the days in Darjeeling and Delhi.

Briefly, Alex and I met this summer in Winthrop when I made her iced lattes at the bakery but didn’t talk until her sister told me she had left for the Peace Corps in Nepal. I found her on Facebook and we’ve kept each other company since, both being volunteers alone on the Indian subcontinent. The day before I was meant to go to her village, her Nepali sister said the house was too crowded and I couldn’t come for a few days. I could not mask the terror I felt at having to wait another WEEK in Pokhara so thankfully Alex convinced her sister to let me come.

Feeding time!

We had a relatively comfy bus ride to the nearest town, Galyang, ate some chow mien and walked with her sister back to their village. Most of the men work in the Middle East as drivers or in hotels on two year shifts with two month breaks so the village of Dimik is mostly women, children and toothless men. It’s interesting to me because nobody in Pamohi left the country to work and almost every student had a mother and father at home. Alex guessed that her family’s income was $6,000 per year, 2-5 times more than families in Pamohi made, but of course the children grow up without fathers…just an interesting contrast that gave Alex and me something else to talk about.

Baby Bisey

Another topic was the institution of marriage. In Dimik, all marriages are arranged. Alex’s sister’s husband saw her on the street in Galyang and “liked what he saw...” and that’s how it works. The married women move into their husbands’ houses but the husbands are gone for years at a time so often several wives live together with their children and mother-in-law. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around, just as the mythical love-marriage is for Nepalis. I’m always surprised at how similar people in India and Nepal are to people at home – friendships between men and between women are essentially the same but marriage is simply a fundamentally different concept.

My second and fourth nights there we had massive thunder storms that lasted for hours, poured rain and hail the size of marbles and cracked lightening like flashbulbs in a stadium. It was an impressive show and a preview of what monsoon season is like. Luckily I was inside watching movies. It did, however, send all the silver dollar-sized jungle spiders scurrying inside. The outhouse had a resident makura that we named Richard “Ricardo” Nixon. I needed to know where he was every time I used the toilet so when nature called Alex and I would say we were checking on Ricardo. Ricardo was fine – he stayed on the wall – but his friends and kin made life exciting when they appeared unexpectedly. When one crawled next to me while we were eating, Alex thought my quick reaction and the aaahhhhHHHHHH noise I made meant I had either shit my pants or was about to vomit. I smacked the spider mostly dead and Alex’s sister’s husband scooped up the still wriggling body in his hand and threw it into the storm.

Kin of Richard Nixon, aka Ricardo

Every morning we got up at 7 for tea, then spent a relaxing few hours talking and waiting for breakfast. No one really spoke English so I was totally reliant on Alex to translate for me. People knew she spoke Nepali and thus assumed I did as well so many times I looked over helplessly at Alex and said “They’re talking to me!” The day began after breakfast. One day we went to a training for new mothers at the health center. The next day Alex and I hiked up to a peaceful hilltop mandir and she explained the boundaries of her district and where she went for meetings. The next day we walked to another village with Alex’s sister. A few hours later while we were waiting for her, I entertained the village kids with Inception noises. That night Alex’s sister’s husband came home for the first time in two years though you wouldn’t know it from the subdued reception he got. The day after that we spent building castles in the river sand. We didn’t do a ton because everything is spread out up or down a hill but the days always felt productive.

I learned about the Peace Corps experience in Nepal. I got some perspective on my experience with village life and made friends with a wonderful family, and I got a friendly face to talk with hours a day.

The beautiful home where I lived for 5 days

 p.s. For those concerned about the health and whereabouts of Dave, he Skyped me from work in London. He's fine. We must have just missed each other walking about town. We're DEFINITELY coming back here.