"Some people will tell me I'm crazy, and I tell them that's the only thing that keeps me sane."
Somewhere in eastern Nepal... it was well after 8pm when the bus finally stopped. For the last 12 plus hours that we'd been bouncing along terrible dirt tracks of roads and twisting in-and-out of hairpin turns, I'd thought that I couldn't wait for us to arrive. But now as I looked out into the darkness at this strange (and seemingly deserted) little town, I started to think we might have been better off before. A guy on top of the bus grunted a little as he struggled to lift each of our backpacks, and slide them over the side into our waiting arms. Mine landed with a thud and almost knocked the wind outta me as I caught it. And then our bus turned around and drove off... leaving us standing there in the night. This was the moment I started to wonder if I had lost my mind.
We were in Shivalaya. And we chose to stop here because, well, it's literally as far as you can travel on a bus before the road disintegrates into a yak trail. For me, the trip had already been long... from Cambodia 16 hours on a bus, then 24 more in airports. My one afternoon in Kathmandu was a blur of running around and stocking-up on last minute cold weather supplies and then cramming it all (plus a mountain of granola bars) into my backpack. Sometime after midnight I stretched out on the living room floor and went to sleep. The next day we were up early for another mind-numbing day on a bus... fallen trees in our way, motion-sick passengers, chasing the bus down the road because we thought we were being left behind... now all I cared about was a soft place to close my eyes. Happily, along the trails here a guesthouse and gluttonous portions of Dhal Bhat are never very far away.
The next morning shortly after dawn I splashed some icy water on my face, wriggled into my pack, and started walking up a hill. And that's pretty much what we would do every day for the next three weeks...
The five of us crossing one of the mountain passes between Shivalaya and Namche Bazzar
Up mountains and down mountains...
Down, down to cross a pretty green river or high suspension bridge... and then back up UP a mountain again.
The days were defined, not by the distance we had walked, but how many vertical meters we would rise and fall. Up and down, up and down, up and... One guy we met on the trail said this kind of trekking is called "sewing". One of my favorite quotes from this part of the trail: "Downhill makes me grumpy; uphill makes me cry." True story.
It was so great to be out of the city and surrounded by simple country life. Another day plowing the potato fields in your favorite red saree. Most guesthouses where we stayed didn't provide lavish eccentricities like toilets or showers, but they weren't without their own particular kind of charm.
cute.
curious.
false advertising!
(but they did have yak cheese)
Back in NY these Rhododendrons would, at best, be modest shrubs in someone's garden. But here they're entire forests exploding in blooms of pink and white or red. The animals we saw didn't seem too bothered by having people around. This blue bird was AMAZING to see! They told us it's a kind of Himalayan Pheasant.
On and on we walked... slowly climbing in altitude. Past the famed Namche Bazzar and other places I'd always read about in old mountaineering stories... following the footsteps of those who've ventured up Everest before. After about a week on the trail we were high enough where trees would no longer grow and unbelievable panoramas of giant mountains started to appear.
Can you see us walking, way down there in the right corner?
Most of the trekkers who come here use porters, but we carried our own stuff.
Our packs felt heavy, but it was nothing compared to what Sherpas carry. They say a typical load for them weighs about 90 kg, or almost 200lbs! Although some will carry even more- and that in extreme altitude and over dizzingly steep terrain. Check out the size of those baskets they're hauling- they support all that weight with only a forehead strap! Incredible!
What a place!
Maybe it'd been the drastic change from the suffocating heat and humidity of Cambodia- to this freeze-dried icebox? Maybe it'd been those first long days with little sleep? Maybe just a lousy coincidence? Who knows? But for whatever reason, the second day of our hike I started to get sick.. and sicker... and wouldn't eventually feel better until I was back home being treated for pneumonia. As we climbed past 4,500 meters, it became harder and harder to breathe, and I was feeling increasingly miserable. But... we walked on. Happily I had some pretty amazing views to keep me distracted. This golden mountain is Ama Dablam. Maybe you've heard of it?
By now it'd been nearly 2 weeks since we'd seen the last paved road. The only way in or out was either on our feet, or by helicopter. Although, I did see one hand-painted sign offering horse rental for a mere $400 USD a day...
Once you get high enough, nothing can grow anymore and it starts to feel like you're on another planet. Look down and all you can see are rocks, sand, and ice. Squint up into the thin air, and sunlight pounds through a blindingly blue sky. And of course the mountains. Everywhere you look are the mountains; whitest white and impossibly huge.
Standing in these places, you can't help but feel small.
Only a few times we got snowed on.
AMA DABLAM WITH SNOW AND TOILET
And I call this one "YAKS IN THE MIST". And, Yes, he's wearing an earing!
Our first real destination was Island Peak. On the left 7873m (25,830 ft) Nuptse is glowing in fresh powder. Island Peak, on the right (at just over 20,000ft), looks like a little baby mountain by comparison. But not so. At 20,000ft the oxygen is only around 50% of what it is at sea level.
Near the base of Island...
These photos can't even really begin to convey the scale of these mountains. Waaaay down on the glacier below, I watched a Sherpa walking in search of small pools of fresh water. I tried to follow him with my eyes, but even with the highest zoom of the telephoto lens, he was soon out of sight. What looks like gravel on the surface of the ice, is actually a carpet of boulders. And the man walking there was just swallowed up in their shadows.
Island Peak base camp
A million pounds of glacier spilling over the side of Island Peak. It's a massive frozen waterfall
From here we continued west to Everest. Walking and walking... Up here I really started to feel the thin air. Even the smallest hills felt like giants. Looking back now, it seems funny to have felt so tired... but at the time I sure wasn't laughing.
In my mind I'd sing to pass the time. "...and if your glass heart should crack, and for a second you turn back, Oh no, be strong. Walk on, Walk on..." and sometimes take a few liberties with the lyrics "Coughing, wheezing, totally freezing, Oh no! Walk on..."
"I have walked 500 miles, and I must walk five hundred more......." (how many songs about walking do you know? :) Eventually we arrived at Everest Base Camp; colorful clusters of tents snuggled-up against the edge of a glacier at 5356m, or 17,570 ft.
It was incredibly beautiful there, but surprisingly Mount Everest isn't visible from here. The summit is still 6 miles (and many days) away and it's surrounded by other high peaks. The photo below is the view from EBC. To the left, you can see part of the infamous Khumbu Icefall which marks the beginning of the climb to the summit of the world's highest mountain.
On the glacier wind and sun have sculpted some of the ice into huge pinnacles.
cracks in the ice
To get a better look at Everest, the next morning we peeled ourselves out of our sleeping bags at 3:30am and started walking up a modest hill called Kala Patthar. Maybe if it were in New York, it'd be impressive enough to be called a mountain. In Cambodia it'd be colossal. But in the Himalayas this was barely a bump in the landscape. Even so, at 5545 meters (18,200ft) for me it was high enough to make an impression.
I jumped around for hours to keep from freezing while trying to catch the perfect sunrise picture. The black mountain behind the ridge... that's the one. Everest!
It was beautiful there, but sooo cold! On the walk up, my water bottle turned to frozen slush in my hands. I wore 5 shirts, 3 pairs of pants, an enormous orange puffy- and was still freezing. Ha! I guess I've definitely turned into a tropical kinda girl!
Everest
.
...and some of it's friends. Slopes so steep they can't hold the snow.
And just like that, 3 weeks had flown by. All our clothes were filthy and most of our granola bar reserves had been depleted. It was time to go home. Instead of walking all the way back, we'd opted to hike a few days to Namche, and then Lukla, where there's a small airstrip.
Turns out, it's one of the shortest commercial runways in the world, and also one of the most dangerous. The airport has one dollhouse-sized airstrip perched on the edge of a relatively steep little hill. As our flight took off, the pilot raced our 21-seater plane down the hill full throttle.... I felt the wheels lift off pavement literally inches before the runaway dropped off into the river, thousands of feet below... And all the trails that had taken us 8 days to cover on foot, we passed by in only 30 minutes. It was, like so many things, all about perspective.
