Back in Kathmandu, Nepal
Yes, I've had 3 cups of coffee and they have been SPECTACULAR! After a month and a half of tea and more tea (and more tea, and some more tea, and yes, even more tea, and oh, yes, tea please, and even a few "What? $16.00 for a pot of tea? I'll stick with my cold, Steri-penned liquid germs for now.") - so after swimming in tea for 6 weeks I succumbed to the call of the coffee. I'll admit I was skeptical - the only coffee I'd had since leaving the States was on Dragonair from Dhaka, Bangladesh to Kathmandu - it did not resemble coffee in the slightest and was so bizarre tasting (euphemism for putrid) that even if I was dying of thirst in the Sahara and came upon a lake of this coffee, I'd drink the sand instead (and not because I didn't know the difference - anyone remember that line from The American President - one of the best, understated, cutting remarks about our fine citizenry in moviedom - but I digress...). Anyway - so in Lukla (the little place with the tiny airstrip) - last day of our trek, there is a "Starbucks" - not a "real" one, but it looks pretty darned good (early in our trekking, when we were fresh faced and energetic, we swore we'd never go to such a "Western" place, but months go by, priorities change...) - the Starbucks logo, designed by the owner - it's Ama Dablam with stars overhead (rather than that Starbuck person) - it's stunning! And the coffee - WOW - let's just say, after all that hiking and tea drinking and yak dodging and too little air to breathe - it was absolutely PERFECT! Sometimes you just need some decadence!
So, enough about coffee! Yes, here we are, back in Kathmandu. Since we were last here in mid-October, Kathmandu has gotten colder, calmer, and cryptically less crowded. Okay, maybe just colder. As for the rest, I think we've just gotten used to the chaos, though I probably still say "Watch out!" about 40 times an hour to Raiona and Marc as we walk the narrow streets full of honking cars, zooming and beeping motorcycles, ding-a-linging bicycle rickshaws, people and more people. Definitely less tourists than in October. Marc regularly gets asked if he wants to buy hashish (and this is after shaving and cleaning up, too!). We are targeted by every shopkeeper wanting to sell to the few tourists (one guy followed us, shouting prices which kept falling like a torrent over a cliff, his price dropping about 10 fold because "you're the only tourists here!" - it worked, we bought).
It's been a bizarre week here, because the day after we flew in, there was a total strike (called by the Maoists, the Communist Party of Nepal who have disrupted things quite a bit in the past, violence notwithstanding - we met several trekkers who were stopped by Maoists collecting "donations." Thankfully, we had no such encounters...) - so the strike - no vehicles running, no shops open - nothing. We went out walking - easy to do because you didn't have to didge all the traffic - there were lots of people (Nepalis) out, but not a single vehicle anywhere. (Westerners who had to get to the airport were taken on a government supplied bus.) There was supposed to be another strike yesterday and today, but they postponed it due to public protest and the fact that yesterday was an auspicious day for weddings!
Today we walked up to the famous "Monkey Temple" (Swayambhu Nath Stupa). It's on a hill so you get a big view of the surrounding area, but there is so much pollution you can hardly see any distance at all. Crossing a river on the way, so much garbage it's unbelievable - truly sickening and disheartening - on the other hand, we passed people carving intricate designs in stone, a man pounding out beautiful brass bowls, women stringing bright orange flower leis, we've seen amazingly ornate beaded and embroidered fabrics, intricate paintings that take 14, 20, 25 days of painstaking work, golden painted statues and intricately carved building fascias - it's bizarre to have such beauty in some respects, and such utter degredation and filth in other respects - I don't know how people reconcile these things.
So, here's some details from the last week or so:
Hydro at Cheplung - So, 2nd to last day of hiking (Dec. 3), it's getting late and we're looking for a lodge - everything's CLOSED! (end of trekking season), so we keep going and going, and we're tired, it's close to dark, it's getting later and colder, and some of us may be getting just a bit crabby, and when are we ever going to find a place to stay (on the way in this section was a parade of trekkers, now there's nobody but us!). Finally - a lodge! Open? No - but her sister's lodge is, just 5 minutes up the trail. She has this guy accompany us there - he offers to take my pack but I have him take Raina's - and we ZOOM up the trail - this guy is going fast - we're smack in the middle of a yak train and he's jumping up on the side of the trail, speeding past these 2000 pound beasts who don't even know you exist, but we have to keep up with Raina's pack (Marc's not so lucky and gets stuck way behind the herd). Finally ahead of the yaks - where is that lodge? Finally there, and we learn the name of our helper (Ang Dawa) and learn that he is a cook for this lodge. We are the only guests, there are no lights, it's COLD, the toilet is way outside (so in the middle of the night I have to go downstairs, through the dining area where someone is sleeping, through the kitchen where someone is sleeping, unbar the door, through the gate, around back. Whew!) - BUT, we have a place to sleep, we have TEA (of course) and incredibly good dal bhat for dinner, and the family is incredibly NICE! AND the man really wants to show us their hydroelectric plant! (Who can resist?) So next morning we follow the guy down, down, and down some more, almost running along a rocky, muddy, steep path through the forest, till finally we come to a small stone building, about 6X6 feet, with a DANGER (in Nepali) sign on the door. Inside was a wheel in a shroud (6" wheel maybe?), a pulley to an induction motor/generator, wires going out of the building nailed to trees. And that's about it!
It makes 2 Kw (yes, you Utility nerds, that's TWO kilowatts - and more info for you Utility wanna-bes - the head pressure was just 20 PSI. Has a 5" penstock.) It serves 54 homes/lodges (that's roughly 200-250 people - so that's, like, 7 watts per person). It provides one or two lightbulbs (compact flourescents) per customer. People pay 200 rupees (a little under $3.00) per light bulb per month. The load shed happens because below a certain voltage the lightbulbs dono't work, so if there's too much load - the lightbulbs go out (thus shedding load) and the voltage goes back up.
That's probably more than most of you cared to know - but hey, it was really quite exciting (including the trail down to it), so we really felt we lucked into a fantastic situation!
Flying out of Lukla - Dec. 5. So, the airstrip at Lukla - fist of all, there are police (in riot gear) ALL over the place - we learn that the prime minister and cabinet had a meeting at Everest Base Camp (on global warming in the Himalayas) the day before, so now the police were ending their "field trip" to Lukla by taking group pictures in all their gear - there were still a lot of media around - they even interviewed Marc for the TV news! We did a lot of waiting around wondering when it would be our turn to get into one of the little 14 seat planes that kept flying in, spewing luggage and passengers, inhaling the next bunch, and zooming out again. Finally our turn - I'm in the from seat looking right into the cockpit (as the guy outside the plane is offwering the pilos tea and cookies through the window). Take-off - the runway is quite shore, so the planes turn at the very ultimate end of the strip, put on the brakes, rev up the engines (the little plane had propellers, just like the ones we put on the bus at Holden for our Easter flight to Bali/Koinonia last year), let go the brakes, blast down the 12-degree slope of the runway, take off, veer left before hitting the mountainside just ahead! "Adventure, Tyler!" (See the movie Never Cry Wolf for an explanation of that comment.) We flew quite low over the entire route that it took us 12 days of hiking and a 10-hour bus ride from Kathmandu - we could even see some of the lodges we'd stayed at! Circled Kathmandu a number of times, and were soon having tea (what else?) and snacks on the terrace of our Thamel hotel!
Power - the power in our area of Kathmandu goes off every night for several hours, and sometimes in the morning too. I think they need some consultations with Holden Utilities!
Eating - Dec. 7. So we have been eating our way through Kathmandu. Let's see, today we had breakfast at our hotel (eggs, toast, fried potatoes, tea), then bought 2 cinnamon rolls at a bakery (ate them), then bought samosas and doughnut things on the streets (5 samosa, 5 doughnuts, ate them), then had lunch at a momo (dumpling) place. Then we bought a loaf of bread and a giant nut cookie tart thing (ate them). Then had dinner at a vegetarian Indian restaurant. Then bought half-priced (after 8 p.m.) bakery goodies (2 pretzels, a cinnamon bun, ate them). So I think we are finally getting fillled up! Bilbo would be proud!
Philip's orphanage - Dec. 8. Some of you may remember Philip who volunteered at Holden in the summer of 2006 and again for a short time in 2007. He runs an orphanage in Kathmandu, so we had the chance to visit! Just getting there was quite the adventure - Philip says there are no traffic rules - then amends it to say there are, but only on paper. Took about 40 minutes in a taxi to go 4 kilometers. Anyway, we met a number of the kids - all in their blue school uniforms. Philip's mom served us the best dal bhat we've had in Nepal. Philip is doing such a good thing for these children - saving their lives really. He also had a number of copies of Holden's Fall Newsletter, so he gave us one. As we were looking through it, we found both Raina's and my picture in the paper (Raina in the Shakespeare play, me hiking across the avalanche debris). It was such a weird, but exciting connection, looking at the Holden newsletter, seeing our pictures, while hanging out at Philip's orphanage house in Kathmandu! They were all so very gracious. We feel lucky to have been able to visit.
So TOMORROW - we fly to Bangkok, Thailand! Last night here in Kathmandu! It's been quite a trip, hard to believe all that has happened. And now on to the tropics, and fresh fruit and vegetables!
My time is up (as usual) on this computer. I'll try to proofread this later, but for now, please excuse the mistakes. We'll be volunteering at the elephant sanctuary in Northern Thailand from December 14 - 27. So if I don't get back on the computer before then, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!! I think we'll decorate an elephant on Christmas Eve!
Anyway, many thanks for all of you who read this. It really makes us feel connected! Feel free to leave comments. I read them all! Thanks for being our extended community. We miss you!
Much love from us!
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
The Mountains Go Ever On and On...
Namche, elev. 11,300 ft.
So, WOW, these mountains: Everest, Ama Dablam, Cholatse, Pumori, Lhotse, Nuptse, Cho Oyu (affectionately known - by us - as Cho YoYoYo), Makalu... I love these names - expecially Cho YoYoYo - say it 10 times fast!
So, yes, these mountains - sheer, immense, icy, wind blasted, pure, ancient, breathtaking (literally).
At one point, standing at the base of Lhotse, the sheer south face, 10,000 feet straight up, wind careening over and along it in a distant, constant ROAR - it was a sound I couldn't fathom, more of a sense than a sound, suffusing time and space with an otherworldliness, especially since where we were standing was not especially windy. But this ROAR... Anyone ever see that TV show "Roar"? About some Celtic legend where the "ROAR" was basically the heartbeat of the universe - well, I think we've been living, breathing, hearing, feleling that roar. And it's made us stronger, and I hope, wiser (not to mention somewhat skinnier and tired!).
So now we've made it back to Namche, in the "lowlands" at 11,300 ft (amazing how your perspective changes) where the air is THICK, the yaks are STILL good looking, and our appetites are way above average. It seems a little surreal, now, that we've been hiking around these mountains for a month and a half, that we've been living the last four weeks at elevations between 14,000 and 18,500 ft (I think the altitude's addled our brains). We look up-valley, at the sculpted perfect profile of Ama Dablam in the distance, and it's almost dreamlike to realize we've been to its base and all the way around the other side, to the base of Everest, and up and up into the thin air, so many miles and meters and days from here.
But now, with just two more days of hiking left (then we FLY back to Kathmandeu from the tiny Lukla airstrip that slopes downhill at an angle of 12 degrees - don't worry Mom and Dad, it will be MUCH SAFER than a repeat of that bus ride we had at the start of the trip) - now at the end of our trek, we are, how should I put it? TIRED? Yes! Hungry? Yes! (We could eat a yak - except that we're vegetarians and we would NEVER eat one of those cute furry guys!) Ready for the tropics? Yes! (Beaches that aren't frozen!) Grateful? Yes! Planning to eat our way through Kathmandu? Yes! (Breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, luncheon, afternoon tea, supper, and dinner, with snacks in between - trying to get our Hobbit habits back!) Anyway, I could go on and on with what we are...suffice it to say - healthy happy Hobbits heading homeward (which I guess is toward Kathmandu at the moment...)
We've seen incredible sights, had amazing experiences, hiked to sacred lakes and up high mountains, met friendly people, had no showers for 6 weeks (and STILL the people are friendly), started buying food specifically for caloric content (though I balk at eating chunks of yak butter), breathed a lot of yak dung smoke (we can smell a yak dung fire a mile away - wait a minute, maybe it's that our clothes have been steeped in it for weeks), caught the stomach bug, got over the stomach bug (thank you antibiotics!), seen Himalayan tahr (goats), snowcocks (huge high altitude grouse-like birds that seem to like to chase each other around for no apparent reason), one Himalayan pika (!), hiked and hiked some more, and lived in the land of VERTICAL.
Here's a few details, comments, useless trivia, etc. in no particular order:
Itinerary - For those of you interested in such things, get out your map and follow the bouncing ball... We started out 43 days ago (or so) in Shivalaya - hiked 12 days to Lukla (where the little airstrip is) - you can read details in the last blog. Then on up the Imja Khola, through Namche, Tengboche, Dingboche, to spend a week at Chhukung (15,600 ft elevation), hiking up Chhukung Ri (3X), and to Island Peak Base Camp (2X), and various people getting sick for a few days. Then on up the Khumbu Khola to Gorak Shep (elev 17,000 ft) for 4 days of hiking to Everest Base Camp and up Kala Pathar (2X, elev 18,500 ft). Then backk down and down some more and around to Phortse and up the Gokyo Valley to Gokyo (15,700 ft) and the sacred lakes and the Renjo La (Pass). The down, down, down.
Snow - "Yak bells ring, are you listening, on the trail, snow is glistening, a beautiful sigtht, we're stranded tonight, sitting in this Himalayan hut... later on we'll play Yahtzee, as we dream of Starbucks Coffee...." We've had spectacular weather, sunny but very very cold, clear sparkling skies, clouds settling daily in the valleys below, and when there were no valleys below (i.e. we're up in the ether), crystalline landscapes reflecting intense sun with no heat, tinkling sounds of ice, squeaky dry snow. We did have snowfall on several occasions. In Lobuche (elev 16,250 ft) on November 17, we awoke to 3 inches on the ground and more falling. Actually, it wasn't so much falling as blasting horizontally, flattening tents and anything else not riveted to the ground (except yaks, who didn't seem to notice anything unusual). Being the intrepid explorers that we are (!), we decided to take a 20-minute hike up-valley to the "Italian Pyramid," a high altitude research station (at 16,650 ft) staffed year round. We were milling about outside in the blizzard when one of the technicians invited us in and showed us all around. It was facinating, a big glass pyramid all run on solar (12 Kw for you Utility folks!) where they study and gather data on weather, climate, glaciers, high altitude effects on humans, and more. Then we skedaddled back down the slippery slope to the tearoom of our lodge, sipped hot chocolate, and sang Christmas songs (like the one at the beginning of this section). Every time the wind gusted, it blew a fine dusting of powdery snow through the walls onto our heads and our Yahtzee game!
Yaks - These guys have got to be some of the cutest, and largest (they must weigh a ton each) animals on earth. We realize that what we saw on the first part of the trek, lower down, were not yaks, but dzos and dsopkyos (crossbreeds between cows and yaks). Anyway. The yaks are incredibly furry (hair down to their knees, fuzzy long tail), they all wear a bell around their necks (which you can hear for miles - a very pleasant sound as it means you'll soon be seeing these cute creatures) - many have "earrings" - red wool tassels, and sometiomes a pink ribbon in their tails. So - incredibly cute, incredibly huge, with large sharp horns. And they seem so docile. They just pad up and down and up and down with all these loads, even up and down the 45-degree stairs of Cirith Ungol! They could easily have a yak uprising and take over the portering business, make their milions, and retire to the beraches of Thailand. Though they'd probably prefer the beaches of Iceland!
Mt. Wanahockalugi must be the patron saint of the Himalaya. If you understood that comment (see "Finding Nemo"?)...it's a wonder that everyone's not sick everywhere because there's so much hacking and coughing and spitting - and very little attention to where these hacks and coughs go. Also, lots of people with all sorts of bugs and stomach/intestinal ills, throwing up everywhere. Pleasant huh? No bed bugs though! Too cold! And while we're on the subject of "yuck," Raina discovered the most disgusting toilet on THE FACE OF THE EARTH at the Sagaarmatha Visitor Center (just outside Namche), a dilapidated place but interesting (and dilapidated) displays. NO details to follow.
Housing - Here's the way it works in a lodge (tea-house). You get a room, generally plywood walls, ceiling, floor, with cracks to see into the next room and to let the frest night air in, beds usually a piece of foam on top of boards. Some lodges higher up provide fuzzy quilts (with cute cartoon characters on them) of varying degees of cleanliness (you carry your own sleeping bag). Bathroom is usually a Nepali toilet (squat over a hole) also of varying degrees of cleanliness. Usually NO sink or place to wash hands or brush teeth (where would we be without good old Purell?!). Then there is the tea-room - benches around the outside covered with Tibetan carpets, low tables in front of the benches, very beautiful in some lodges - where you spend most of your time because it gets the sun in the afternoon, and they build a fire in the stove for the few hours around dinnertime (of course, this does not mean that it stays lit). You are required to eat in your lodge's tea-room (it's not cheap - that's where they make their money). The menus look extensive, but you realize quickly enough that they are all variations of a few ingredients - potatoes, noodles, rice. In the smaller lodges, you may be eating in the family's kitchen, next to the fire. We ate dal bhat (rice and a thin lentil soup that you pour over it, with curried vegies) for much of the trip, but the higher we got, the worse and less plentiful (per plate)it became, so we've been trying everything on the menu - fried potatoes with yak cheese, fried noodles with yak cheese, fried rice with yak cheese - you get the idea. We have dinner, play a few games of Yahtzee, or re-read our 3 books that we've already read several times each - Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiesen, and Lost Horizon, then hit the sleeping bags around 7:30 or 8 (when the yak dung fire goes out) for a good 11 hours or so! We, who are night owls, can only dream of one day STAYING UP LATE again!!
Everest Base Camp. November 20. 17,600 ft. Yea Everest Base Camp! We made it! AND we had it all to ourselves!! AND the weather was SPECTACULAR! Sunny and calm! (There is so much icy wind up here.) Truly truly amazing. The Khumbu glacier is just astounding - like a frozen ocean of whipped up waves, hundreds of feet high. You walk across it and mostly you're on rocks, but suddenly - solid glassy ice - you want to look through it into the depths of the glacier ("through the looking glass") - ice cliffs and ice sculptures - massive amounts of broken ice, pinnacles of smooth translucent ice with boulders balancing on top - the whole of it flowing down the huge valley as far as you can see. And the Khumbu Icefall - again, incredible - snaking its way up the Western Cwm (pronounded "koom"), trying to imagine climbers gingerly crawling up that way as Jon Krakauer describes - as we walked through the glacier among the debris of climbers (a group had just pulled out that day leaving behind a pile of rotten cucumbers and green peppers which the birds were enjoying, and a full toilet thing, which nobody will ever enjoy), there were flat spots for tents and wind breaks and many many prayer shrines with tattered prayer flags flapping in the breeze - as we walked through the glacier, you could hear falling rocks, running water, cracking, groaning ice, thundering avalanches from across the way. We celebrated by eating a giant chocolate bar carried all the way from Holden Village! The next day we hiked (I should say crawled) our way up Kala Pathar (18,500 ft) for stupendous views of Everest, Lhotse, Nuptse, and all those other mountains.
Thanksgiving - We hiked into Gokyo (15,700 ft) on this day. It is situated in a beautiful spot on an emerald lake, with a view up valley to Cho Oyu (I mean Cho YoYoYo). We stayed in a small lodge right on the lakeshore. After meeting only 2 other Americans in the past 5 weeks, we ran into three American couples that night at the lodge (all independent trekkers), even a couple from Seattle! So it was good to yak away in English to English speakers for a change! And we treated ourselves to a Thanksgiving Feast - we shared a vegie thing in dough, some noodles with yak cheese, some fried dumpling things, and some tasteless boiled cabbage with a few sprigs of carrot. But the piece de resistance was the dessert we shared - a bowl of "rice pudding" - rice with hot milk - we dumped on lots of sugar, salt, and cinnamon for a pretty darned tasty treat!
Being the detail oriented guy that he is, Marc figured out our total hiking ascents and descents - SO - we hiked UP over 54,600 feet, and DOWN over 50,800 feet! Hey, with all that, how come we only ended up at Everest BASE camp?
Pheriche - On our way down from EBC (Everest Base Camp) we stayed in Pheriche for a couple of nights at the cleanest, nicest lodge we've seen. The rooms were the typical boxes - but we felt we were in total luxury because there was a SINK available for washing hands, a mirror in the room (YIKES!), the first toilet clean enough to sit on (or that you COULD sit on) in a month. There were HOOKS on the wall, the light worked. AND they had a "library" of books donated by trekkers. Raina buried her nose in the 7th Harry Potter. Pheriche is also where the Himalayan Rescue Association runs a clinic. They do AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) talks every day for trekkers. They have volunteer doctors and they provide services for both trekkers and locals. AMS is a big problem up here. Thankfully, we went very slowly and acclimatized well, so never even got a headache! Living at high altitude, though, is hard on your body - colds and coughs don'ot go away - just breathing is a chore...
Pringles are everywhere. As is Coke and Everest Beer (for $4.50 a can). We did try the Everest beer in Kathmandu when our hotel owner gave us a bottle fort the festival Diwali - it was putrid but Marc dutifully drank it. We may try a can when we bet back, just to see if it varies from bottle to bottle.
We carried what amounted to weekend overnight packs (though sometimes they felt much heavier that that). Though we didn't have to carry food (except snacks), we had sleeping bags, lots of warm clothes, a humungo medical/fist aid kit, books, notebooks, steri pen (water purification), back-up water purification, extra batteries, solar charger, emergency equipment, cameras, toiletries.
The local seem to like that we're a family traveling together. They also seem to like that Raina and I wear skirts (with legging underneath for warmth) - one day, chatting with 2 young army/police guys who were standing by the trail - they liked practicing their English - they liked our skirts - said it was "like Nepali girls" - they though we'd bought them in Kathmandu and were impressed that we could buy such things in the States. One of them also asked Marc if Raina was married, and he couldn't believe she wasn't yet!
Ice, ice, ice. Ice is everywhere - huge caps of it on the mountains, valleys full of glacial ice, ice waterfalls even low down.
The following is the opinion of the author and does not reflect the management - Here, there are basically two types of trekkers - the independent trekkers, like us, and those who either go in a guided group or those who hire their own guides/porters. We have found by far that the friendliest, most environmentally minded, most culturally minded, have been the independent trekkers. The groups and those who come in with their retinue of servants generally ignore us independents. It's a whole weird scene - they have a lot of money (much of which goes to the middle men in Kathmandu rather than the locals) and there is a definite caste system. The Westerner is treated as a rich demi-god, but also as a poor, imbecilic, physically and mentally inept creature that needs to be coddled and catered to every step of the way ( in fact, many in groups ignore the signs of AMS and keep going higher until they keel over). Ah, judgements, judgements. We're full of them. Happy to discuss these opinions and any others with you anytime!!!
Well, my fingers are frozen and hitting lots and lots of wrong keys. Not sure I'll have time for proofreading (again) so please excuse the mess! We've so many stories and ideas and opinions that it's hard to give an accurate picture of what's been happening. Hope you get a little idea of our trip. Hope you are all enjoying yourselves too! Bye for now. Lot of love from us!
So, WOW, these mountains: Everest, Ama Dablam, Cholatse, Pumori, Lhotse, Nuptse, Cho Oyu (affectionately known - by us - as Cho YoYoYo), Makalu... I love these names - expecially Cho YoYoYo - say it 10 times fast!
So, yes, these mountains - sheer, immense, icy, wind blasted, pure, ancient, breathtaking (literally).
At one point, standing at the base of Lhotse, the sheer south face, 10,000 feet straight up, wind careening over and along it in a distant, constant ROAR - it was a sound I couldn't fathom, more of a sense than a sound, suffusing time and space with an otherworldliness, especially since where we were standing was not especially windy. But this ROAR... Anyone ever see that TV show "Roar"? About some Celtic legend where the "ROAR" was basically the heartbeat of the universe - well, I think we've been living, breathing, hearing, feleling that roar. And it's made us stronger, and I hope, wiser (not to mention somewhat skinnier and tired!).
So now we've made it back to Namche, in the "lowlands" at 11,300 ft (amazing how your perspective changes) where the air is THICK, the yaks are STILL good looking, and our appetites are way above average. It seems a little surreal, now, that we've been hiking around these mountains for a month and a half, that we've been living the last four weeks at elevations between 14,000 and 18,500 ft (I think the altitude's addled our brains). We look up-valley, at the sculpted perfect profile of Ama Dablam in the distance, and it's almost dreamlike to realize we've been to its base and all the way around the other side, to the base of Everest, and up and up into the thin air, so many miles and meters and days from here.
But now, with just two more days of hiking left (then we FLY back to Kathmandeu from the tiny Lukla airstrip that slopes downhill at an angle of 12 degrees - don't worry Mom and Dad, it will be MUCH SAFER than a repeat of that bus ride we had at the start of the trip) - now at the end of our trek, we are, how should I put it? TIRED? Yes! Hungry? Yes! (We could eat a yak - except that we're vegetarians and we would NEVER eat one of those cute furry guys!) Ready for the tropics? Yes! (Beaches that aren't frozen!) Grateful? Yes! Planning to eat our way through Kathmandu? Yes! (Breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, luncheon, afternoon tea, supper, and dinner, with snacks in between - trying to get our Hobbit habits back!) Anyway, I could go on and on with what we are...suffice it to say - healthy happy Hobbits heading homeward (which I guess is toward Kathmandu at the moment...)
We've seen incredible sights, had amazing experiences, hiked to sacred lakes and up high mountains, met friendly people, had no showers for 6 weeks (and STILL the people are friendly), started buying food specifically for caloric content (though I balk at eating chunks of yak butter), breathed a lot of yak dung smoke (we can smell a yak dung fire a mile away - wait a minute, maybe it's that our clothes have been steeped in it for weeks), caught the stomach bug, got over the stomach bug (thank you antibiotics!), seen Himalayan tahr (goats), snowcocks (huge high altitude grouse-like birds that seem to like to chase each other around for no apparent reason), one Himalayan pika (!), hiked and hiked some more, and lived in the land of VERTICAL.
Here's a few details, comments, useless trivia, etc. in no particular order:
Itinerary - For those of you interested in such things, get out your map and follow the bouncing ball... We started out 43 days ago (or so) in Shivalaya - hiked 12 days to Lukla (where the little airstrip is) - you can read details in the last blog. Then on up the Imja Khola, through Namche, Tengboche, Dingboche, to spend a week at Chhukung (15,600 ft elevation), hiking up Chhukung Ri (3X), and to Island Peak Base Camp (2X), and various people getting sick for a few days. Then on up the Khumbu Khola to Gorak Shep (elev 17,000 ft) for 4 days of hiking to Everest Base Camp and up Kala Pathar (2X, elev 18,500 ft). Then backk down and down some more and around to Phortse and up the Gokyo Valley to Gokyo (15,700 ft) and the sacred lakes and the Renjo La (Pass). The down, down, down.
Snow - "Yak bells ring, are you listening, on the trail, snow is glistening, a beautiful sigtht, we're stranded tonight, sitting in this Himalayan hut... later on we'll play Yahtzee, as we dream of Starbucks Coffee...." We've had spectacular weather, sunny but very very cold, clear sparkling skies, clouds settling daily in the valleys below, and when there were no valleys below (i.e. we're up in the ether), crystalline landscapes reflecting intense sun with no heat, tinkling sounds of ice, squeaky dry snow. We did have snowfall on several occasions. In Lobuche (elev 16,250 ft) on November 17, we awoke to 3 inches on the ground and more falling. Actually, it wasn't so much falling as blasting horizontally, flattening tents and anything else not riveted to the ground (except yaks, who didn't seem to notice anything unusual). Being the intrepid explorers that we are (!), we decided to take a 20-minute hike up-valley to the "Italian Pyramid," a high altitude research station (at 16,650 ft) staffed year round. We were milling about outside in the blizzard when one of the technicians invited us in and showed us all around. It was facinating, a big glass pyramid all run on solar (12 Kw for you Utility folks!) where they study and gather data on weather, climate, glaciers, high altitude effects on humans, and more. Then we skedaddled back down the slippery slope to the tearoom of our lodge, sipped hot chocolate, and sang Christmas songs (like the one at the beginning of this section). Every time the wind gusted, it blew a fine dusting of powdery snow through the walls onto our heads and our Yahtzee game!
Yaks - These guys have got to be some of the cutest, and largest (they must weigh a ton each) animals on earth. We realize that what we saw on the first part of the trek, lower down, were not yaks, but dzos and dsopkyos (crossbreeds between cows and yaks). Anyway. The yaks are incredibly furry (hair down to their knees, fuzzy long tail), they all wear a bell around their necks (which you can hear for miles - a very pleasant sound as it means you'll soon be seeing these cute creatures) - many have "earrings" - red wool tassels, and sometiomes a pink ribbon in their tails. So - incredibly cute, incredibly huge, with large sharp horns. And they seem so docile. They just pad up and down and up and down with all these loads, even up and down the 45-degree stairs of Cirith Ungol! They could easily have a yak uprising and take over the portering business, make their milions, and retire to the beraches of Thailand. Though they'd probably prefer the beaches of Iceland!
Mt. Wanahockalugi must be the patron saint of the Himalaya. If you understood that comment (see "Finding Nemo"?)...it's a wonder that everyone's not sick everywhere because there's so much hacking and coughing and spitting - and very little attention to where these hacks and coughs go. Also, lots of people with all sorts of bugs and stomach/intestinal ills, throwing up everywhere. Pleasant huh? No bed bugs though! Too cold! And while we're on the subject of "yuck," Raina discovered the most disgusting toilet on THE FACE OF THE EARTH at the Sagaarmatha Visitor Center (just outside Namche), a dilapidated place but interesting (and dilapidated) displays. NO details to follow.
Housing - Here's the way it works in a lodge (tea-house). You get a room, generally plywood walls, ceiling, floor, with cracks to see into the next room and to let the frest night air in, beds usually a piece of foam on top of boards. Some lodges higher up provide fuzzy quilts (with cute cartoon characters on them) of varying degees of cleanliness (you carry your own sleeping bag). Bathroom is usually a Nepali toilet (squat over a hole) also of varying degrees of cleanliness. Usually NO sink or place to wash hands or brush teeth (where would we be without good old Purell?!). Then there is the tea-room - benches around the outside covered with Tibetan carpets, low tables in front of the benches, very beautiful in some lodges - where you spend most of your time because it gets the sun in the afternoon, and they build a fire in the stove for the few hours around dinnertime (of course, this does not mean that it stays lit). You are required to eat in your lodge's tea-room (it's not cheap - that's where they make their money). The menus look extensive, but you realize quickly enough that they are all variations of a few ingredients - potatoes, noodles, rice. In the smaller lodges, you may be eating in the family's kitchen, next to the fire. We ate dal bhat (rice and a thin lentil soup that you pour over it, with curried vegies) for much of the trip, but the higher we got, the worse and less plentiful (per plate)it became, so we've been trying everything on the menu - fried potatoes with yak cheese, fried noodles with yak cheese, fried rice with yak cheese - you get the idea. We have dinner, play a few games of Yahtzee, or re-read our 3 books that we've already read several times each - Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiesen, and Lost Horizon, then hit the sleeping bags around 7:30 or 8 (when the yak dung fire goes out) for a good 11 hours or so! We, who are night owls, can only dream of one day STAYING UP LATE again!!
Everest Base Camp. November 20. 17,600 ft. Yea Everest Base Camp! We made it! AND we had it all to ourselves!! AND the weather was SPECTACULAR! Sunny and calm! (There is so much icy wind up here.) Truly truly amazing. The Khumbu glacier is just astounding - like a frozen ocean of whipped up waves, hundreds of feet high. You walk across it and mostly you're on rocks, but suddenly - solid glassy ice - you want to look through it into the depths of the glacier ("through the looking glass") - ice cliffs and ice sculptures - massive amounts of broken ice, pinnacles of smooth translucent ice with boulders balancing on top - the whole of it flowing down the huge valley as far as you can see. And the Khumbu Icefall - again, incredible - snaking its way up the Western Cwm (pronounded "koom"), trying to imagine climbers gingerly crawling up that way as Jon Krakauer describes - as we walked through the glacier among the debris of climbers (a group had just pulled out that day leaving behind a pile of rotten cucumbers and green peppers which the birds were enjoying, and a full toilet thing, which nobody will ever enjoy), there were flat spots for tents and wind breaks and many many prayer shrines with tattered prayer flags flapping in the breeze - as we walked through the glacier, you could hear falling rocks, running water, cracking, groaning ice, thundering avalanches from across the way. We celebrated by eating a giant chocolate bar carried all the way from Holden Village! The next day we hiked (I should say crawled) our way up Kala Pathar (18,500 ft) for stupendous views of Everest, Lhotse, Nuptse, and all those other mountains.
Thanksgiving - We hiked into Gokyo (15,700 ft) on this day. It is situated in a beautiful spot on an emerald lake, with a view up valley to Cho Oyu (I mean Cho YoYoYo). We stayed in a small lodge right on the lakeshore. After meeting only 2 other Americans in the past 5 weeks, we ran into three American couples that night at the lodge (all independent trekkers), even a couple from Seattle! So it was good to yak away in English to English speakers for a change! And we treated ourselves to a Thanksgiving Feast - we shared a vegie thing in dough, some noodles with yak cheese, some fried dumpling things, and some tasteless boiled cabbage with a few sprigs of carrot. But the piece de resistance was the dessert we shared - a bowl of "rice pudding" - rice with hot milk - we dumped on lots of sugar, salt, and cinnamon for a pretty darned tasty treat!
Being the detail oriented guy that he is, Marc figured out our total hiking ascents and descents - SO - we hiked UP over 54,600 feet, and DOWN over 50,800 feet! Hey, with all that, how come we only ended up at Everest BASE camp?
Pheriche - On our way down from EBC (Everest Base Camp) we stayed in Pheriche for a couple of nights at the cleanest, nicest lodge we've seen. The rooms were the typical boxes - but we felt we were in total luxury because there was a SINK available for washing hands, a mirror in the room (YIKES!), the first toilet clean enough to sit on (or that you COULD sit on) in a month. There were HOOKS on the wall, the light worked. AND they had a "library" of books donated by trekkers. Raina buried her nose in the 7th Harry Potter. Pheriche is also where the Himalayan Rescue Association runs a clinic. They do AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) talks every day for trekkers. They have volunteer doctors and they provide services for both trekkers and locals. AMS is a big problem up here. Thankfully, we went very slowly and acclimatized well, so never even got a headache! Living at high altitude, though, is hard on your body - colds and coughs don'ot go away - just breathing is a chore...
Pringles are everywhere. As is Coke and Everest Beer (for $4.50 a can). We did try the Everest beer in Kathmandu when our hotel owner gave us a bottle fort the festival Diwali - it was putrid but Marc dutifully drank it. We may try a can when we bet back, just to see if it varies from bottle to bottle.
We carried what amounted to weekend overnight packs (though sometimes they felt much heavier that that). Though we didn't have to carry food (except snacks), we had sleeping bags, lots of warm clothes, a humungo medical/fist aid kit, books, notebooks, steri pen (water purification), back-up water purification, extra batteries, solar charger, emergency equipment, cameras, toiletries.
The local seem to like that we're a family traveling together. They also seem to like that Raina and I wear skirts (with legging underneath for warmth) - one day, chatting with 2 young army/police guys who were standing by the trail - they liked practicing their English - they liked our skirts - said it was "like Nepali girls" - they though we'd bought them in Kathmandu and were impressed that we could buy such things in the States. One of them also asked Marc if Raina was married, and he couldn't believe she wasn't yet!
Ice, ice, ice. Ice is everywhere - huge caps of it on the mountains, valleys full of glacial ice, ice waterfalls even low down.
The following is the opinion of the author and does not reflect the management - Here, there are basically two types of trekkers - the independent trekkers, like us, and those who either go in a guided group or those who hire their own guides/porters. We have found by far that the friendliest, most environmentally minded, most culturally minded, have been the independent trekkers. The groups and those who come in with their retinue of servants generally ignore us independents. It's a whole weird scene - they have a lot of money (much of which goes to the middle men in Kathmandu rather than the locals) and there is a definite caste system. The Westerner is treated as a rich demi-god, but also as a poor, imbecilic, physically and mentally inept creature that needs to be coddled and catered to every step of the way ( in fact, many in groups ignore the signs of AMS and keep going higher until they keel over). Ah, judgements, judgements. We're full of them. Happy to discuss these opinions and any others with you anytime!!!
Well, my fingers are frozen and hitting lots and lots of wrong keys. Not sure I'll have time for proofreading (again) so please excuse the mess! We've so many stories and ideas and opinions that it's hard to give an accurate picture of what's been happening. Hope you get a little idea of our trip. Hope you are all enjoying yourselves too! Bye for now. Lot of love from us!
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