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!