20,000 Leagues Over the Sea (Part I: Getting There)

We're back!

After about three weeks of trekking and small mountaineering in the Solukhumbu (click for a map) and some much needed apres r & r, Mana, Brendan and I are back at work in Kathmandu (actually Brendan is in the states now, but he was here for a bit). The Himalaya is everything you'd expect it to be including mind-blowing gorgeous and crowded. But unlike what you might expect it was usually quite warm, and while you could say it was a cultural experience it wasn't a particularly Nepali one.

Flying in to Lukla is an adventure in itself, so much in fact that travel agencies advertise mountain flights as a way of seeing the Himalaya with a cocktail in your hand. Nepal is a pretty disorganized if well-meaning country, so in our case the adventure was not picking out a brand of whiskey, but merely trying to get on the plane. The night before we left Nandu presented each of us with a Khada, a Nepali-Tibetan prayer scarf that symbolizes good luck while travelling and respect. It would prove to be more than a charm. The next morning while waiting in the hectic domestic flights terminal, we heard an announcement that weather had caused a small aircraft accident and flights would be delayed until tomorrow. Shaken but remembering that the "safest plane that ever flew was the first to take off after 9/11," I invited two British climbers who were in our same situation back to our flat, as they didn't have a hotel room anymore, and we got some food and repacked for the next morning. It took us three more days for the gods and the air traffic control room to agree on the weather, but finally our Twin Otter turboprop touched down on the 12% inclined mountain runway and we were off to see the wizard.

Two days of hiking up a temperate, wooded valley brought us to our first rest day in Namche Bazaar, where we secured a climbing rope and stove fuel, and got some of our first views of the glaciated Ama Dablam and it's precipitous neighbors. Brendan, after seeing a doctor, learned he was coming down with bronchitis and went on antibiotics, while Mana and I acclimatized (got our bodies used to the altitude) with a day hike up a nearby ridge. We ran into recent Dartmouth graduates who we met before in the airport, meaning there must be a total of a dozen Dartmouth students or alum in Nepal at any given time. Really, its astonishing. From Namche we trekked east up the valley on the same path that leads to Everest base camp, spending the nights in our tent and eating mostly Dal Bhaat (rice and lentils), bread, and ramen. By now even small trees were scarce as we migrated to alpine desert leading up to the sand-covered glaciers that were disappointingly smaller than on our climbing map, a reminder that world might actually be getting warmer.

We couldn't hike more than a few hours each day to keep from gaining altitude too quickly, but the packs were heavy enough that none of us complained. When we told a teahouse (lodge) owner that we were climbing Island Peak and didn't have a Sherpa guide or porter, he and his crony just laughed. But we did meet climbers from Seattle headed to Pumori who had a first ascent near our second destination, Lobuje East, and did it all without porters. So we're not crazy, just climbers. The wildlife in the Solukhumbu and traffic are one and the same - yak trains carrying trekking and expedition gear can pile up on narrow, steep trails and keep you dodging steaming piles of future firefood. One note about the yaks though, they were at least as polite as any of the French we met in the region. If there was enough room, they all seemed to step off to the side and let you past without a word from their driver. In Chukkung I tried on a porter's basket and was suprised to learn that it wasn't any heavier than my own, but of course they put all the weight on their foreheads and do three times the vertical we do in a single day.