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 14th 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…