Nepal - the journey to Everest

Seeing the Himalayas and Everest up close - what more is there to say :-)

Miloš turned up only when everyone was already sitting on the bus.

After six hours of waiting they were paging Miloš over the loudspeaker, he was sitting on the toilet.
Qatar airport.
Qatar must be a country full of money. A lottery ticket for a McLaren cost $180, the most common item on sale 22-carat gold. They didn't have a battery for the Canon EOS. Not even in Munich. I need 5 of them, because we'll be 3 weeks without electricity. After five hours of dozing at the airport they were paging us again :).

I finished Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Qatar Airlines have the same media system in all their planes, so the same selection of films
A luxurious breakfast.
At the airport in Kathmandu a lovely 25°C, the usual dose of tropical bureaucracy, get your visa photo taken and off you go. They were waiting for us, Prakash arranged a ride to the hotel.
After dumping our load at the hotel ($15 a night for a room) we set out into town for a look around. Kathmandu is considerably rawer than we expected. The narrow lanes of Kathmandu, where there were no cars until 1953, weren't built for such a tangle of mini-taxis, hundreds of motorbikes and dozens of rickshaws, everyone trying not to kill the piles of Nepali pedestrians and wandering white mugs. The lanes are mostly 2 – 3 m wide, packed with all kinds of goods on both sides, quite an experience :).
Dinner at the hotel, fried chicken with rice for 275 rupees, that's about 65 crowns :).

Breakfast at 6:30 in the morning so we'd make the departure for the airport,
The flight from Kathmandu to Lukla should be quite an experience. For one thing Lukla is at 2850 m, so the weather there is pretty changeable, but above all the approach to the runway comes through a narrow valley between cliffs at a right angle! So a sharp turn just before landing. The runway ends at a rock face, starts at a sheer cliff, and since it's only 200 m long!, they built it steeply uphill. The consortium of our expert advisers agreed on an angle of 20 degrees.
After chaotic wrangling at the airport, where they do have a computer in a wooden crate, but in reality it works like this: they write the flight number on the tickets with a marker using the FIFO method (in plain English – first come, first flown),.. we worked our way onto the plane. A rattly machine for 18 people, the pilot's cockpit not separated from the passengers, unpadded seats, after the door was shut you could see a gap about a centimetre wide to the outside, the tyres completely bald, noise like in an army helicopter. On the other hand an absolutely gorgeous stewardess and by chance the seat next to her fell to me :). I made the most of the situation straight away and during the hour of waiting on the apron and during the flight towards Lukla and during the flight back too I interviewed her. Yes, during the flight back, because 5 – 10 min. before landing the pilot announced that there's wind and thick fog in Lukla and we're going back.
The stewardess explained the Nepali education system to me. She studies at a state university of economics, doesn't pay much for it, does the stewardess thing alongside school. Education is theoretically available to everyone, it's just hard to imagine a farmer high in the mountains sending all his children to study in the city.
After the failed run at Lukla we took the minibus back to the terminal and went to a restaurant for lunch. Before they even brought us the chowmein, or fried rice, the loudspeaker announcement was already summoning the common folk for a second run at Lukla. This time the 15-hour time difference (from California) got me and despite the noise I fell asleep like a log. (We also had a weaker stewardess :) I was only woken by that brutal perpendicular manoeuvre while landing in Lukla. I tell the lads that the airport in Lukla isn't so hardcore after all, is it? That made them laugh a lot, because we'd landed in Kathmandu again. We called Prakash at the hotel, he already had the same rooms for us :).
There are five of us, so among the taxis we found a minivan. Unfortunately it was so mini that Honzík was sitting on our laps :). Driving through some of Kathmandu's neighbourhoods is an experience that's a match for the slums of Mexico City, Nairobi or a Cambodian town on the edge of the jungle. Heaps of rubble, half-naked children, bare feet, clouds of dust, cooking over a fire and so on. Our tourist quarter is very much lacking this authenticity, it's more of a typical Potemkin village. So we dropped our backpacks and set out from the Potemkin village to look for the genuine part of Kathmandu. We'd already done the trip to the airport 3 times, so we'll find our way to the slums on foot! Nope, we walked loads of kilometres, but instead of slums we found a beautiful historic and very genuine part of Kathmandu, with markets, little shops, street theatre, and not a single white mug. :)

Second day, third run at Lukla. They remembered us at the airport, very smooth going, into the plane and the run at Lukla worked out. I've done a fair bit of flying and apart from my first landing years ago I've never watched so closely. A landing with a perpendicular approach over the edge of a cliff and a sloping runway ending in a rock face.
We worked out that the pilot has about 5 – 6 seconds to stop. It looked bad, since we didn't know that at the end of the runway it takes a sharp right turn towards the airport hut. Our guide Nuru Sherpa was waiting at the airport. From his surname it's pretty clear what nationality he is :). He's nice, speaks great English, has been guiding in the mountains for eleven years and comes from a little village two days' walk from here.
The Sherpas are a very interesting people. According to various sources there are between 10 and 20 thousand of them, most live in Nepal and they have all lived for hundreds of years at high altitudes in the Himalayas.
Their adaptation to thin air, their industriousness, reliability and calm nature were already noticed by professor George Mallory when he was organising the first expedition to Everest in 1924. Since then no expedition has managed without their help and their experience and assistance are appreciated and respected even by climbing aces like Messner and others. Sadly, half of the 235 people who died tempting Everest are Sherpas.
From Lukla to the lodge in the village of Phakding it was barely two hours of easy walking, interrupted by a surprisingly luxurious lunch. We keep waiting for the suffering to begin, without electricity and with lentils and no meat :). The lodge is better than expected, hot tea, buffalo steak, they lit the stove, sweet. The lodge belongs to Nuru's dad, his sister cooks here :).

In the morning we got the breakfast we'd ordered for 7:00 at about 7:40. It seems to be a local custom. By the time everyone had packed and taken their turn on the toilet it was about 9.
Today we're supposed to get up to 3400 m, so we expected climbing and a mountain environment. The climbing only showed up long after lunch, but the mountain environment as we know it from the Alps, not at all. Rhododendrons of unbelievable size are flowering along the trail, as tall as an old pear tree! In other places irises are in bloom, in the villages they grow cabbage, potatoes etc., and that up to an altitude of 4000 m. Proper tropics :).
For lunch we stopped at one of the little eateries by the trail, of which there are plenty here. Stone cottages, windows painted blue, you can buy food like pizza, spaghetti, Chinese noodles, rice with vegetables/meat Chinese style and occasionally the Nepali speciality Dhalbat, which is basically lentil soup, white rice and a few fried potatoes. Lower down you could even get a yak steak. Despite the remoteness and the high altitude the food is surprisingly good and cheap. It's 120 km to the nearest road, so everything that doesn't grow here is brought in by plane and then on porters' backs. As you can see from the photos, a Himalayan porter is a fellow the height of a ten-year-old boy, unlike the Tanzanian porter on Kilimanjaro, who is the height of an eleven-year-old boy. The Himalayan porter is usually a Sherpa and he can arrange 40 – 50 kg of load very sophisticatedly, upwards and sideways, so that the load is balanced side to side. The basis is usually a woven basket, which the Sherpa carries hanging from a strap across his forehead!
In Africa the porters had jute sacks thrown on their backs any old how, where one sack held the tourist's backpack as well as a chair and a big gas cooker. Here it's evidently well organised, everyone carries a load that can be sensibly arranged. The biggest show-off job is carrying beams. They're tied in sevens, they're 2.30 m long, 12x12 cm. Unlike the Tanzanian porters, who most often had a chunk of tyre on their feet, the Sherpas have shoes. Either beach flip-flops with a strap between the toes, or trainers in size 13. Since they're 140 – 150 cm tall, I don't suppose that's their size, more likely something inherited from tourists :).
The whole route to Namche Bazar basically runs along the river. It's a giant bed carrying the water from the melting glacier. Several times a day we have to cross the river, which is what the suspension bridges are for (see photo). It's a fairly stable affair, even caravans of laden yaks go across them.
Before Namche Bazar came a pretty brutal climb where we had to gain those roughly 800 metres of altitude. Namche is a picturesque little town hemmed in on all sides by mountains. The floods of tourists have turned it into one big cluster of hotels, restaurants and guesthouses laced with an endless marketplace. The market (apart from a few local products) mainly offers an endless amount of gear for high-altitude trekking and mountaineering, from all the leading world brands like Mamuth, North Face and so on. Even here at 3400 m the prices weren't anywhere near as high as in the Giant Mountains. A room with a shower for three costs 500 rupees a night, that's 125 crowns (for all three of us!) A big yak steak costs about the same, but chicken with rice, for example, costs half. The food is excellent and there's plenty of it. So far I have no idea how we're going to lose the advertised 7 kg here, it looks more like a health resort with a fattening farm :).

For acclimatisation we left our stuff at the hotel and set off for the Shyam boche panorama, from where you can usually see Mt. Everest. The walk from 3440 to 3780 was tough, there really is some oxygen missing here! Luckily the weather is nice and after we passed the highest airport, Syang boche (3700 m), with its dusty runway about 200 m long, we really did reach the viewpoint. Since, unlike the others, I hadn't had time to study the route map in detail beforehand, I had no idea at all that we'd be seeing Everest today. All the more delighted I was, and Honzík and I immediately shot heaps of „profile" photos :).
When Everest got wrapped in clouds we carried on up the hill. At an altitude of 3880 m the Japanese built a fairly luxurious hotel with the fitting name Everest View. The most interesting thing about the hotel wasn't the view of Everest, but the volleyball court! Nuru Sherpa wheedled a ball out of the Japanese and off we went! First I played with Nuru, until he dislocated his thumb :). Then Patrik joined in and Braňo, with a cold, took photos. Not many people have played volleyball this high up :).
The descent was pretty easy, the whole afternoon just more gorging in the dining room, where it's about 10°C. Surprisingly there's WiFi here and relatively fast internet, so over the WiFi I downloaded photos to the iPhone and after a hefty cull put a few dozen photos (out of the original 650) on Facebook. It's something else, this far from civilisation as we know it :). In the evening a heroic shower in water at 4°C (from the waist down).

Today's march was at first a stroll through a botanical garden. Breakfast was finally on time, we told them that if it isn't at 7, we're not paying for it :).
The start was tough again, getting going uphill hurts. The number and size of the rhododendrons was amazing though. After lunch, spent (unfortunately) with a bunch of elderly Czechs who'd even paid for a cook, we set off up the brutal climb to the Thangboche monastery at 3880 m. The name is some sort of corruption of the Nepali word for footprint. At the entrance they had a boulder with a hollow in it which they claimed was the footprint of some lama. Well, I don't know, it looked like it had been washed out by water in a stream :).
From the monastery it was only 20 min. downhill to the Paradise lodge, where we arrived about three and collapsed into bed. We don't actually walk that much, but the altitude is tiring. Nuru then woke us for lunch and since the dining room here is heated, we stayed sitting there from lunch right through to dinner :). The room is damp and since it's been snowing all day!, it's just above zero in there for now. Since we've climbed over the hill, the snow here isn't lying on rhododendrons any more, but on various dwarf pines. Tomorrow we're going to cross the 4000 m mark, so I'd better go to sleep. From 4000 up I can't eat much and I sleep badly.

It's been dumping snow since morning! It snowed all night too, it was 6°C in the room. In the evening we did sit by the stove (last time burning wood) and stuffed ourselves with an amazing apple dessert drizzled with chocolate, but breakfast was a weaker affair. Not that it wasn't good, but I've got no appetite in the morning. I forced down some porridge, but I took the toast with omelette with me.
We trudged through snow and mud, the whole landscape was covered in snow. We keep passing dozens of tourists, yaks and porters. Patrik grumbles, I don't mind that much, Kili was way worse.
Since it's overcast all day and snowing, the views are limited. The clouds are low, so we're looking at yaks on snowy slopes and a mountain river deep below us.
This time climbing to higher altitudes is a good deal friendlier, because even though we're tired and dragging ourselves along slowly, so far nobody's puking and we're all eating like there's no tomorrow.
The distances between the individual stops are pretty short, so from breakfast to the lunch stop it takes us maybe two hours. Since we get up at 7 and leave at 8, we don't really fancy lunch at 10. It doesn't help that making the soup and the food takes an hour :).
The second part of the walk is usually another 2–3 hours, so we get to the lodge between two and three. We stretch out in our sleeping bags for a bit and then gather in the dining room. It's pretty cold in here today, partly because at 4400 m there isn't enough oxygen for a proper fire, and partly because no wood grows here and they burn yak dung. Surviving those 6 hours in a cold dining room with choking smoke isn't much fun. The magazines are running out, plus the lighting here is very energy-saving. To our surprise there's internet even at this altitude! But it's pretty pricey, 600 rupees (about 150 CZK) an hour.

Today is one long mild misery. During the night we did take a few shots of Ama Dablam lit by the moon, but sleeping was rubbish. I woke up boiling hot, because even though it was 3°C in the room, I'd bundled myself up properly into a 2-layer Sir Joseph sleeping bag and wrapped myself in a blanket on top of that. Until morning I had crazy dreams and kept tossing and turning. Honzík had it even worse, he got woken up in the night by the chicken curry, once out the top, once out the bottom, and once out both holes at the same time. I couldn't even finish breakfast (pancakes), the water in the outdoor bathroom was already frozen and there was fresh snow everywhere (oh, golden Manhattan Beach two weeks ago with 26 degrees).
My back's been hurting for about three days, today a bit more. The acclimatisation hike above the village up Nangkhar Tshang ended already at 4750 m, so about 300 vertical metres above the village. Everyone feels lousy, only Braňo made it with the Sherpa all the way to 5002 m. It's still cloudy and you can't see a damn thing. Everyone feels lousy from the altitude. I looked at the map to see what's ahead of us. We won't get this low again for the next 10 – 11 days. After coming back from the walk we flopped down in the dining room, which isn't heated during the day. After a few hours Patrik set off on another hike, and a bit later Miloš and I went for a little stroll around the village. At first we headed out with nothing at all, a camera is unbearable dead weight at these altitudes. But then we ran into Přemysl the Ploughman, Sherpa edition, so I had to painfully go back for the camera. Even though we're 4400 m up, the ploughman had harnessed two yaks, hitched up an ard made from a piece of wood behind them and was ploughing a small field. Behind him two women in down jackets were planting potatoes and two smaller ones were raking everything over. This field had 5 cm of snow on it this morning! The locals' houses are all stone and the roofs are made of flat stones. There's no wood, they cook on yak dung. What luxury we have at home! I'd like to be somewhere warm. At least we found a little pub in the village where they had a fire going. The lady who served us a yak cheese bun with her bare hand came a moment later to put more on the fire. With her hand. Yak dung…
Two Poles were sitting there, getting ready to climb Island Peak and Ama Dablam. Yuck, nobody could drag me up there.
For dinner I had the local speciality Dal Bhat again. It's white rice, a bit of potato and lentil sauce. I don't like it anymore, I ate half of it. It's half past eight now, everyone's gone to bed. I paid for the WIFI so we could let people at home know. But it stopped working. So I'm off to bed too. Tomorrow will probably be worse…

In the morning it was confirmed that my altitude limit is just over 4 km. I woke up all night with insane hallucinations, I ate 2 ibuprofens, I basically didn't sleep. Breakfast, in my sorry state, was about 4 forcibly swallowed spoonfuls of porridge. Since there's no running water here, I couldn't even unstick my eyes.
On the trail, especially uphill, I'm starting to be the slowest. Around noon we got to Thukla, where there are a few huts with a little pub. We sat in one of them over tea and soup (I only ate the liquid from the tomato soup with spaghetti). Next to us sat a group of mostly Indians, who've lived in California since birth, though. One of them, a doctor from Fresno, noticed the state I was in and offered help. He gave me 5 tablets of Dioxine, which is the only medicine for altitude sickness. I thanked him and we started a steep climb up the rock to our destination for the day, another 300 vertical metres higher. 300 m might not sound so bad, but when you finish at 5 kilometres, with a pack on your back and after two days without food, it's quite brutal.
In the end I somehow scrambled up to Lobuche. The landscape has changed a lot, instead of rhododendrons just bare plains and the odd bush. But potato fields still show up here, carefully walled in with stone.
We arrived in Lobuche exhausted and, as usual, flopped down in the dining room wrapped in our sleeping bags and fell asleep. The heating season usually starts a few hours after we arrive, plus the heat output of yak dung at these altitudes is negligible due to the lack of oxygen. At 5 km the oxygen content is 50% of what it is at sea level. God, how I'd love to be at the sea! Except the sea got put on the list of banned topics declared by the chief. Same as stoves, goulash, schnitzel, heating in the toilet or in the room. It doesn't freeze in the bedrooms. It's about 2 – 3°C in there, but 100% humidity, since they never warm up or get aired out. We've got good sleeping bags, so we don't suffer from the cold, sometimes it's actually too hot in the bag. Then you crawl out of it half asleep and give yourself bronchitis. Since I'm reading the book Into the Thin Air here, which is about the Everest expeditions in 1996 where 19 people died, I've got a perfect overview of all the types of altitude sickness. Because of the bubbling in my lungs when I breathe, I'm starting to suspect I've got HACE. That idea, however irrational it probably is given the relatively low altitude, makes it pretty hard to sleep. In the evening I took my first dose (only a quarter) of Dioxine. Unfortunately the drug doesn't cure anything, it only suppresses the symptoms of altitude sickness, so I have to be careful.

After the classic hard time getting up and no appetite at breakfast (I envy the others that they can eat!), we got down to packing. Since we'll be coming back this way, we were issued a jute sack (probably from fuel :)) and we're stuffing into it the stuff we won't need above 5 km. Apart from the sleeping bag and the camera, everything else looks unnecessary :). The climb to 5140 m is quite a torturous experience for me. The original plan also includes climbing Kala Patthar, 5550 m, which has the best view of Mt Everest and where all the famous Everest photos we know come from. It's better to get to Kala Patthar in the afternoon, when the photographer has the sun at his back rather than shooting into it. In the end only chief Patrik manages the climb, and that's with all three cameras and who knows how many lenses. Besides the digital SLR he's also lugging a classic 35 mm film SLR and, on top of that, an insanely heavy large format camera for 6x7 cm film. Unfortunately, by the time he hauls it all up to the summit, there are clouds everywhere.
I arrived at the lodge in Gorak Shep about an hour after the others, but found them asleep. Attempting to climb Kala Patthar was out of the question. Only Miloš set off sometime in the afternoon towards Everest Base Camp, where all the Everest expeditions start from. He didn't get there, but he did completely exhaust himself. So we're putting the climb off until morning.

Morning brutally hard, as usual, with eyes glued shut after a night mostly spent awake we try to dig ourselves out of our sleeping bags into the freezing room and the inhospitable corridor, if there even is one. Sleeping here is lousy also because a person is used to calming his breathing while asleep, which damn well doesn't pay off up here! You wake up feeling like something is smothering you and you start breathing like you're in a full sprint. Resting pulse (we measured it after sitting quietly in the dining room for several hours) hovers around 100 bpm.
Any activity, for example the trip from the sleeping bag to the toilet, means many minutes of furious breathing to pay off the oxygen debt, and I'm not talking about some sprint because of diarrhoea, but about a calm stroll to take a pee. Since we sit in the dining room for 5 – 6 hours every day before bed, slurping tea out of big thermoses, there's a blessed number of pee trips.
For breakfast I took a whole 500g capsule of Dioxine, because a plan had ripened in my head during the night.
Now that I've scrambled this far into the Himalayas, I have to see Everest and photograph it properly. But since I handle altitude worse than anybody, after the climb up Kalapatthar I'm going to split off from the others and hightail it down to lower regions. The idea of suffering like this for another ten days simply doesn't appeal to me.
We set off for the climb together, only cameras and water with us. The lads quickly left me behind, even though their pace wasn't exactly breathtaking either. Mine, however, was riddled with breaks. From the very first climb I started getting coughing fits, I was coughing up blood. So the routine was – 10 small steps, prop the poles against my shoulder, 2 min. of coughing, spit out blood, 10 small steps, sit down on a rock, fall asleep for 2 min. The heroic feat of getting up off the rock, another 10 steps. Nuru Sherpa walked with me the whole time, in the end he even carried my camera for me. Having or not having those two kilos round your neck makes a difference at this altitude.
Luckily the sun came out early, right above the summit of Everest, and the view was absolutely breathtaking (literally, here). Even though I didn't crawl all the way to the very top of that muddy hill (according to the GPS in the camera I settled about 100 m below the summit), it didn't spoil the view of Everest at all. All I had to do was sit on a rock for a couple of hours until the sun stopped shining straight into the lens, and then it was just a matter of pressing the shutter. Just sitting there in the sun, I actually felt more or less fine.
When the lads came down from the top, Patrik pulled a big 3kg tripod out of his backpack and one by one we shot panoramas of the whole horizon filled with snow-covered giants, a few group photos and loads of profile pics with Everest for Facebook :). The way down to the lodge was a good deal easier, but those last 400 m across the sandy plain were torture again.
The last breakfast in the lodge came with an interesting encounter with a doctor from California. When he saw me, he asked about my symptoms and ran off for his instruments. Among other things he said I was an idiot for climbing that Kalapatthar at all. Well, yeah, but I'm hardly going to turn back from a place that's a few hundred metres from a view of Everest without seeing it!
His device measures the oxygen content in the blood. Down in the lowlands we're supposed to have something like 95%. Up this high it showed everyone something around 80%, the chief 85%. Me, though … 60%. Clearly my body isn't willing to adapt to high altitudes. That's been confirmed 4 times now, I'm simply NOT going above 4km ever again!!!
The doctor brought me antibiotics for that cough and a few tablets of some steroids to help me recover. Terribly nice guy, next time I'm in Fresno I have to take him out to dinner. On the way up they confirmed my role as CIO in the USA, so I'll be showing up there in person now and then. The descent from Gorak Shep to Lobuche was grim. After the medical confirmation of my condition I immediately changed my flight from Lukla to Kathmandu to three days from now. There was still the option of the lads taking the original route at high altitudes (4500 – 5500m) and me going lower by another way, but solo travelling isn't my thing. I'd rather go home to the kids and go to work. Oh boy, everywhere there's a toilet where it doesn't clink when it lands! You can get goulash there and you can take a shower every day! And the bedroom isn't freezing!
On the way down Honzík loaded my camera and both lenses onto himself, Braňo even took my (almost empty) backpack. In Lobuche, in the same lodge where we'd already slept, we just confirmed the plan. It's not only because of altitude sickness. That would probably pass in a few days. But I haven't been home since February, on the way back from California in the USA I had just a couple of days at home to repack and clear five weeks' worth of backlog at work, then another 20 hrs of flying to Nepal, where I ended up with a 14-hour time difference in total. And then in six days we moved 4000m higher. To that hangover from oxygen deprivation add the eternal cold, the damp, the absence of running water and 4 days without food.
The beauty and majesty of Everest made up for it and I'm glad I got this close to it, but the idea of another 10 days going the same way simply put me off. Home, to Prague, damn it's cold here!
Nuru Sherpa, who looked after me with touching care, found me a young porter in Lobuche who will accompany me to the airport in Lukla.

Going down could be run in two days. At first I wanted to be a hero and carry everything myself. But even on the descent there are a lot of climbs, so in the end I paid the pedagogy student from Kathmandu those 250 CZK a day. At first he waited for me on every ascent with a long-suffering look, but as we descended my strength came back fast and in the end he had trouble keeping up with me :). The other porters go up with loads of around 50 kg, he went with my 15kg backpack, and downhill at that. But he hacked and coughed worse than me, and since his mum never taught him to use a handkerchief, every 15 steps he'd hoick up a load of snot and spit it around him. He actually got on my nerves a bit in the end :). The first night we were supposed to sleep in Deboche again, in the Paradise Hotel lodge. We got there at five, but all the rooms were full (an Indian and a German expedition). We didn't feel like going any further, and luckily right across the way there was a luxury hotel under construction. Kumar went to negotiate, we hopped over piles of stones and cement and lo and behold, a lovely little room with its own bathroom and a carved bed :). The water didn't run and the price was twice what it was at the Paradise, but so what, it's a higher category and at 500 CZK/night. I'll survive that. For dinner I went across the street to the Paradise, they heat with wood there! After 5 days I finally ate almost a whole plate of rice. But I didn't have the strength for apple pie, sorry lads, I know I promised.
At 3750m you actually sleep great. That is, if you're coming down from 5450m…

In the morning, after a breakfast I finally managed to finish for once, the trail started with a brutal climb up to the Buddhist monastery at Tengboche. I still had to sit down on a rock a few times there. By the afternoon we'd long been strolling through a botanical garden full of rhododendrons (out of all 26 species in the world, 18 are found in Nepal, it's the Nepalese national flower), irises and local eight-daisies. In Namche we stopped for lunch at the Snowland hotel. Even though the sun is blazing outside, it's still 12 degrees in that dining room!
The internet, prepaid last time for 24 hrs, was still working here, so I filed reports to my hungry audience. Nothing about my return yet, I'm saving that as a surprise at home :) (lover in the wardrobe, and all that :) ).
From Namche Bazar to Phakding, our destination, it went fine, we just passed endless caravans of donkeys, yaks and porters. You can see here that the nearest road is still 140 km away and whole towns are built on the backs of porters. Beams (7 of them), sheet metal, petrol, food, cement, bottled water, absolutely everything! And in among it giant yellow bags with the gear of Everest expeditions. It's the start of the commercial expedition season. (For a hundred thousand dollars they'll push you all the way to the summit, but you can easily croak up there too, see the book Into Thin Air, which I'm reading here) So the porters lug oxygen bottles, crampons, ice axes, tents, sleeping bags, stoves, food etc. etc.
At the start of the season a crew of paid Sherpas builds the route almost all the way to the top. 75 ladders across the icefall, fixed ropes on all the harder sections, 4 permanent high camps above base camp. Stocks of oxygen, food, they pitch the tents etc.
Even so, nobody would get me up there, even if they paid ME that 100 thousand dollars!!!
We got to Phakding around five again. Nuru's mum came running to greet me with her hands clasped, as if I'd just escaped the clutches of death :). The lodge belongs to his dad, and Nuru's lovely sister served me. Just like home :).
After dinner the Frenchwoman sitting next to me struck up a conversation. She and her bearded boyfriend had taken 6 months off under French law to travel the world. For 1 year they get 50% of their salary (they're both teachers) and the other 6 months they travel. They'd spent 3 weeks in Burma, then three weeks in India and now 3 weeks in Nepal. They decided to walk into the Himalayas along the old footpath, from the days when you couldn't fly into Lukla yet.

I was up at five so we'd be at the airport before eight. Because of the weather there were no flights out of Lukla for 3 days again, so changing the booking didn't work out. During the night I managed by SMS to direct Kuzma to call Qatar Airways, the US branch, from the cottage in South Bohemia, and he changed my departure from 6/5 to 30/4. I couldn't do it myself, because the phone here shows signal alright, but 17 times in 17 different places it simply reports the network is overloaded. :)
So now I was in a rush to even get down from that Lukla to Kathmandu. The alternative is 3 days on foot and 10 km by bus :).
I got lucky. Instead of the complicated changing of the departure date I bought a new ticket with a rival airline. I've got plenty of time to cancel the old one, they'll refund 90%, so I'm out 14$. The competition got me on the very first flight today, I sat right behind the pilots' backs (there's no door!) and I got a beautiful shot of the take-off from the "Most dangerous airport in the world" through the pilot's eyes (camera stuck out over his shoulder!).
It's really wild, the runway steeply! downhill and after 150 metres it ends in a 200m drop. Right across a small valley opposite there's a hill, so after take-off a sharp right!
BTW, there are stairs running alongside the runway. With the same gradient! as in a block of flats. Well, never mind, everything fine, except they lost my backpack. Wasn't once a quarter enough already? So not just Air France, but Sita Air too :). So they left me waiting 2 hrs on a dusty building site next to the airport until the next plane arrived. Calmly (by now) I read about the 1996 Everest disaster and enjoyed the heat. And the dust.
The backpack arrived, they handed it over without a word (or God forbid an apology) and I set off by taxi to the hotel. They stuffed me into a Suzuki 800cc taxi with a German. Never heard of a country called Czech Republic. So I ask him which part of Germany he's from, must be somewhere near the French border, right? No. He's from Regensburg, 45 min down the motorway to Rozvadov. Aha, now he remembered…
At the hotel I revelled in the luxury. Walking from the room to breakfast without a down jacket. Running water to wash my hands. A toilet you can actually sit on. A shower. A hot one. Lying down in a bed. Without a down sleeping bag rated to -20 and without a blanket over the sleeping bag. Not having to take all the batteries into the sleeping bag so they don't freeze.
And the best for last. Right across the street a fruit stand and a blender.
1x mango – banana – pineapple
1x mango – banana – papaya and then another 3kg of fruit to take away. Damn, that's the life.
Did I wreck my guts? Nope.. I feel great :). In the afternoon another trip through mad Dustmandu (as I renamed it) to Boudha Nath. A quiet square with no cars, motorbikes, bicycles or dust, built around an ancient Buddhist monument. A local community of Tibetan monks in exile. Dinner on the roof of one of the houses.
La Dolce Vita!
It almost looked like nothing more would happen, but in the evening I got itchy feet and sometime after nine I set off to find a pub. Since we're staying in the tourist quarter of Thamel, pubs here are a dime a dozen. These days they're up on the first floor or on the roof so that during the day they don't get in the way of the stalls with T-shirts, guaranteed genuine North Face down jackets, books, hand-sewn bags etc.
Before I found out that all those pubs are DESPERATELY empty, I'd run up a good few dozen steps! Good thing I'm in training now!) BTW, since I left the mountains I'm absolutely fit. All that's left is a bit of a sniffle :)
I'm standing there figuring out how to find a pub where the locals go, or at least the tourists? About ten little teenagers offered me hash and weed. So a tourist here buys some smoke and then sits with it alone in a pub?
In the end it hit me. Three pairs of beautiful legs got out of a taxi (and no blokes either, maybe). My eye, trained over the years, watches how they walk and then it hit me! They're definitely heading to a bar! So I follow them, but oops. They turned into a horribly dark, muddy alley that leads to a rubbish dump or a building site. I was almost afraid to go in there. But then I hear music and some other local sees my hesitation and immediately explains that there's a bar with live music in there and that it's great. Well, I'm a big boy, so in I go. I step over a pile of rubbish, walk through a spit-covered corridor and up the stairs. And lo and behold, a really cracking bar, loads of locals and tourists together, live music, brilliant!
The white folks hanging out there were more the type who came here once on holiday and just stayed. Dreadlocks, dressed in local rags, smoking a water pipe and blending in with the locals.
I had two beers (0.7l) and was having a good time, but suddenly that's it, over and out. Dustmandu brutally goes dark and shuts down at exactly midnight!

At five in the morning they fired up a concrete mixer right next door. Sure, I'm on the fourth floor, but so was it. In the end I managed to filter it out in software and at eight I went for breakfast.
I had three places planned for today on Prakash's recommendation – old Dustmandu, known as Bhaktapur, then the old cremation grounds at Pashupatinath and finally the Monkey Temple called Swayambhu.
Since Bhaktapur is about 20 km east of Dustmandu, I went looking for a taxi. It was supposed to cost 700 rupees, the first cheeky guy wanted 1500. The second one was more decent, he wanted 800, plus he spoke good English and clearly knew the place well, history included. So we agreed he'd drive me around all day for a fixed price. He was quite good fun.
We started in Bhaktapur, the capital of Nepal. To this day people live there just like they did centuries ago, I was curious about that. The reality exceeded all my expectations. It fully dawned on me that when I travel I'm far happier among the locals in their natural environment than alone in the mountains. The mountains are beautiful, majestic, peaceful and quiet, but that pulsing of life out on the street, kids running around, life spread out right into the middle of the road, that's what fills my travelling passion. I was shooting photos like mad and Bhaktapur definitely had plenty to offer.
Life in its purest form, without cars, machines, running water, property and envy. A small grubby boy sidled up to me and asked where I was from. Since I'd just had to shake off about ten pushy "guides", I almost brushed him off, but I answered anyway. And I couldn't believe my ears! Czech, sure, that's between Germany and Slovakia, Central Europe! And he says it in cracking English! He did immediately pull out the learned trick about how he desperately needs to buy an English book for school and the shop is just around the corner. I didn't buy him the book, but I already liked him, so I offered him the job of being my guide. So for the whole day I had the company of a smart 12-year-old boy and access to his view of the world. They lived right in the historical centre, so he knew all the monuments and gods and symbols, but at the same time he told me how things work at school, at home, what's real and what's just theatre for tourists. He was funny and we really enjoyed it. At one point his mum started watching us suspiciously. I get it. A little boy prowling dark alleys with a strange white guy. I'd be scared too. So I stuck to open places and in the end, at his request, we went for lunch. Deliberately on a terrace right on the square so his mum could keep an eye on us. The boy had to go to school after lunch, so he had the rest of his fried rice packed up to take away and off he zoomed. Sadly I didn't retain his name, but I gave him my email, and once he gets to a computer, hopefully he'll get in touch!
The rest of the day actually wasn't nearly as much fun. Compared to peaceful Bhaktapur with its pure, unspoiled culture, the rest was just dusty, noisy chaos.
Traffic in Dustmandu is a disaster. They only know asphalt from adverts, so everywhere there are potholes, dust, honking, honking, dust.
The next attraction was Pashupatinath. Supposedly it's a holy place, UNESCO protected, and for the locals a sort of Nepali Mecca. Well, I don't know. UNESCO HERITAGE SITE was written in marker pen on a yellow cut-off piece of cardboard box and the access road led across a genuine rubbish dump. Then came a row of 300 metres of stalls with trinkets. Then, well, there were three oldish buildings standing there, but there wasn't much difference between the hospice Mother Teresa had built 50 years ago and that holy-of-holies temple. Piles of rubbish everywhere.
The main attraction of Pashupatinath is the cremation ground. Every inhabitant of the Kathmandu valley can (must) bring their dead here along with a pile of wood, for 25000 rupees. And right here on the street above a filthy sewer they burn their dead in this holy place. Down in the sewer monkeys and people scurry about. People thigh-deep in the water sift through the ashes looking for gold teeth. The sewer is regulated with plastic sandbags. Everything floats in it. In two places a pyre really was burning. Another student forced himself on me as a guide, but his good English caught my interest, so I let him. He studies anthropology, he really did know a fair bit (well, definitely more than me :)). First he showed me praying monks with faces painted with ashes, smoking weed. From the way they struck professional poses and how vehemently they demanded payment for every photo, he didn't even have to tell me they were fake.
But then, when he assured me about three times that I wouldn't see the corpse in the pile of wood because it's underneath (without me even asking), I got suspicious that the whole "cremation" is more of a tourist attraction than a matter of faith and tradition. Well, I don't know, maybe I'm too much of a sceptic.
What he did say that was interesting was about the mourning tradition. When a father dies, all his sons shave their heads and dress in the traditional mourning colour, WHITE. They stay bald and in white for a year! Women aren't allowed at the funeral, they have to stay home. Supposedly because they'd throw themselves into the fire after their husband. It wasn't that long ago that a wife had to die together with her husband.
What's ruining my life here today (as so many times elsewhere in the world) is a Czech tour group. You can spot Czechs a mile off. Chequered shorts, sandals, they stick together like a flock of sheep, they talk loudly to each other in Czech and even louder to the locals (in Czech too). They try to look worldly, like nobody's getting one over on me here, nobody's ripping me off, I've got my head screwed on! Look mum, they want 25 rupees for that water here! I'm not buying that, no way! In ???? it only costs 20! (I'll note the difference is 1.25 crowns..)
The next attraction was Swayambhu, the monkey temple. Again pushing through dust and traffic jams in a microscopic taxi with a little motorbike engine. I filmed the most interesting places, hopefully something will come of it. I was already pretty worn out, so among the monkeys I just clawed my way up to the temple roof and found a little pub with a terrace right up on the roof.
The pubs here are a strange thing. Mostly they're empty. When there were 5 of us turning up somewhere it didn't matter, but as a solo traveller I'd appreciate some company. And being permanently in the company of 3 – 5 gay waiters somehow doesn't sit right with me. Apparently, just as every paedophile automatically takes up a career as a Catholic priest, in Nepal every homosexual is destined for a career as a waiter. I've got nothing against them, I lived in San Francisco long enough to respect them completely, but their local fawning manners don't suit me.
Anyway, I sat on the little terrace between the chimney, the air-conditioning exhausts from the kitchen and a black plastic hot-water tank and watched the goings-on below. One roof lower, 3 workmen squatted and cleaned the joints between the roof bricks with little brushes. In that hour and a half the three of them maybe managed a square metre. A bit lower down among the trees a flock of birds of prey was playing in the wind. An amazing sight, but hard to photograph without the right lens. My 135mm is climbing Gokyo Ri today, but a 200mm would have been better for this.
Right at the bottom (I'm on the highest hill above the city) you can see the desperation of Dustmandu in all its nakedness. Opaque smog, dust, half-ruined houses, a fire here and there. As far as the eye can see. I'm not sure Western-type civilisation has brought Nepal anything. Anything positive, I mean. Until the fifties there wasn't a single car in Dustmandu. No road led here. The first few cars for the nouveaux riches got here because their owners had them dismantled to the last screw behind the mountains, loaded onto the backs of Sherpas and carried over the mountains all the way here. It reminds me a bit of how in 1948 Jan Masaryk blessed the delivery of a few Czech fighter planes to Israel. They dismantled those too and stuffed them in pieces into a B52 :). After that I had myself driven to the hotel and caught my breath a bit.
Luckily the electricity was on (and therefore the water was running), which isn't all that common here :). Since I still have a decent head cold from the mountains, it wasn't too hard to get all the dust out of my sinuses. The bogeys were just a bit bloody :).
Then I set out to finish off the presents. A common stall here is a guy with a (treadle) sewing machine who embroiders Everests, yaks, yetis and any text you like onto a T-shirt. So I had a few specimens made as presents and two T-shirts for myself. My work signature JaK dangerously resembles the national draught animal, the yak, so I made use of that :).
Dinner in a tucked-away little pub with a garden (Nepali set – lentils, rice, spicy chicken, spicy potatoes, baked flatbread, yoghurt and on top of that fried momo dumplings and a lassi yoghurt drink).
2 beers in the bar with live music like yesterday, pack up, book the bus from Munich (a bit of a problem to print – Vančura, you plonker, do you really need it printed??? In 2013?? You know how much the Nepali guy sweated?) :) Then just pack everything and set the alarm.

The morning went smoothly. One last banana pancake from the gay waiter, goodbyes to Prakash and Shukra, taxi to the airport. Check-in in the civilised world takes 3 – 4 min. per person, here everything's nice and easy, so about 10 – 12 min. per person. I nearly sh… (literally, not from impatience. Maybe a whole mango on an empty stomach wasn't such a great idea :))
I got off in Doha, Qatar, and it was about 12:40. Boarding for the next plane 1:10, so I'm rushing and the stewardess says take it easy. Well, it was only at the departures board that I found out I don't have 30 min. but 13 hrs and 30 min. for the transfer :). So now I'm sitting in the Business Lounge, finishing my third meal, drinking up my third wine and wondering whether to have a coffee and a shower, or just go straight for the shower. It did cost $40, but I think I'll get my money's worth :).