Everest Base Camp trek day 4 - Frustrations & Recommendations

We drove to the airport this morning feeling positive - "THIS time! Yeah!"

Yalamber thought the signs were good as he surveyed the airport car park with a grin - "lots of mountain trips here today"

We rolled to the check-in counter full of confidence - no scrum, that means no delays, right?

Wrong.

"Sorry sir, all Lukla flights today cancelled, I am sorry,"

Bugger.

With a 14 day trek ahead and only 15 days before our flight back to London, it was time to think of plan B.

So after another come-get-us call to Yalamber, and a detailed plan-redrawing session in the Explore Himalaya office, we now have these options:

Plan A
- fly out to Lukla tomorrow (yes, we WILL!)
- trek as far as Gorak Shep, via Gokyo Ri as planned
- climb Kala Pattar as planned, but don't go on to Everest Base Camp & back the next day
- instead, save one day by heading back down that afternoon.

This allows us to keep one day contingency at the end in case we have troubles flying BACK from Lukla. It means we don't get to see base camp, but Kala Pattar is just as high and actually offers better views of the mountain.

Plan B
- if we can't get a flight tomorrow, we drive to Pokhara in the west, and trek to Annapurna Base Camp.

ABC is only 4100m, compared to EBC's 5600m, hence the trek is a few days shorter and less physically arduous, but it's just as popular. We also know we've been OK going to that altitude before (Toubkal) in just 4 days. So it's easier, but therefore less of an adventure.

Still, an ABC trek would still be pretty awesome, I'm sure...

I have to say that Explore Himalaya have been amazingly helpful, especially Yalamber who just radiates an easy-going calm practicality, and the same goes for all the Nepalis we've dealt with so far. Take the airport staff yesterday - could you imagine anyone at Heathrow taking you out to the runway and rummaging through bin bags for a list ticket with you? I'd have had to fill in forms, ring an 0870 number, spend hours on hold, navigate an automatic menu system, etc etc...

And the food - oh, the food! Some recommendations:

- the daal baat at New Orleans (so good Lise had it two nights running)

- Momo - essentially a Nepali version of dim sum dumplings. Delicious!

- the fajitas at the Northfield Cafe (better than any Mexican food I've had in England)

- the coffee at Mandaps

- "Trekking in the Everest region" by Jamie McGuinness / Trailblazers. Everything we've found ourselves asking about Kathmandu so far, is answered in this book.

I'm going to bed now, as we have to be up at 5am for our last chance of a flight to Lukla. With a bit of luck, this will be my last post for a few days...

Happy New Year!

Everest Base Camp trek day 3 - lucked out over Lukla

"This customer service is amazing," I remember thinking as I joined two cleaners, one bin man and one sharp-suited Tala Air check-in official in a frantic rummage through a small rubbish tip just off the runway, "there's no way you'd ever get this in England!"

Let's rewind a little.

Our 7am flight to Lukla was rescheduled to 9.15, but as Yalamber said, "it's not hard and fast 9.15...."

No kidding. Lukla is one of the most difficult and dangerous landings in the world, and what we didn't find in any guidebook was that flights frequently get delayed or cancelled as they close the airstrip whenever the wind or cloud picks up.

Apparently there had been unusually windy weather up there, and we met several people in the airport who had been trying to get there for days already.

A word here about the internal airport - it's chaos. None of the orderly queues that we Brits seem to default to whenever we see someone behind a counter, here it's good old fashioned Asian Crush. The staff, however, are helpful in a way that if seen at Heathrow would surely be grounds for an instant sacking (and no doubt followed by a strike vote from the union.) When our local helper left us saying "wait here, I'll tell you when to check in" yet an hour later had still not returned, an airline employee tapped me on the shoulder and said "to Lukla? Mr Davidson? We have been looking for you!" (More of him later)

It took until 11am to board the bus for our plane - a tiny twin-prop 20-seater, which we were just starting to board when the walkie-talkie squawked and the cry went up - "Lukla airport closed!"

Cue everybody off, and a further 20mins standing around the tarmac chatting to the others, one of which turned out be Lucie Dumont of Karavaniers, a Canadian guide who gave us some great tips about where to stay in Namche. Two Japanese lads said this was their second day of trying to get a flight, the third for a German group who now only had 6 days left.

Eventually the airport re-opened, we boarded the plane on tenterhooks, and to a palpable sense of nervous excitement we finally took off.

I'd studied the map beforehand, and figured that the best views would be on the left side of the plane - I wasn't disappointed. As our tiny plane rocked and swayed over the foothills, mammoth peaks aplenty came into view, including a spectacular sight of Everest over the monstrous Lhotse-Nuptse wall, tailing its signature plume of cloud in the jet stream. I got several good photos, but they're all on the decent camera so you'll have to wait until I get back and upload them.

The plane was being buffeted by the wind and banking heavily, and also didn't seem to be pressurised. I felt light-headed and got the hot flushes in waves that I've learned signal an imminent digestive revolt against too much altitude too quickly. A glance around the plane at the other faces in various shades of ashen green told me I was far from alone.

Then just as we flew over the airstrip, and we all looked down and thought "oh my God, it's TINY! You can't land on THAT.. and there's a sodding great mountain right at the start of the runway!", the announcement came back from the front - "sorry, too windy, we're heading back to Kathmandu."

The disappointment was only slightly tempered by relief that we wouldn't be going through the legendarily scary landing this time, together with surprise that they had managed to squeeze an air hostess into a plane this tiny.

On arrival back at Kathmandu - the captain signing off with "bad luck gentlemen - such is Lukla!" - at around 12:45, we were told that there might be one more flight today, and we should wait until 2pm, by which point they would either fly or cancel, and we could re-use our boarding passes.

At this point I checked my pocket for my boarding pass, and with a sinking feeling realised it wasn't there.... or in the top of my bag. Oh shit. Not in any of my other pockets either. Shitshitshit! ....and it was with our airport tax receipts and return tickets as well! Oh shit, shite and shinola...

I sheepishly explained the situation to Lise, feeling like a naughty schoolboy sent to the Headmaster and asked "so, why have you been sent to me?" She was remarkably calm and level-headed in contrast to my rising panic, and after a couple more exhaustive searches of my backpack, sent me to throw myself upon the mercy of the nearby gaggle of airport staff, clearly sharing a girly gossip session (although speaking Nepali, the body language of a group of young, same-sex employees on a break was unmistakable).

After just about managing to explain the situation - their English was limited, and my Nepali covers all of about 10 phrases - one of them ran off to speak to someone else, and returned saying "there is no problem, you can come speak to the ticket desk," then walked me back through security to the front.

As they explained in Nepali to the check-in person at Yeti Air, whose expressions of concern and occasional gasps were straight out of a silent movie and should have been accompanied by a tinkling piano, I was trying to explain that I couldn't prove I had been on the flight as I'd lost all of my stubs, when the guy who'd come to find us earlier walked past.

"This gentleman!" I cried, "he knows I was on that flight!"

Although already wearing the expression of someone just trying to get to the end of a long day, he listened intently to the two women, then turned decisively to me and said "come with me!"

He led me at pace back through security and out through a side door onto the tarmac, flagged down a passing bus and diverted it to our plane, and led me onto it where the captain and hostess were hanging out and chatting. "It's already been cleaned," said the captain, "but please, go ahead!"

I searched to no avail, and re-emerged onto the tarmac to see the check-in guy in conversation with two cleaners carrying full bin bags from other planes. He turned to me again, and said "the rubbish has already gone - this way!"

So we marched determinedly over to a small dump of bin bags just off the side of the main runway, and began tearing open the bags.

Which is where we came in.

I shall truncate the rest of the tale - the search was fruitless, and in the end we concluded that the tickets and stubs were irretrievably lost. The last Lukla flight was now cancelled, so the check-in guy took me back inside and up to the main back-office of the airline where some more explaining to the airline manager eventually resulted in an offer to provide replacement tickets for 500 rupees each (a bit less than a fiver) on the condition that our guides wrote a letter promising that they would be responsible if the original tickets were ever used by somebody.

I thanked him copiously, and set off to find Lise, who I now realised I hadnt spoken to in over an hour and must still be sitting by the departure gate wondering where I'd gone.

Practical as ever, she'd retrieved our baggage once the flight was cancelled and was waiting for me by the check-in desk.

"There you are!" she cried, "where did you go?"

"Well..."

We called Yalamber, who arrived half an hour later and, after some intense discussuions with the airline, eventually said that we could get new tickets for tomorrow for nothing. However, the conditions on the return ticket offer were too onerous, and we would have to pay the full cost of one new return ticket, and one nights accommodation for the sirdar still waiting for us in Lukla. He took us back to the Explore Himalaya office where we paid on card and adjusted paperwork, then back to the hotel, where we, frankly, zonked out and slept for three hours.

Fingers crossed for a flight tomorrow!

Everest Base Camp Trek day 2 - Thamel and Temples

"What are they burning over on that side of the river?" I asked our guide Niraj, as we entered the Pushipatinath Hindu temple complex and the clouds of sweet-smelling smoke drifted across to us.

"Dead bodies," he replied, matter-of-factly.

Niraj went on to explain in great detail all the rituals and complex caste hierarchies encapsulated in the scene before us. How the ten stone plinths were reserved in caste-order from highest-caste right in front of the temple to lowest way off to the left, and the obligations encumbent on the son of the family once his parent dies. As we watched, two funeral pyres finished and the ashes were pushed into the river, where women were washing their clothes and men were picking through discarded rags.

"It's a holy river to us," Niraj explained, "it flows down to the Ganges in India."

One pyre was just getting started on the second-highest-caste plinth, reserved for diplomats and senior public officials, with the highest-caste plinth reserved for royalty.

I in turn told Niraj how funerals in England tend to be very private affairs, with all the mechanics taking place behind closed doors and a family's grief locked down behind a stiff upper lip. Lise, by way of contrast, told of how the richer Chinese families will hire women to cry in public for them.

My lasting impression of that visit was a sense that, despite the rigid caste demarcations, there was something very egalitarian about the whole business being literally and metaphorically out in the open, with diplomats burning just a few metres up the river bank from the lower castes, following the same rituals and very visibly ending up in the same river. Death, of course, being the greatest leveller of all.

Our next stop was Boudnath, a Buddhist stupa dating back to the 7th century, festooned with prayer flags and containing hundreds of prayer wheels, from the small to the size of a room. Every wall was covered with stunningly detailed Buddhist art, ten foot tall wheels of life and mandalas of all descriptions. Upstairs we visited the school of Buddhist painting where the works are produced, and saw the master lama at work, filling in the tiniest of details with a single-cat-hair brush.

The guide explained the painstaking process of preparing the canvas, crushing the stone to make the paint, freehand sketching by the master and then up to 57 days of painting that goes into a mandala, and the richly-layered symbolism embodied in the design. He also talked us through a series of photos of the Dalai Lama spending nearly 2 months producing a mandala from sand, and then, once finished, tipping it into the river. There was something about that which definitely struck a chord with us - the end product being almost irrelevant compared with the process itself. Very reminiscent of our feelings on finally reaching the top of Jbel Toubkal - "right, quick photo then let's head straight down!"

We returned to our hotel in Thamel, the main tourist district in Kathmandu. It's a bustling district of endless small shops with street signs piled high, street salesmen offering you taxis, rickshaws and  trinkets while you dodge a miasma of cars and motorbikes and people offering you a "schmoke sir?" every few seconds.

However, unlike Marrakesh,  they all accepted a "no thankyou" with good grace (at least the second or third, if not always the first) and the atmosphere has yet to feel in any way threatening.

Tomorrow we fly early to Lukla, and trek on from there. My next post will probably be from Namche on New Years Eve.
Namaste!

Everest Base Camp Trek - day 1 - Kathmandu

"oh my GOD, Al..." exclaimed Lise as the plane banked south east and we got our first unambiguous view of the gargantuan wall of snow-capped mountains on the horizon to the north of Kathmandu, "I thought they were SKY!"

I am aware, of course, that as insights go, "gosh, those Himalayas - they're quite big, aren't they?" lacks a certain something, but as the unmistakable profile of Ama Dablam towered on the horizon, I was struck - and slightly perturbed - by the thought "that's only about 6850m, which means that somewhere out there is another one that's two whole kilometres higher than THAT..."

Emerging dazed and bleary-eyed from the tranquil bureaucracy of the airport immigration & customs, you are suddenly plunged into a kaleidoscopic chaos of smiling, nodding faces waving name cards at you, offering you taxis, hotels, treks, but even amongst all that I thought the guy wanting a tip for pushing our trolley 20m was a bit much - we thought he was a customs official.

Finding our contact - Yolamber - in a sea of faces and name cards, we forced our way across the road and into his car, and were driven through an onslaught of motorbikes, cycles and horn-tooting cars from all directions through the hectic dusty streets to Thamel.

Yolamber assured us that we would be safe from pickpockets and any other kind of violent crime, but did suggest that we should be back inside by ten, as "night is the time when evil wakes up". I listened intently for any sign of the almost obligatory thunderclaps, howling wolves or diminished organ chords that surely should have followed a sentence like that, but none were forthcoming.

Tomorrow is sightseeing around Kathmandu, I'll post more then.

Test post

Nothing to see here, move along now....

Oh alright, go on then, here's a pic of the view from halfway up Great Henry at Lawrencefield