Everest Base Camp trek day 5 - Lukla or Bust

By 12 o'clock, our 7:15 flight was looking increasingly unlikely. Every hour, they delayed it one more hour, and this was the last day we could get out there in time to get to Kala Pattar and back with still one day's leeway in case of delays on the return.

"I reckon we go for plan B," I sighed.

Lise was not giving up so easily.

"Maybe we can get a flight tomorrow and just not go as far as Kala Pattar?"

"It's been 3 days now, and there were people on our first day who'd been stuck for three days before that. We've got no reason to think it'll be any different tomorrow, and then we'll shave another day off the trek, and then another, until we're just going to Namche and back."

"Well we still have to wait until they officially cancel it at 2"

This was true. So we were going nowhere either way.

The exasperation, lack of breakfast and lack of sleep the night before was catching up with me. New Years Eve in Thamel is a deafening affair even six floors up, and no respecter of early morning flights or musical tastes - I had laid awake dreaming of calling, in Marcellus Wallace's fine words, a couple of hard pipe-hitting so-and-sos to go to work on DJ Utzi with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.

"I'm going for a walk," I said.

I set off for yet another tour of the departure lounge - two small but exorbitantly overpriced kiosks selling Pringles for a fiver and an array of postcards taunting me with lurid close-ups of the mountains we weren't going to get to see, plus one smoking room with air so thick it might have been on fire and an array of middle-aged men outside it seemingly performing the 1812 Overture scored for phlegm-hawkers, wheezers and coughs.

On my return I found Lise talking to Bruce, an amiable English chap we'd exchanged a few pleasantries with earlier, who was also waiting for a Lukla flight. He was pretty experienced in the region, and suggested a couple of alternative shorter plans - e.g. from Gokyo, go back via the Henjpo-la and down the other valley.

By 1pm, we were told by the information desk that the flight would certainly be cancelled, but they just wouldn't make the announcement until 2. We sat there dejected as Bruce went off to the ticket desk to change his ticket, leaving us with "So I'll probably see you in Pokhara then!"

After a few minutes of shared sighs and slow head shakes, I rang Yalamber to pick us up once more.

"Just come back through security," he said, "I'm already at the check-in desk"

As I rang off, Lise came over with Bruce, and a slight smirk. Bruce said,

"I've just been offered a chopper for $250..."

Lise and I looked at each other.

"What do you think...?"

Half an hour later we were being rushed through a side door with the chopper profferer heading onto the tarmac with our luggage, but a security guard insisting we go back through security and out through the gate.

Yalamber was looking genuinely worried for the first time.

"I don't know this guy," he said, "check the bill, make sure it's right, OK?"

We were waved through security without even a cursory inspection - the guards were getting to know us by now - and five minutes later, having swiped our credit cards on a windswept flimsy fold-up table by the runway, and checked that the bill was indeed what we'd agreed, we climbed into the 4-seater helicopter and hung on for dear life as it took to the air.

Bruce had warned us that it would be a bumpy ride, so I took the precaution of opening an empty plastic bag in front of me as an improvised sick bag. I looked across at Lise with an excited grin, and made the scuba diver's sign for "Ok?" She just looked back at me with a trembling bottom lip.

The flight was indeed bumpy, but once over the initial nerves, quite exciting. The pilot rode the updrafts as we crossed the mountain ridges - sometimes by a margin of what seemed like just a few feet as he stayed just underneath the thick clouds above us.

Then suddenly, out of the clouds appeared Lukla airstrip, right in front of us. It looks tiny from a plane, but when you're doing a dramatic sweep over it in a chopper from a height of about 10m.... it looks even tinier, and makes you very glad you're in something that can land vertically.

We were greeted by our sirdar Bagbir, a tall thin man in his thirties, with smiling eyes and a constant sideways nod, and his brother Malang, who would be our porter. Malang was shorter and younger, and shy. We said our goodbyes to Bruce and went inside for a cup of sweet black tea and an introductory chat with Bagbir.

"Tonight we sleep in Phakding," he said, "maybe three hours from here."

It was already 3 o'clock, and with sundown around 6, we had to get moving, so once we'd finished our tea we set off. Lise and I put on our backpacks - maybe 6 kg or so each - and felt suitably humbled as Malang strapped both of our duffels together for a combined load of 30kg plus whatever else was in the two smaller bags for he and Bagbir.

At 2845m in Lukla, I was feeling a little light-headed at first, but soon settled into a medium paced hike through Lukla village, noting with a wry smile the Starbucks branch there.

We passed through village after village, peopled with exactly the kind of red-cheeked, white-smiled, huge load-carrying Nepalis we'd seen in countless photos, plus an assortment of unbearably cute small dumpy children in huge woolly hats. Bagbir pointed out apple trees and vegetable patches, and schools being built through foreign aid.

We had to push the pace a little, so there was no time to stop and chat en route, but we did squeeze in a tea break at Bagbir's cousin's house where we were served a plate of Nepali donuts - like yum-yums without the glaze.

"You have a headtorch?" asked Bagbir, with a note of concern in his voice as he eyed the gathering gloom outside.

We finished our teas and set off again, pushing against the tiredness and breathlessness, until we gratefully arrived in Phakding in more or less full darkness, and checked into the Beer Garden lodge.
Our previous reading on lodges in the hills had led us to expect little more than a shed with some bunks, but this lodge had a twin room with a couple of lightbulbs, two relatively comfortable mattresses, and a western-style porcelain toilet across the steps - all spotlessly clean. No heating though, and the night was cold and surprisingly damp after the dustiness of the trail.

The dinner menu was extensive, our Nepali hostess sang a constant ditty in a sweet voice, and after a delicious meal of Dal Baat, we retired. We climbed gratefully into our sleeping bags, thinking that fleece liners were the best invention ever, and were asleep by 8:30, for night of altitude-induced vivid dreams and numerous trips to the loo, up at 6 for the long next days hike to Namche.