Never in my wildest dreams would i have envisaged seeing snow capped mountains on a beautiful sunny day for 6 days on the trot.
The last time i was in Nepal- i spent a month staring at what appeared to be a mountain range covered in a layer of mist. Only once did i glimpse the "fishtail" mountain - Machhapuchhre (on the left).
I guess i should start at the beginning...my friends and i started our adventure from Heathrow. We did not meet up officially with our group & guide from Explore until Kathmandu but we were positive we would be spotting others way before then. What we didn't expect was every other person on our flight to be wearing trekking boots & ruck sacks! Not a hope of meeting our group until the designated time. I started speaking to an obvious trekker carrying Explore documents..Patrick was the first member of our group. Soon enough we met up with the others waiting for our connecting flight from Delhi. Ever been through Delhi?? Allow an hour for security...it is a crazy system of women in one queue, your coat & shoes in another & bundles of baggage tickets on everything including your plastic bags. Our group seemed like a good bunch - we were the youngest at first glance. By the time we arrived in Kathmandu we were ready for some shut eye.
I guess i should start at the beginning...my friends and i started our adventure from Heathrow. We did not meet up officially with our group & guide from Explore until Kathmandu but we were positive we would be spotting others way before then. What we didn't expect was every other person on our flight to be wearing trekking boots & ruck sacks! Not a hope of meeting our group until the designated time. I started speaking to an obvious trekker carrying Explore documents..Patrick was the first member of our group. Soon enough we met up with the others waiting for our connecting flight from Delhi. Ever been through Delhi?? Allow an hour for security...it is a crazy system of women in one queue, your coat & shoes in another & bundles of baggage tickets on everything including your plastic bags. Our group seemed like a good bunch - we were the youngest at first glance. By the time we arrived in Kathmandu we were ready for some shut eye.
Jangbu - our guide was a friendly soul. He bundled us into a bus & we inched our way towards our luxury hotel. Two nights here & some sight seeing with a man who had one tone of voice - brilliant english but i started nodding off early on! Finally our group was complete with 3 canadians, and 9 english including a plucky 22 year old called Anna, by the time we ended up at the airport ready to board our little plane to the scariest airport on this planet - Lukla. Our last group member - james rocked up late after falling asleep at Delhi. He joined us later that day after jogging the first few kms in the dark with an unfortunate incident with a yak...big, hairy creatures that carried our bags the entire trek. James was clearly going to be the entertainer for the trip. We almost lost him to an escape mission to the Maldives but we convinced him the cold, lack of oxygen and dodgy toilets were all character building!!!
Days 1-6 were blissfully sunny as we steadily made progress upwards. There were lots of hair raising bridges (James was also scared of heights)
Our phrase of the day soon became "yak attack". As every corner produced another line of yaks who walk precariously close to you and if you're not on the right side of the track (away from the edge) you could find yourself abseiling down cliff faces. As time went on and we grew wearier - there were so many yak expressions that left us in fits of laughter. The lack of oxygen was becoming evident by that stage. Tea Houses provided accommodation along the route. We usually walked for 6 hours, stopped for 11am tea and lunch and then at about 3pm. Dinner was always at 6.30pm and consisted of soup ((particularly pungent garlic one helps with altitude sickness apparently), rice or pasta & tinned fruit for dessert. We were fed well and always waited on by our sherpas - Dawa, Furger & Golpa. Apologies for spelling the names completely wrong. My attempts at learning sherpa were severely restricted by the fact that most sherpas these days speak nepali so they kept forgetting the words!!! These guys were unbelievable. By the time we reached 4000m some of us were seeing the signs of altitude sickenss...headaches & vomiting. The sherpas looked out for us 24/7, taking our ruck sacks when we were flagging and making sure we had our shades on etc
By day 7 of the trek my memory becomes hazy as i was one of the few not taking anti altitude sickness tablets. That soon changed! For many of us - our lowest points were reached at a place called Lobuche (4910m) where you can only describe the tea house as basic in every shape and form. The toilet was undesirable and for the first time i watched steam coming out from the hole in the ground as i was squatting! It was cold, really cold and we were tired. The khumbu cough that everyone seems to get with the ice cold air you're breathing in all day was in full force at that lodge. The next day we ascended to Gorak Shep - the highest tea house of our trek at 5140m. By this stage i was surprised how weak i felt. I attempted to walk at 5am to Kala Pattar - our highest point but after 40mins of shuffling for two steps and stopping to rest, i gave up. It had beaten me fair and square. Most of our group conquered this and base camp everest but the strain really showed as we began to descend. Gorak Shep will always be the place i will never return to for the stench in the corridors coming from the loos & the cold!!!! Some of us resorted to buckets as the toilet facilities were so unappealing (no names).
Heading back down was a relief. It was still tough going but with each tea house we knew it would get easier. We re-visited Namche Bazaar - one of my favourite stops where we spent 2 days acclimatising before our ascent. It served the BEST food and was the only time i personally went to the chef to thank her! Good food warms your cockles on a trek like this. It was just as good coming down. One thing we did religiously on our trek was to walk clockwise around the prayer stones and spin the wheels for good luck. 
Little did we know at this stage that we were going to have amble time on our hands to spin merrily around the wheels while waiting at lukla for the fog to lift and the planes to land. That has to be the most bizarre part of the trip. weather has always been an issue with this airport as the conditions have to be good for any planes to land or take off. When we got there, we joined 1500 other trekkers stranded. It became obvious that we were "stuck" and would have to get used to waiting...having not showered or washed our hair for 2 weeks we were dying for that hotel in Kathmandu. By day 3 we just wanted out of there!!! We were the lucky ones. Some had been there 7 days. We found an old cinema in the basement of a bar where you could pay 200rupees each to hire it out. We had car seats for cushions, the clomp clomp of shoes in the bar above & freezing cold drafts but it was 3 hours of time killed watching the slowest moving film ever. The other form of entertainment was a set of scales outdoors that we visited once a day or more for the sheer pleasure of seeing how our weight had dropped off!!! Eventually the British Embassy agreed to military helicopters taking some of the trekkers off the mountain and soon we were washed and clean at our hotel in kathmandu. Our group had split up by then so the last supper was a funny affair in a trekkers restaurant with giant size feet all over the walls showing other groups trips to base camp everest.
Little did we know at this stage that we were going to have amble time on our hands to spin merrily around the wheels while waiting at lukla for the fog to lift and the planes to land. That has to be the most bizarre part of the trip. weather has always been an issue with this airport as the conditions have to be good for any planes to land or take off. When we got there, we joined 1500 other trekkers stranded. It became obvious that we were "stuck" and would have to get used to waiting...having not showered or washed our hair for 2 weeks we were dying for that hotel in Kathmandu. By day 3 we just wanted out of there!!! We were the lucky ones. Some had been there 7 days. We found an old cinema in the basement of a bar where you could pay 200rupees each to hire it out. We had car seats for cushions, the clomp clomp of shoes in the bar above & freezing cold drafts but it was 3 hours of time killed watching the slowest moving film ever. The other form of entertainment was a set of scales outdoors that we visited once a day or more for the sheer pleasure of seeing how our weight had dropped off!!! Eventually the British Embassy agreed to military helicopters taking some of the trekkers off the mountain and soon we were washed and clean at our hotel in kathmandu. Our group had split up by then so the last supper was a funny affair in a trekkers restaurant with giant size feet all over the walls showing other groups trips to base camp everest.
What a trip, what memories and what a way to end it all! Thankfully i popped into the Seeing Hands Massage Clinic in Kathmandu before the trek so got to have my massage as the last part of our trip was devoid with the flight delay. I guess i have a reason to return to Nepal again....this country gets under your skin and comes out your nose/mouth!!!
Chiran and Laxmi, the blind massage therapists at the Kathmandu Clinic. Three members of our group - Andrey, Pelham and Hilary joined me for a sports massage and thoroughly recommend it pre/post trek.
