Kinders and Kathmandu: To the Top of the World

My family was scheduled to arrive in Kathmandu on March 5, but due to a Turkish Airlines crash on the only runway at the only international airport in the country, they ended up stranded in Guangzhou, China for 2 extra days. But that's a story for another day.

Look how clean we are!

My mom, dad, and uncle finally arrived, and we were able to move our flight to Lukla forward a couple days so we still had enough time to prep for the trek up to Everest Base Camp. We got to the domestic airport on time for our 8am flight, but were further delayed by a broken cargo door on the 15 person plane, that Turkish plane still ominously in the distance half on it's side.

The 30-minute flight from Kathmandu to Lukla is stunning, until you come around the last bend, with a stomach churning descent, and you see the runway that must defy some laws of physics. Maybe things work differently in the mountain. I ended up closing my eyes until I felt the plane hit the pavement, then opened them to the "WELCOME" paint on the concrete wall less than 50 metres from where the plane stops. Welcome to your death. But we made it.

Lukla's runway is angled downward so it slows down planes landing and gravity helps a bit with take off. We watched many more planes come and go while we had our breakfast, and these guys really seem to know what they're doing. You just have to trust this place and how everything works. Nepal always comes through.

The landscapes here are unbelievably beautiful and utterly, utterly vast. You can walk for hours and "that mountain" in the distance doesn't seem to get any closer. Staying in the tea houses is one step up from camping, and the conditions were less than comfortable, but we stayed dry and warmish for most of the trek. There's a lot more of the harsh and sometimes disgusting realities of doing this trek that I'll leave out of this post, but know this wasn't just a simple walk in the park. There is no "break" from the trek. It goes down as one of the hardest physical things I've ever done. We were fortunate to have an absolutely wonderful guide and porters.

Day 1: Lukla - Monju

We landed in Lukla at nearly 2800m, already starting out at 70% of the oxygen content that we're used to at sea level. This first part of the trek starts with a downhill section, taking you down to about 2400m, then back up to 2700 by the end of the day. We walked for a total of 6 hours, stopping in the town of Phakding (had fun saying that one) for lunch. I don't know the total of kilometres distance walked, space is measured more in terms of altitude and time. And it's always up. Even when it's down it's up.

There is only a walking path that fits people and animals. There are no vehicles and very few offshoots from the main route. We were still more than happy to have a guide to lead us. Sometimes there was barely enough space for porters or horses or dzokyo (cow/yak hybrids). You have to quickly move to the side so you don't get bumped off the path. The animals are all very tame, and we only had one "incident" with a dzokyo. It's amazing how many people are on the trail at any given time. We were never alone for very long.

Bridges and mountains and valleys

Littles with sticks.

We reached the Sherpa Guest House in Monju in the late afternoon (I didn't wear a watch), and had dinner and went directly to bed. I think we slept for 9-12 hours most nights, though sleep at altitude isn't exactly restful. More on that later.

All of the guest houses are basically the same along the way - you get a very basic, drafty room for about $2 a night, and are expected to have your meals at the same establishment until you move on. There's no heat, and only sometimes glacier-cold running water, a shared toilet, paper thin walls, and critters running around in the night. The conditions were better than I had originally expected, although it gets pretty rough the further up you get.

Aww, our first bridge.

Day 2: Manju - Namche Bazaar

We got into a routine of getting up around 6am, having breakfast, and hitting the road by 7 or 7:30. On our second day we left Manju and headed UP to Namche Bazaar. This was our first taste of what going up at altitude would really be like. There are stairs and stairs and stairs, and then more stairs around the corner. Again, we never really checked the actual distance walked horizontally, everyone only cares about the elevation. This area is full of bridges and rivers and waterfalls, and we also saw a film crew using drones for something. They couldn't say what they were working on.

One of many hills.

On this day we went from 2700m to 3400m. You really start to feel the lack of oxygen at this point. I think it was at about 65% here. Your dreams get completely bizarre if you do manage to actually sleep, and you'll sometimes wake up with your heart pounding while everything tries to catch up. It's a pretty scary feeling.

Namche Bazaar is the last, and only, big stop before you get to the hard part of the trek. It's full of outdoor gear stores, a couple banks, coffee shops, grocery stores, and guest houses. It seems that these towns rely solely on tourism for their economy, though there are schools are up here so some people must live here year round.

We were up in the town before lunch so we had time in the afternoon to visit the Sagarmatha museum, which had some neat climbing and local artificacts, and info about the area.

Tenzing Monument with Everest in the distance

This is a really busy place so our guest house was full of other trekkers and we met some cool people from all over. We were chatting with some Americans whose friend had just been helicoptered down from higher up due to a lung infection that turned really serious. That turned out to be the first of many emergencies we heard about.

We were also lucky enough to get a glimpse of Everest on the way up the hill.

Everest with Cloud Hat

Day 3: Namche Bazaar Acclimation with Day Hike

Namche from above

Hike high, sleep low. That's the general rule for getting acclimated. On our third day we did a 7-hour hike into the twin villages of Khumjung and Khunde to get some more elevation and keep our legs moving. Guess what, more up. The villages sit at about 3700m so we climbed pretty high that day. We stopped at a fancy Japanese hotel at the top of the hill for a break and then toured through.

We brought some school supplies and clothes to the Hillary school in Khumjung, which they were happy to receive.

This was our first taste of the snow and cold that we were really coming into. The villages were very remote but very peaceful. We enjoyed a Tibetan style lunch in Khumjung as well.

We went to the "Starbucks" for afternoon coffee, and it turns out our guide, Basu, is also a pretty accomplished musician, so he grabbed a guitar and he and my dad played and sang a few songs. An audience gathered in no time.

Heyyy Namche

There's a market every Saturday here, and they were setting up on the Friday night we were there, so we went and checked it out for a bit. It didn't hold the Tibetan treasures of the East Orient we imagined, it was mainly rarer grocery items and clothing that porters only bring up once a week. It was more for the locals but it was still a fun atmosphere to check out.

Shopping with Mama

Busy Streets

Day 4: Namche Bazaar - Pangboche

This was one of our crazier days. We hiked for a total of about 9 hours. One of the most brutal parts of the trek is the sort of warm up period before your heart and lungs remember what oxygen level you're at. The first 10 minutes going up the stairs (it's always up) of Namche felt like agony. But then you're completely fine.

The more pleasant parts of the trail are rolling, hilly paths with beautiful views. They don't tend to last very long. We came down a long descent into a town called Phunki, where my dad started to feel very sick, so we stopped at a random tea house and had a traditional lunch. It was actually nice to have something even more authentic than at the guest houses.

We spent another 2 hours climbing up to Tengboche, site of a famous monastery. It started to get very cold with a little bit of snow up here. Mom started having a hard time with her sinus infection, coupled with the cold and the elevation.

Tengboche (from the Monastery steps)

We assumed this was where we were stopping for the night, since we'd already hiked for 7 hours, but no, we had 2 more to go! For some reason we took the route less travelled, and ended up on this icy path of death, overlooking a crevasse with a glacier river below.

One slip and you're toast.

I don't have any photos of the next part, because it was so terrifying and my camera was carefully stowed. We apparently took the "new" trail, which involved shimmying across actual cliff faces above the crevasse. I'm not actually sure how we survived, it was really scary.

Mom was still struggling with the breathing and was a little behind the rest of us. Uncle Brian and I had gone quite a bit ahead when a man on a horse comes galloping by. Brian didn't see him so I yelled out and he barely missed being thrown off the trail. We finally see the village so we keep walking and we hear the horse come up behind us. We turn around and Mom is there, grinning on top of the horse.

The night we spent at Pangboche was the start of the colder evenings to come. Our guest house had the rooms detached from the dining room and the bathroom was also outside which means boots on every time. This village sits at about 3900m, so oxygen supplies at this point were getting even thinner.

Day 5: Pangboche - Dingboche

This was by far one of the easiest walking days. We left the cold guest house at Pangboche (though they win the award for best tea with their fresh picked mint leaves) and headed up the trail to Dingboche. The journey was only about 3.5 hours, and brought us up to about 4300m. After the other relentless mountains, a few staircases here and there seemed like nothing. This is where things started to get really real.

The snow started to fall just as we were arriving. We stayed at the Everest View Guesthouse. We couldn't see Everest this time because of the cloud cover, but we already got one glimpse a few days earlier and had more to come. Dingboche seems to be the last stop before you get into the real land of winter. This was one of our 2-day acclimation stops, which ended up working in our favour. The conditions were very cold from here on in.

Snowfall on a Stupa

Day 6: Dingboche Acclimation Day and Snowfall

We woke up to a big snowfall on the morning of day 6. I went to the dining hall to find Brian and Basu with grim expressions. We would have to turn back if the storm didn't let up. The winds and snow were fierce farther north. I kept the faith. Nepal has a crazy way of always coming through.

AMS stands for Acute Mountain Sickness, but we decided the S was for Stupidity instead. Your brain starts to come up with some pretty silly stuff up here. Even the most simple tasks can be incredibly confusing, and you're constantly misplacing things.

This day we had a scheduled acclimation hike. We went up about 200 extra metres and saw the path we'd continue on the next day. The snow and ice got fairly intense so we made it a shorter day and went back to the village to rest up and get our supplies together.

Solid Gold

This was also our first experience with the 'ceremonial dung fire', as we referred to it as. We were higher than the tree line so the fires were all burned with dried dzokyo dung. A girl would show up with a big bowl of it and toss it into the stove. It could get quite smoky, so we think this may have been a big contributor to the lung infection my dad ended up with.

My headlamp decided to break and get stuck on flashing party mode in the middle of the night. I had to get on my down jacket, boots, and gloves to make my way to the toilet with the frozen...liquid on the floor. Strobe light party bathroom.

Oh, and before that we ended the day with a beautiful sunset. Nepal always comes through. Red sky at night, sailor's delight.

Day 7: Dingboche to Lobuche

By this time in the trek you're pretty much into the whole routine. It's actually kind of a relief to get moving in the morning because your sleep is terribly fitful and you're generally always cold. The food is good but a little plain and repetitive. There comes a point when no amount of the magic green sauce will make it any more interesting. I had assumed the worst was over since we'd already gained so much altitude and didn't have much more to climb, but I was oh so wrong. Even walking flat at this altitude is exhausting.

Promising Start

Every day starts with an uphill climb out of the village. Even when we headed down it still started with an ascent. The hill in the background of the above photo led us out of Dingboche, starting with a 150m climb. At this elevation every step is deliberate and kind of agonizing.

After crossing the Great Snow Plains of Endor (we gave everything awesome fantasy names), we reached Dugla/Thukla where we had lunch and fuelled up in preparation for the daunting Thukla Pass. I thought some of the other sections were hard, but this was by far the most painstakingly brutal and relentless uphill climb of the whole thing. I think it took us about two hours to CLIMB A HILL. The altitude does not care about age or level of physical fitness - it will get to you. At this point it's not like you can just turn around so up we went.

awful awful awful

At the top of Thukla Pass is a sort of Sherpa cemetery. It's a peaceful and beautiful place where you can see the big mountains in two directions.

Mama made it!

After more snow fields and about 6 hours we reached Lobuche at an elevation of about 4900m. This is where my mom started to really struggle with her cold and the altitude, and dad started getting a really bad cough. Our guide took us to go check out this pyramid research centre, but on the way my parents started feeling really bad so we turned back to the guest house. All the dung on the mountain couldn't heat the place enough to make it actually warm.

Lobuche

Day 8: Lobuche - Gorak Shep - Base Camp

The land of Always Winter.

After a heroic effort at 5000m, my parents decided to turn back from Lobuche the next morning. Dad's cough was getting worse, and Mom was struggling badly with her cold and the altitude. Many trekkers don't even make it this far, and we heard reports and saw lots of helicopters coming up to take people back who couldn't make it. We sorted out details with our porters and our guide: Uncle Brian and I would continue up with our guide Basu and our porter Nanda, and Mom and Dad would head down with our other porter Milan acting as their guide.

See you in a couple days!

Uncle Brian and I left first thing in the morning for the 2.5 hour slog up to Gorak Shep. This is the last village on the map before you hit Base Camp, and the weather conditions are generally horrible. It was many degrees below freezing when we arrived and checked into our guest house. There are only a handful of buildings in this village, and it's only inhabited in the good trekking months. We had a short break with some lunch and then decided to just push ourselves up to Base Camp.

The final 2 hours to the top were a lot more challenging than I had anticipated. I had imagined the walk to Base Camp as a sort of wide open space where you'd eventually come to the spot. No, it was more icy, treacherous trails going up and down along a skinny little mountain. I slipped quite a few times and had a couple bad falls which resulted in one bent pole, but no falling off the cliff.

This region is part of the Khumbu Glacier, and in this last part of the trek you're actually on the glacier itself. There are frozen lakes and translucent blue glacier bits that look like they're glowing. It's really like you're in a completely different world. We hiked along the ice trail and then climbed down and across to the middle mound of the glacier to reach Base Camp.

Taylor, Brian, and Basu

And suddenly...you're there. There's no fanfare, you don't get a special medal. To be honest, we were so cold and tired we couldn't wait to get back and start heading down. We were more excited later. You can't really see Everest from the Base Camp, which sits at 5364m above sea level, and there are crazy people who climb to the summit which is still another 3500m up. Just beyond the shrine area is the place where climbers actually set up camp. We could see some of the tents and there are many porters coming in carrying climbing gear and food and ladders.

We left some offerings up at the shrine - some little mementos, some new prayer flags, and I had an owl feather from Cowichan in my hair that I brought aaallll the way from home to put up there too. And that was that. We snapped a few photos and headed another 2 hours in the cold back to Gorak Shep. It was getting even colder by this point so the path was even more dangerous.

Magical glowing glacier ice.

We made it back to Gorak Shep mid-afternoon where we celebrated with rice and freezing cold temperatures. This was definitely the most rustic guest house. There was no running water whatsoever, the dung fire did basically nothing, and the one functional bathroom had a toilet covered in frozen diarrhea and vomit. We wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. The weather report said it went down to about -35 the night we stayed there. We slept in our clothes and jackets. I think I wore the same outfit for three days in a row. I was originally worried about the gross factor, but you get over it after about the second day. Electronics and medicines don't do well in the cold, so we also got used to each sleeping with a bundle filled with cameras, phones, batteries, and contact lenses. My phone made it up to Base Camp and survived taking photos up there. There was randomly 3G in Gorak Shep of all places so I was able to send updates when we made it and then my phone decided to brick itself. Some combination of the intense cold and altitude caused some component to fail.

We spent 10 miserable hours trying to get some rest in Gorak Shep before we had a quick breakfast and got the heck outta there.

That ice is on the INSIDE

Day 9 - Gorak Shep - Pangboche

I don't have many photos from this day as we were trying to get the heck down as quickly as possible. Our original schedule had us getting up to Base Camp this morning, but I'm very glad that we just pushed it and went up the day before. Getting out of Gorak Shep was incredibly hard and painful. My gloves weren't good enough and my hands were basically frozen so I couldn't even use my sticks. Though one was bent anyway from the day before. We had to go UP again to get out of the village, and the oxygen level was just brutal. I ended up giving my backpack to Basu to carry because I just couldn't do it. We made it to Lobuche for a hot drink before heading down the Thukla Pass. That thing was also horrible on the way down. A lot of the trek would have been much easier without ice on the path, but we got 'er done. We stopped for lunch again at the bottom of the hill in Thukla, then headed for the snowy plains. The plan was to meet my parents in Dingboche, but after hiking down for 7 hours it turned out Dad was getting worse so they had left for the next town on the map. So, we went for another two hour walk down to Pangboche. Dad's lung infection had turned pretty nasty and our guide and the hosts at the guest house insisted he get off the mountain as soon as possible. Our wonderful host arranged a rescue helicopter to come first thing the next morning.

Day 10 - Pangboche - Kathmandu...

We prepped our bags and made arrangements again with our guide and porters to deal with splitting the group. Dad needed to be flown down to get to the hospital right away and Mom and I would go with him. Uncle Brian would take Basu and one of the porters to rightfully complete the trek.

The entire village gathered to watch the helicopter land in a farmer's field. A pile of supplies had to come out of it first before me, Mom, Dad, and our porter Nanda could get in. It took off with the villagers and a bunch of trekkers watching. Pretty exciting.

Burnt-faced co-pilots

It took less than 10 minutes to fly to Lukla (about 5 days walking up), where we dropped off Nanda and refuelled.

I was secretly relieved that we didn't have to take the terror flight out of Lukla off the sloped runway.

It was still about 30 minutes back to the Kathmandu airport where we got a taxi to one of the nicer hospitals. Dad was seen immediately. They did full blood work, x-ray, and gave fluids along with better antibiotics for the infection. He has improved greatly. We are thankful no one ended up with anything worse. We saw some trekkers in the hospital who were suffering injuries from bad falls or worse respiratory conditions.

We all have some variation of the Khumbu Cough, which a lot trekkers get just from the conditions up there. It's pretty much guaranteed that you will end up with something. Some just get it worse than others.

It doesn't even merit a big photo.

OH - and the helicopter landed in this weird airplane graveyard section of the airport where what do we land beside but that stupid Turkish plane that crashed and started this whole mess.

Day 11-13: Rest and Trek Completion

We spent the next couple days resting at the house while Dad improved. Uncle Brian completed the descent two days faster than we had originally scheduled. The flights from Lukla are flexible and will take you back to Kathmandu when you arrive.

Adjusting to "normal" oxygen levels is also a thing. The heart and lungs get used to working up high so it's a bit of a shock to the system when you're back down. Also hiking in extreme conditions for 6-9 hours a day every day for over a week is fairly exhausting. Our legs and feet are in surprisingly good shape. Faces and lips were completely fried and wind burnt, though those are healing up pretty quickly. We apologized profusely when we dropped off our laundry.