Everest Base Camp (or not)

Maybe it's the fact that in 12 hours we leave for two weeks in Tibet, but once again, we're gonna try to resist the urge to wax too rhapsodic about our 17-day trek through the Himalayas. But all the pictures are up! Click on the Photos link on the side and you'll see our albums on Everest, the Nepali MS150, and our trip through Kathmandu and Royal Chitwan National Park. As for the trek, here's some highlights:

The Beginning - Twenty minutes into our 16-day trek, after reading extensively about the perils of altitude sickness, we passed a group coming down led by a twentysomething woman being led on a horse. She was sheet white and clearly was riding because she wasn't able to walk. As we gave her what we thought were understanding smiles, she glared at us and said "In two weeks, you'll understand."

The Israelis - Israelis probably have the worst reputation of any nationality on the traveller's circuit (even worse than Americans, gasp!). According to the lore, they're loud, obnoxious, cheap, and only hang out with each other. There are also tons of them everywhere. They usually take a year (or two, or ten) off after their mandatory military service and travel to the most remote parts of the world. On day five of our trek, we met six Israeli guys who killed all the stereotypes (okay, almost, they are loud, but we loved it). When we came upon them on the
trail, one had just eaten a yak poop patty on a dare for a prize of 10 Snickers bars from his buddies. He also got a bonus of explosive diarrhea two days later. Later that day, we watched two of the guys carry a Frenchwoman suffering from altitude sickness who had been deserted by her tour group back down the trail for hours till they got her to safety. They taught us card games, helped hone our bargaining skills, and made us laugh over and over again.

Dirk - Around the same time, we met Dirk, a 38 year-old Belgian father of two, the happiest house-husband we've ever met, completely committed to never having a job for the rest of his life. He and his wife have hitchhiked their way through Mongolia, Tibet, Alaska, and Southeast Asia. On the first night they met, she moved into his house and never left. He's been up and down every trail in the Himalayas, and guided us around, putting up with our smelly farts, our weird American jokes, and our constantly changing hiking plans. He even fed us Nutella sandwiches and hot lemonade on the trail. We miss him already.

The Blizzard - We carefully planned our schedule so that for our hardest climb over a huge, steep, slippery pass, we'd hike to the nearest village the afternoon before. Unfortunately, at 2pm when we started our hike, a massive blizzard hit and after 20 minutes, we had to turn around and go back because we couldn't see the trail, each other, or the crevasses in
the glacier that we shouldn't fall into. We cursed the weather gods because we knew it would mean a killer climb over the pass the next day, but we soon changed our tune when the storm passed and we climbed up a nearby hill and took another look at the longest glacier in the world,
covered in snow, surrounded by mountains. It was one of the most beautiful things we've ever seen in our lives.

The Porters - They are freaking unbelievable. Most days we saw over a hundred guys, carrying stuff up and down the mountains. There's no roads into any of these villages, so anything that comes up, comes up on either yaks or backs (with the occasional exception of a helicopter drop). This includes cases of beer, sheets of plywood, 2X4s, meat carcasses, dairy whitener, Pringles, and of course, chocolate. As we were making our way up switchback after switchback, we watched a 5'5" guy walk by in flip-flops carring two 50kg bags of rice up. That's 100 kgs (220 lbs). Stunning.

The Climbs - The first few days of trekking were pretty chill. In order to avoid altitude sickness, you only want to gain about 1000 feet a day, which in the straight-up Himalayas usually means an hour (or two) of hiking. But once we hit 15,000 feet, we got more hardcore, climbing up to between 17,500 and 19,000 feet on four consecutive days. We got little headaches, we got little everything-aches, but we saw some absolutely gorgeous views, at least when the clouds didn't come in and wipe out all our visibility. After the final climb (over the Cho-La pass), our legs were completely worked and even the tiniest little uphill stretch along our descent back to home base made us whince.

The Change in Plans - We started out fixin' to go to Everest Base Camp. We ended doing everything but that. We decided that instead of spending our trip trying to see the world's hightest mountain, we'd rather search for frozen alpine lakes, uninhabited and uninhibited views, and the, ahem, road less travelled. Just about every day we changed our plans somehow, and that was good. But someday, we're just gonna have to come back and make it to Base Camp.

The Deep-Fried Snickers- On what we thought was our last night of hiking (until a storm came in and grounded all the planes the next day), we ordered up a "Khumbu Glacier Melt" from our local lodge. It turned out to be a Snickers bar deep-fried in pastry. It was so good that we had to have another one the next night. Luckily the clouds parted and we flew back to Kathmandu before we were able to make it a threepeat.

The Yak Bells - Every once in a while, you think there's really no other being left on earth around you. You're dwarfed by the mountains around you and you feel absolutely isolated from everything. Then you hear a strange little tinkling sound and see a big hairy yak looking down at you, slowly loping up the trail, with a well-worn bell dangling from its neck, cutting through the harsh wind and telling you you're not alone. We love the yak. And the nak (its female counterpart).

The End - And then, after seventeen days, no showers, a couple pounds of chocolate, 20 helpings of chow mein and dal, and a whole lot of smelly, dirty underwear, we were done. After a day's delay because of grounded aircraft, we boarded our 10-seater plane and made our way back to Kathmandu, exhausted, exhilirated, ecstatic. Life in the Himalayas...is good.