First and foremost, for anyone that saw the news about the plane crash at Lukla yesterday, everyone in our group is safe. I’m not sure what all made it to western news channels, but a plane taking off from Lukla lost control and crashed into a parked helicopter at the bottom of the runway, killing 3 and injuring 4. Because WiFi is getting increasingly sparse up here though, I unfortunately don’t know much more than that (ie, what caused the plane to lose control on takeoff). Our thoughts go out to the victims and their families, and hopefully there’s something that can be learned from this incident to prevent another one like it from happening again. Scary stuff.

As for our group, we’re continuing to progress our way up the Khumbu Valley towards Everest Base Camp. Two days ago we left the bustling village of Namche Bazar and trekked to Pangboche. The route took us up the valley that has Lhotse dominating the skyline at the end of it and Ama Dablam on the righthand side; and although it was overcast for most of it, the views through the clouds were still incredible.

About 5 miles into the trek we descended down to the river and then took a steep turn upwards to the town of Tengboche (which sits on a ridge about 1,200ft above the river). There are two notable things about Tengboche; 1) an impressive Buddhist Monastery (which was unfortunately closed for prayer when we arrived), and 2) a bakery that serves-up some amazing cakes. It felt completely out of place, but after huffing & puffing up this gigantic hill and arriving at a very sparsely populated village, it was a rather incredible sight to walk into a random bakery and be treated to a dozen different cakes sitting there on serving trays. Needless to say, we took a quick 30min break and enjoyed a slice of mocha chocolate cake (hey, who said you couldn’t enjoy the finer things in life while trekking to EBC??).

After another hour of trekking post-Tengboche, we arrived in Pangboche – a smaller town at the foot of Ama Dablam (in fact, base camp for climbing Ama Dablam isn’t too far away).

The tea house at Pangboche was a bit more rustic than that at Namche (rooms were separated from the main house and thus much colder at night, toilets without toilet seats, etc.), but the views from the house were pretty incredible.

April 14th: Pangboche to Dingboche

The hike to Dingboche was a relatively easy one, following the river up some 1,500ft vertical and passing by a number of shrines. All in all it only took us 2hrs to complete the trek, which worked out well because it started hailing and snowing shortly after we arrived at our tea house. And it didn’t stop hailing and/or snowing all afternoon, which meant we were confined to the common room at the tea house all afternoon playing cards and/or reading books (I’ve already finished my first book, but luckily procured a new one from one of the other members on our expedition. With any luck, EBC will be half the book-trading utopia I’m hoping it’ll be…).

Our next day in Dingboche (ie, today) was to be a rest day. But if we’ve learned anything, our rest days are anything but restful. After breakfast we laced up our boots and headed out for a trek up a nearby mountain overlooking the valley. This mountain took us over 2,000ft vertical above Dingboche to an elevation of over 16,500ft (Katie’s new elevation PR!). The views from the top were incredible. Directly across the valley was Ama Dablam (I promise I’ll stop talking about this mountain soon…), and further up was Lhotse, Island Peak, Baruntse, and Makalu (which I imagine might as well be made up names for 98% of the people reading this blog… but, a mountain blogger’s gotta drop names, you see). After snapping some pics at the top, we headed back down to the tea house for lunch and… what we typically do in the afternoon: lounging around.

Ok, to close things out, I figured I’d end with a few things that might impress you…

1) Our head Sherpa, Jangbo, has summited Everest 19 times (putting him 4th on the all-time list), K2 twice, and summited 7,000m Baruntse with a dog…

2) I wrote this whole blog post from my phone with trademark sideways typing (finding a place to charge my laptop is becoming increasingly difficult…)

3) Each photo I upload to these blog posts takes about 60min due to the limited WiFi bandwidth, so, umm… I hope y’all are sufficiently appreciating these pics… 🙂

I hadn’t intended on posting today seeing as how I just inundated everyone with an entirely too lengthy post yesterday, but given I’ve already paid for the WiFi (and given I’m a man prone to maximizing the value of a buck – especially in this economy…), I felt compelled to provide an update on both our “rest day”, as well as a few other interesting odds & ends observations from our trip.

First, our rest day activities in Namche Bazar.  We awoke again to another beautifully sunny morning (in fact, we’ve had such good weather the past few days, that it’s hard to imagine that only a week ago this place was covered in 2ft of snow and experiencing “ground blizzards” (whatever those are).  As part of our rest day activities, we hiked about an hour up the trail towards Khumjung to what I can only describe as one of the most incredible views I’ve ever seen… After climbing 1,200ft you reach a plateau where 3 of the most prominent mountains on planet earth (Everest, Lhotse and Ama Dablam) dominate the horizon.  Even if you’re not a mountaineering geek, it’s a sight to behold. The sheer scale of everything was incredible. To put it somewhat in perspective (since my iPhone photos certainly won’t), imagine standing on a plateau looking at mountains that extend over 15,000ft above you, while the valley below you is over 4,000ft down. The Himalaya are truly just on a different scale. I’d say I shed a tear, but it was too windy for tears to form (whew – gotta keep up appearances as a rugged mountain man).

Ok, some other odds & ends that I’ve found kind of interesting, and in no particular order…

Tea Houses: I’m not sure what I thought these things were going to look like, but it’s not this…  They basically look like Swiss Chalets on the outside, but are constructed with plywood on the inside.  There’s usually a common room where everyone sits around chatting, reading and/or playing cards. Tea is plentiful (go figure), and the food is… well food. I’ll leave it at that. Oh, and they usually have funny names like: The Hill Ten, The Four Season, Comfort Inn, etc.

Alcohol: is priced very interestingly.  Apparently in Nepal alcohol is taxed based on volume, not on alcohol %, so a beer cost as much as a martini.  Also, while a beer cost ~$8 (which seems reasonable), you can get a private room at a tea house for ~$5/night.  Where else on earth can you get a room for ½ the cost of a beer???

Porters, Yaks & Donkeys: the primary means of ferrying equipment and supplies up to these villages (and also Base Camp) is via either donkeys, yaks and/or human porters. What’s kind of amazing though is that the human porters seem to be carrying the heaviest loads. It’s absolutely incredible to watch some of these guys hauling what must be well over 100lbs of supplies up some of these hills with make-shift carrying contraptions that wrap around their foreheads.

Ok, that’s it for now!  Tomorrow we’re heading up to Tengboche (~12,700ft), and then on to Dingboche (~14,500ft) the following day.  Assuming I can get Wifi at Dingboche, I’ll try to post again from there.

Hello from Namche Bazar!  A lot has happened since we left Kathmandu a few days ago, but not to worry – your novice blogger has been taking copious notes :). So without further adieu, here’s a recap on all that’s transpired…

April 9th: Kathmandu –> Lukla

We met our group at midnight to begin loading bags onto vans to make the drive to Ramechhap where we hoped to skip the lines in KTM and get on a flight to Lukla. Although Ramechhap was less than 100 miles away, it took us ~4.5hrs to make the overnight drive – climbing steeply up through the mountains, and oftentimes driving on severely rutted out roads littered with debris from prior rock slides (always comforting). Because it was the middle of the night, I couldn’t see much, but occasionally distant lightning would illuminate the surrounding area, revealing enormous landscapes of mountains and valleys.

Shortly after 5am we arrived at the tiny airstrip in Ramechhap where we waited for the sun to come up and hoped for the rain to stop (since rain meant the flights would be grounded).  Luckily for us, both happened, and by ~6am we were loading onto the 16-passenger twin prop plane and headed off for Lukla.

The flight to Lukla was beautiful as we weaved our way through valleys with gigantic Himalayan peaks looming far above us.  It’s hard to overemphasize the scale of these mountains – they’re simply enormous.  After about 30min of flying, the infamous Lukla airstrip appeared in the distance. For those that aren’t familiar with the Lukla airport, it’s worth spending 30sec and YouTube’ing it (I’d upload the videos I took of planes landing and taking off, but the wifi here would laugh at me if I attempted such a thing…).  In short, the Lukla airport is a tiny airstrip perched precariously atop a cliff with a steeply inclined runway that can’t be more than a couple hundred yards long. It uses this incline when planes land to assist with braking on the short runway, and uses the decline to help acceleration when taking off (and hopefully you get enough help on that acceleration because the runway just runs off the edge of a cliff…).

Fortunately for us, we landed safely in Lukla around 7a and headed over to the Namaste Lodge to grab breakfast and wait for our bags to arrive.  An interesting thing about flying these regional planes in Nepal – your bags don’t fly with you… Why? Apparently it’s because the planes can only carry so much weight (not surprising) and because people are paying passengers whereas luggage isn’t (I suppose also not surprising?).  So the flight operators always opt to maximize the number of people on the first flights and then (hopefully) send your bags on later flights. Last I saw, mine and Katie’s duffel bags were lying in the mud underneath a heaping pile of other luggage in Ramechhap.

Unfortunately for us and our luggage, the weather continued to worsen in Lukla, and around 12p we got the notification that all flights were canceled for the remainder of the day (which meant our luggage wasn’t coming today, and also meant that we weren’t leaving Lukla).  Oh well, there are worse places to be stuck. Aside from the airport, Lukla is a small town (probably only a ¼ mile from end to end) with a number of lodges and restaurants that play host to hundreds of tourists that are here to trek in the Himalaya.

April 10th: Lukla → Phakding

We awoke around 7a to a beautiful sunny morning and to the sounds of planes taking off and landing (apparently it has been unseasonably cold and snowy this spring, so the sun seemed to be quite the respite for people that had been up here for a while).  What’s more – our bags finally arrived! So after a quick breakfast, we set off around 10a to officially begin the trek to Everest Base Camp!

The first day of this trek would be a very easy downhill hike to the village of Phakding. While it was only ~2hrs away, it was nice to finally stretch our legs after so much sitting around.  The hike took us through a number of small, but very picturesque, villages and by dozens of Buddhist shrines – adorned with prayer wheels and surrounded by boulders that had been carved to create Buddhist prayers in relief (which must’ve taken forever to create…).

We arrived at our tea house at Phakding shortly after 12p, and as I sat in the sun, sipping on tea next to Katie, and thinking to myself how wonderful everything was, a random realization hit me…  I had left my Kindle in Kathmandu (F@#K!!!!!!!!). It’s hard to describe the feeling of dread this immediately created – I had only brought one extra physical book, and at the pace at which things moved in the mountain, this would mean I’d be without reading material for 90% of the trip…  I quickly implored everyone on the trip to not just randomly leave their finished books at the tea houses, but to instead save them for me. Time will tell if that’ll be enough, or if I’ll just start talking to myself like a mad man out of sheer boredom…

April 11th: Phakding → Namche Bazar

We again awoke to a beautifully sunny morning, and were eager to hit the trail as today’s trek would take us further up the Khumbu Valley to the village of Namche Bazar – some 3,000ft vertical above us at Phakding.

For today’s post, I’m going to let the pictures do most of the talking…  One notable thing though was that we got our first sighting/glimpse of Everest!  And man, does it look intimidating…

Hello from Kathmandu!  After 30+ hrs of traveling, we finally arrived in Nepal around midday on Sunday (man it takes a long time to get here; also, no signs of Bob Seger yet…).  For those that haven’t been here before, Kathmandu is a pretty frenetic place. Honking cars, motorbikes and seemingly unfazed pedestrians share the crowded streets; but the telecommunications network is second to none (just check out the pic below – this place isn’t going to let a couple tangled wires stand in between you and your communication/electrical needs…).

But for all its busyness, it’s also proven to be a very laid back and friendly place.  Katie and I are actually sitting outside in a very pleasant courtyard enjoying a couple drinks while I write this – essentially enjoying the calm before the storm, and shaking off the cobwebs of what felt like a never-ending trip to get over here. Speaking of which, a couple highlights from that trip…

• Books: Katie has this theory that leaving books in places is a nice way of spreading literature across the world. Which, if you’re in a hostel, hotel or library, sure… But if you’re in an airport and you just leave it sitting in a random seat outside the gate, well I’d call that littering… What was funny about this time is that after Katie left her most recently read book at the gate in LAX, there were numerous calls over the plane’s intercom seeking for the book’s owner. What don’t these China Southern airline people get about trying to spread a little literary love!?? Also, I think Katie finished 3 entire books on the trip over here (I, on the other hand, logged a few chapters in a single book in between in-flight movies…).
• Bags: for about 6hrs, one of my worst traveling nightmares came true… When Katie and I went to collect our bags at the Kathmandu airport, we discovered that one of them hadn’t made it – and it just happened to be the bag with my most expensive pieces of climbing gear (namely, my boots). Oh, and per usual, I opted not get the trip interruption insurance, so it was looking like I was about to go on a very expensive shopping trip in Kathmandu… Luckily we later learned that the bag was on the next flight, so aside from having to brave the Nepalese traffic to/from the airport for an additional time (btw, while the airport was only ~3mi from our hotel, it takes ~45min to travel that distance by car), everything worked out. Whew!

Ok, back in Kathmandu… Last night we got to meet many members of the various teams that’re here for Summit Climb expeditions (which is the outfitter).  All in, there are probably ~40 people across: Everest (from both the Nepal and Tibet sides), Lhotse (4th tallest mountain in the world), Cho Oyu (6th tallest), Island Peak, people signed up to climb up to Camp 3 on Everest, and people signed up to go to Everest Base Camp (again, on both the Nepal and Tibet sides).  For the Everest expedition (Nepal side, which is what I’m on), there are 4 people: myself, 2 Brits and an Iranian.

For those of us going to Lukla (which is essentially anyone not going to Tibet or Cho Oyu), we also found out earlier this morning that instead of flying up there tomorrow morning (as originally planned), we’re now leaving at midnight tonight. Apparently the last week has brought a ton of rain to the region, and as a result, all flights between Kathmandu & Lukla have been grounded – creating quite the backlog of people trying to catch those flights.  So our solution – hop in vans and drive 4hrs thru the night to another airport to catch a less crowded/backlogged flight to Lukla (making this 3 out of the last 4 nights slept in a moving vehicle…).

Ok, that’s it for now – next post will likely be from a tea house somewhere in the Khumbu Valley on our trek up to Base Camp.  Oh, and along those lines – one other thing I learned this morning… It may not be possible to charge my laptop once at Base Camp, which means these posts will be coming from my iPhone (which for those of you that know me well, means LOTS of sideways typing… :)).  Talk again soon!!