It has taken quite a few days for me to be able to write about the hike to Base Camp. I think there were a combination of reasons for that. Mainly it was sheer exhaustion. At altitude you sleep so poorly, then your body works so hard to do every single thing - even tying a shoelace takes your breath away! The other thing I found was that it was difficult to think that clearly at altitude, so sitting down to blog was really not compelling. And if those weren’t reason enough, there was the matter of cost too.... it’s difficult to be creative and spontaneous when the cost to use the internet in some of the higher villages was more than $1 per minute. So, enough of excuses, now I’m at a hotel with free internet in Kathmandu and feel compelled to share a little of what Everest Base Camp and the trek is like.
It’s impossible to separate Base Camp from the trek. If you were to view Base Camp in isolation, you could almost be disappointed - when we arrived, the climbing season was over, so all that stood there was a big rock with Everest Base Camp graffitied on it (probably by Australians!) and prayer flags flapping in the breeze haphazardly. Down on the valley floor below us was the enormous Khumbu glacier with white peaks all over it like the top of a pavlova. And looking up towards where Mt Everest was hidden behind Nuptse and Lhotse we could see the Khumbu icefall tumbling down to the glacier. To give an idea of the scale of the icefall, in a story about climbing Mt Everest that I’ve been reading, the author Beck Weathers describes his experience of attempting the icefall like being an ant at the bottom of the icebox. And that’s only the very beginning of an Everest ascent!
Describing what you see at Base Camp misses the main part of the story of the Everest Base Camp trek in my experience. From the beginning we realised that the entire journey is the destination. We spent a fortnight on the trail - we flew into Lukla on Thursday 4 November all clean, bright eyed and full of anticipation; by the time we stumbled back into Lukla on Thursday 18 November we looked and felt quite wild and utterly exhausted. We hadn’t showered for 8 days, our few clothes hadn’t been washed for a fortnight and we were looking a little skinny and dehydrated - not surprising given that we’d just completed 104km of trekking, gaining and losing almost 7000m of altitude over that time.
The hiking begins in forested hill country and passes through lots of little villages where the people live very simple lives, tending their small crops and operating small tea shops or lodges to feed and accommodate the thousands of trekkers who pass by each spring and autumn. When the sun is out, it’s warm, but in these villages once the sun has set, life is lived inside in darkened kitchens warmed by the fire. We were lucky enough to stay in a couple of smaller lodges where you are almost part of the family for the evening. I loved having that chance to watch them busy around the stove making up the dishes fresh as we ordered them.
On some days the hiking is really hard and long - the steep uphills into Namche Bazaar and Tengboche come instantly to mind. They were gruelling days with endless ‘switchbacks’, where the trail just turns back and forward upon itself going higher and higher without respite. But as difficult as we found those sections, we could never moan about it, because we were constantly passing or being passed by porters, who carried hugely laden baskets on their backs supported by a strap across their heads. My backpack weighed about 14kg, Damien’s about 20kg. We found those weights hard to bear on some sections. The porters carry loads of up to 140kg. And they are not big people, they are short and typically small framed. It was humbling to see how hard they have to labour to make their small wages. And it was somewhat confronting to see that most of the goods they carted up and down those mountains were the ‘essential’ supplies for western travellers - beer, softdrinks, cigarettes, tinned juices, bottled water.
There is no road access along the base camp trail. Every building material is walked in either on the back of porters, or on the back of cattle trains. So it is startling to rise up and up, into the high mountain territory and come across a town like Namche Bazaar. For hundreds of years this village has been a major trading point between Tibet and Nepal. When we returned to Namche on our way back we were happy to witness that this is still the case. In the potato field behind our lodge, Tibetan traders who had crossed the high pass between Mt Everest and PumoRi, had set up a market selling clothes and blankets from China to the Nepalese porters. The Tibetans had very basic tarpaulin tents for shelter, but our lodge owner told us they don’t sleep in them, they worry that their big bag loads of goods will be stolen overnight, so they sleep on their piles of merchandise. For us this was an insight into lives of such deprivation and hardship that I found difficult to comprehend.
From Namche Bazaar onwards, acclimitising to the altitude was the rule governing how far we could hike in a day. So there were a few days where we just had a 2 to 3 hour hike then spent the afternoons lazing (recovering) about the lodges. This sounds a whole lot more salubrious than it was. In all of the villages, there is a kind of rule that the warming stove in the dining room doesn’t get lit until 4 or 4.30pm. We were absolutely blessed with fantastic weather every single morning of our hike - clear blue skies and cloudless mornings. After the sun rose above the high peaks around 9am and we started hiking, we were really quite warm while we hiked. Once we stopped walking however we cooled down very quickly. And as I wrote from Pheriche, the clouds would follow us up the valley as we hiked and by early afternoon there was typically full cloud cover which took away all of the sun’s delicious heat. So on days where we only had a short hike, we typically would pass the afternoon just lying in our sleeping bags, reading books and waiting until the dining room heated up.
The landscape changed day by day, growing more extreme the higher we ascended. Tall fir trees along the lower parts of the valley gave way to smaller gnarly rhododendrons and junipers with spanish moss draped from their limbs. As we rose up to Dukla and towards Lobuche, plant life disappeared altogether, replaced by harsh rocky slopes. By Gorak Shep, the final village before Base Camp it was just a completely inhuman environment. I thought it looked more lunar than earthly.
So by the time we trudged our way into Everest Base Camp, our heads were already filled with the whole experience of getting there, surviving the elements and achieving a goal that we had both held in our sights for so long. These are just a few of the impressions that come to mind of the journey to Base Camp. We hiked up Kala Pattar the next morning to get a view of the mountain we had come to see (you don’t see Everest from Base Camp). It was so gruelling that we couldn’t really celebrate it at the time. There was no energy for high fiving or whooping and back slapping. I think we shook hands and took photos. That was effort enough.
The journey back from EBC as we now know it was also eventful. But enough for now. I’m in Kathmandu and it’s breakfast time. They make a wonderful coffee here..... I’ll write about the homeward journey another time.
It’s impossible to separate Base Camp from the trek. If you were to view Base Camp in isolation, you could almost be disappointed - when we arrived, the climbing season was over, so all that stood there was a big rock with Everest Base Camp graffitied on it (probably by Australians!) and prayer flags flapping in the breeze haphazardly. Down on the valley floor below us was the enormous Khumbu glacier with white peaks all over it like the top of a pavlova. And looking up towards where Mt Everest was hidden behind Nuptse and Lhotse we could see the Khumbu icefall tumbling down to the glacier. To give an idea of the scale of the icefall, in a story about climbing Mt Everest that I’ve been reading, the author Beck Weathers describes his experience of attempting the icefall like being an ant at the bottom of the icebox. And that’s only the very beginning of an Everest ascent!
Describing what you see at Base Camp misses the main part of the story of the Everest Base Camp trek in my experience. From the beginning we realised that the entire journey is the destination. We spent a fortnight on the trail - we flew into Lukla on Thursday 4 November all clean, bright eyed and full of anticipation; by the time we stumbled back into Lukla on Thursday 18 November we looked and felt quite wild and utterly exhausted. We hadn’t showered for 8 days, our few clothes hadn’t been washed for a fortnight and we were looking a little skinny and dehydrated - not surprising given that we’d just completed 104km of trekking, gaining and losing almost 7000m of altitude over that time.
The hiking begins in forested hill country and passes through lots of little villages where the people live very simple lives, tending their small crops and operating small tea shops or lodges to feed and accommodate the thousands of trekkers who pass by each spring and autumn. When the sun is out, it’s warm, but in these villages once the sun has set, life is lived inside in darkened kitchens warmed by the fire. We were lucky enough to stay in a couple of smaller lodges where you are almost part of the family for the evening. I loved having that chance to watch them busy around the stove making up the dishes fresh as we ordered them.
On some days the hiking is really hard and long - the steep uphills into Namche Bazaar and Tengboche come instantly to mind. They were gruelling days with endless ‘switchbacks’, where the trail just turns back and forward upon itself going higher and higher without respite. But as difficult as we found those sections, we could never moan about it, because we were constantly passing or being passed by porters, who carried hugely laden baskets on their backs supported by a strap across their heads. My backpack weighed about 14kg, Damien’s about 20kg. We found those weights hard to bear on some sections. The porters carry loads of up to 140kg. And they are not big people, they are short and typically small framed. It was humbling to see how hard they have to labour to make their small wages. And it was somewhat confronting to see that most of the goods they carted up and down those mountains were the ‘essential’ supplies for western travellers - beer, softdrinks, cigarettes, tinned juices, bottled water.
There is no road access along the base camp trail. Every building material is walked in either on the back of porters, or on the back of cattle trains. So it is startling to rise up and up, into the high mountain territory and come across a town like Namche Bazaar. For hundreds of years this village has been a major trading point between Tibet and Nepal. When we returned to Namche on our way back we were happy to witness that this is still the case. In the potato field behind our lodge, Tibetan traders who had crossed the high pass between Mt Everest and PumoRi, had set up a market selling clothes and blankets from China to the Nepalese porters. The Tibetans had very basic tarpaulin tents for shelter, but our lodge owner told us they don’t sleep in them, they worry that their big bag loads of goods will be stolen overnight, so they sleep on their piles of merchandise. For us this was an insight into lives of such deprivation and hardship that I found difficult to comprehend.
From Namche Bazaar onwards, acclimitising to the altitude was the rule governing how far we could hike in a day. So there were a few days where we just had a 2 to 3 hour hike then spent the afternoons lazing (recovering) about the lodges. This sounds a whole lot more salubrious than it was. In all of the villages, there is a kind of rule that the warming stove in the dining room doesn’t get lit until 4 or 4.30pm. We were absolutely blessed with fantastic weather every single morning of our hike - clear blue skies and cloudless mornings. After the sun rose above the high peaks around 9am and we started hiking, we were really quite warm while we hiked. Once we stopped walking however we cooled down very quickly. And as I wrote from Pheriche, the clouds would follow us up the valley as we hiked and by early afternoon there was typically full cloud cover which took away all of the sun’s delicious heat. So on days where we only had a short hike, we typically would pass the afternoon just lying in our sleeping bags, reading books and waiting until the dining room heated up.
The landscape changed day by day, growing more extreme the higher we ascended. Tall fir trees along the lower parts of the valley gave way to smaller gnarly rhododendrons and junipers with spanish moss draped from their limbs. As we rose up to Dukla and towards Lobuche, plant life disappeared altogether, replaced by harsh rocky slopes. By Gorak Shep, the final village before Base Camp it was just a completely inhuman environment. I thought it looked more lunar than earthly.
So by the time we trudged our way into Everest Base Camp, our heads were already filled with the whole experience of getting there, surviving the elements and achieving a goal that we had both held in our sights for so long. These are just a few of the impressions that come to mind of the journey to Base Camp. We hiked up Kala Pattar the next morning to get a view of the mountain we had come to see (you don’t see Everest from Base Camp). It was so gruelling that we couldn’t really celebrate it at the time. There was no energy for high fiving or whooping and back slapping. I think we shook hands and took photos. That was effort enough.
The journey back from EBC as we now know it was also eventful. But enough for now. I’m in Kathmandu and it’s breakfast time. They make a wonderful coffee here..... I’ll write about the homeward journey another time.