Once Upon a Time in Khumbu
Tales From the Roof of the World
“‘There’s no sense in going further — it’s the edge of cultivation,’
So they said, and I believed it — broke my land and sowed my crop
Built my barns and strung my fences in the little border station
Tucked away below the foothills where the trails run out and stop.
Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes
On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated, so:
‘Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’”
— Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Explorer’ (1898)
“I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar.”
— Harold Brodkey, ‘Manipulations’ (1975)
“Stories are always good to tell, lah?” Ganesh, my young guide, was announcing in his Singaporean-accented King’s English as he led the way up the rocks. “But sometimes, it’s nice to just be in a place and enjoy it — without building around the memories too quickly.”
It was just before five in the morning on a winter Saturday in Nepal, and we were climbing to a sharply-pitched turn in the trail near the top of Kala Patthar — a slope that makes up the western side of the giant ravine cradling the Khumbu Glacier. In normal circumstances, this 18,000 foot piece of Earth might reasonably be called a mountain, but given its company, the Sherpas refer to the effort towards its summit as a “walk to the viewpoint.” Looking east from that spot, we stared over the Khumbu and squarely into the faces of Nuptse, Lhotse, and Everest. These real mountains — along with Pumori and Lobuche, just behind us — surround the high-altitude basin on three sides, rising sharply and sporadically like the teeth of a predator. Nestled between them is the glacier — the beast’s icey-blue tongue — which at its tip is home to Everest’s base camp, and further back slides down the throat of the landscape, melting into rivers that quench the valleys below.
Although the hour belonged to the night, to call it dark outside would have been untrue. A big crescent moon was shining down on that amphitheater of summits and glaciers, and the snow covering their silhouettes made them look as if they were wearing white tee shirts to a party with black lights. As we climbed we were stalked by their ghostly silver luminescence. 45 minutes passed, sipping tea and shaking out limbs to avoid the stinging cold air, until finally a pale orange light started to spill into the sky from underneath the outline of the range.
Ganesh and I had hiked for more than a week to reach that point, and after spending a few moments taking in the high-Himalayan daybreak, it would be time to head back down.
One
Qatar Airways flight 646 left Doha at dawn, and on that Wednesday morning the plane was sent off from the airport southbound, which allowed it to loop back around the city and stare down towards the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert for a fleeting moment before banking east. Finding a window on the left side of the not-too-crowded plane, I was caught staring at the Southern coast of Iran — a long stretch of void shorelines, the color of rust, that stair-step up into the Persian Plateau and the dry lands of Central Asia. It was turning into a perfectly clear day and the desert sent a wide nebulous glow up towards the sky. We crossed over into Pakistan, and soon enough, the hills became capped with snow. I had naively planned to catch up on some much needed sleep after a trio of international flights, but that would never happen on a ride like this — my eyes were glued to the windows.
Eventually we barreled over the tribal lands of Balochistan, which were downright lunar — a bleached patch of terrain scattered with black sand and pocked with dark, crater-like depressions. We got as far as Karachi before really turning North, flanking Afghanistan and reaching the fertile Indus River valley. The Indus cuts straight down through Pakistan and offers a welcome rush of live-giving moisture to the desert. It’s one of three hugely important rivers in South Asia, emanating from lakes and glaciers that dwell deep within the Himalaya — along with the Ganges, which sweeps across Northern India and empties in the Bay of Bengal (or, if you like, “flows from the foot of Vishnu through Siva’s hair”); and the Brahmaputra, which runs East of Bhutan and curls back into India to meet the same end. The rivers are squeezed around the corners of the subcontinent like the creases of a crooked smile; the Himalaya in between them forms a set of sharp lips. Those peaks are just one part of the long highland region — stretching from Kyrgyzstan in the west to Burma in the east — that also includes the Pamir, Hindu Kush, and Karakoram ranges. Our plane pointed its nose right between Islamabad and Delhi. The biggest mountains on Earth were not far off the horizon.
Our minds, which usually want to think of maps in terms of their tidy and familiar political borders, will likely jump to the country of Nepal whenever that mythical word Everest is heard. But Nepal is home to only half of the mountain, sharing it with Tibet (or China, depending on where you’re reading this) — the line on a relief map cuts straight through the summit. Some of the imaginative haze around even the single word itself can be partly traced back to the circumstances of Everest’s two relatively insular home countries, one being a closed-off kingdom and the other being defined by its quiet religious devotion and unique geography. Both were largely untethered to external world affairs for most of history. This was not a peak located in the Alps, staring down at clean-lunged European alpinists who fancied themselves sportsmen, daring them to take an extra week’s vacation and try to come on up on the way to their next getaway in Saint-Tropez. It was — as far as Westerners were concerned — impossibly distant and hard to reach, which probably only made it more alluring (when George Mallory, an early Everest-obsessed climber who may have been the first to reach the top, was asked why he wanted to summit it so badly, he famously answered: “Because it’s there.”) Around the midpoint of last century, almost at the very same time, Tibet came under the administrative control of China — which then closed off the region to foreigners — and Nepal opened its borders to the outside world. For climbers and future tourists, the pendulum of Everest accessibility had swung in Nepal’s direction. Today, the country is a frontier and a focal point in more than one way — geographically, it is a land where the Indian Tectonic Plate has smashed against the Eurasian; culturally, it is a home to diverse groups of peoples that span Asia’s lineages; spiritually, it is a place where Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam meet.
Our plane neared the mountains, and suddenly, the straight line of the horizon began to rise and fall sharply like the LCD pulsing on a heart monitor. We flew along the Himalaya’s southern edge toward central Nepal. It soon became strangely clear that the peaks were hulking very nearly as high as the plane. A local expert in the seat behind me started ticking them off out loud to a friend: “…Annapurna, Daulaghiri, Pumori, Ama Dablam…” And then it came into vision — one cluster of mass standing a notch higher than all the rest — Everest above them still, a thick, three-sided black and white pyramid.
Pretty much everyone — even the Nepalis, but especially the westerners — had their necks craned towards the port windows as we descended into Kathmandu.
There are other places, many of which in Southeast Asia, that can wonderfully overwhelm you with a tidal wave of motorbikes and scooters as soon as you leave the bounds of the airport — but instantly, Kathmandu felt like it contained more underlying swell than even these. I met Ganesh, for the first time, and squeezed through a crowded vein of enterprising taxi drivers before hopping on his bike. One big bag on each lap, we pulled out of the parking lot and into the engulfing grasp of the city. The collective energy of a few million people was channelled into a chaotic road-bound swarm of humming metal. The last time I had been outside was in the subzero temperature of a departures terminal in Fairbanks, Alaska, and the sticky air enveloped me immediately — plus my head was spinning from the quick transition between being surrounded by tourists in the international arrivals queue to being completely submerged in this new, strange, colorful, intense world. My mind raced almost as fast as our bike in a futile attempt to keep up with the change.
In that brief first evening, it seemed that in Kathmandu everyone was happy to have you, but no one was really pestering you. Plenty of smiles were dished back and forth amongst the city-goers. Hawkers and restaurant owners were keen to invite you in, but never to harass. Nepal is a land home to an extremely diverse collection of people, and as long as you kept your head on a swivel and didn’t step in front of any scooters, you were maybe welcomed to be one of them, if only briefly.
On the first morning I woke up early, before the sun rose high enough to illuminate the narrow, alley-like streets, and slowly the sounds of life returned to the city from their nightly slumber. The aluminum grates of shop stalls were pushed up one by one, footsteps moved past the hotel, pigeons chattered, the smell of burning incense crept into the window. Eventually I went out for a coffee, turned the corner, and was greeted by a proper Kathmandu morning: sights to match the sounds and smells. Passages were choked with a loud medley of motorbikes and rickshaws, shopkeepers tended to their huge baskets of vegetables or tea, a group of men huddled around a wood fire on the edge of the street frying a few eggs for breakfast, neglected dogs bounded around. I had found a good street-side spot when a man drifted over to the table, clearly drunk and in a rough way, asking where I was from. “The States,” I replied without really engaging, and in a garbled stammer, he came back with the surprising comment: “Washington, sahib, gimme harder one. I’ve known them all.” This altered my mien immediately — I understood the situation and was now fully game — and I pressed him on England, Canada, Indonesia, and Wales. He slurred the capitals back for each with no difficulty in thought, only communication. Lon-dawn. Ottahwah. J’karta. Cardff. As I tried to process what this man’s story was, what he had been up to for the last few hours, and how he acquired an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of world capitals, the shopkeeper noticed the situation and came outside to move him along. “Alright, how about Senegal?” I said a bit louder, as he was being pushed away down the street. Dah-kar. He knew it immediately, and waved me off, deciding that I couldn’t hang. But I’d like to think that I do know a few world capitals, and what good at all is knowing a few world capitals if you can’t meet the challenge of an impromptu geographic joust over coffee on a street in Kathmandu? One last turn, trying to be clever and nearly shouting now, I challenged: “Bolivia!” Without even looking, he yelled back, hanging on to the word: “La Pazzz!” A few seconds passed, and I almost started to form a victorious smile. “…and also Sooh-cray, sahib, yuhl have t’do bit better than that!” He stumbled away around the corner — off to the library, I thought.
Lunch was had in a garden cafe that was soon turned into a local Foreign Correspondent’s Club chapter by a group of French and German diplomats who wore suits, smoked cigarettes, and discussed global affairs in a triad of languages. In my extremely limited, half-day experience, I noted the potent and strange international blood type that was coursing through this city’s veins. The Kingdom had always been closed to visitors, and now it was full of them. That tension between cultural tradition and modernity in developing countries could hardly have a more appropriate image than a young monk that I walked past that day, solemnly following his abbot, wearing customary Buddhist robes and a Balenciaga hat.
Later that night, Ganesh and I spent a few hours going over the trip to Base Camp — planning supplies, arranging finances, packing gear, going over the itinerary. The thin and twisted streets of Thamel — Kathmandu’s hub for international visitors and adventurers about to head into the mountains — are lined with stalls offering experiences of all kinds. While we were finalizing our own matters, I kept one ear tuned in to the plan being discussed next door — some spiritual European wanted to take a full set of hand drums up Annapurna, and was structuring a particularly shrewd deal (that would have caught the attention of a Wall Street banker had this been happening in a La Colombe on 42nd Street) in which he would purchase a yak to carry the instruments high on the mountain, and then have the animal killed and prepared for him once he got up there.
But our own plans were set, and early the next morning, we tossed our bags in a jeep and set off for the domestic airport. Moving through these local terminals is a very different experience than doing so in their international counterparts — where colorfully-branded tourists jump on planes to Abu Dhabi or Singapore or Doha and then connect to far-flung places that many local Nepalis will never get the chance to visit. No, in the domestic terminal people are moving about their own country, heading to weddings and work functions and festivals and funerals. There were three gates, each boarding four or five flights at the same time, below a frenzied competition for the small room’s speaker system. The few of us outliers with big backpacks and trekking poles in tow are all heading to Lukla — the launching point into the Khumbu region, the trailhead for Everest. We eventually were called outside onto a haggard old bus, which stalled on the way out to the tarmac, and rolled by a military hangar filled with Russian-made helicopters before reaching our own tiny, ten-seat plane. The thin fuselage made the propellers outside sound deafening, and as they started everyone was pushed back into their seats, not necessarily because of speed but because the motor was dead one moment and alive the next; it flicked on with extravagant power and jolted the plane forward down the runway.
We lifted above the outskirts of Kathmandu. Later on in the trip, after the trek to Base Camp was done with, I would take a bus out of the capital and come into closer view of the terrible, grinding poverty present in these city fringes. The English subtitles on the signage would disappear not long after leaving the tourist district. Rivers cutting through the urban spaces — so clear and ethereal up on the mountain — were littered with trash and populated mostly by stray dogs. Entire neighborhoods of rotting hovels were overflowing with people. By most measures, Nepal is the poorest country in Asia behind only Afghanistan, North Korea, and Yemen — two of which have been torn at the seams by war and one of which is singularly despotic. It would be easy for a trekker or a climber, heading from their hotel straight out to the Himalayas and then back home, to forget this inconvenient fact. The vibrancies and excitements of a visit through Thamel do fade into an often difficult life for most Nepalis as you travel outwards. At the very edge of town, our bus would make a brief stop to pick up a pair of passengers. Just as the wheels started moving again, two young kids — maybe brother and sister — came up to the vehicle and motioned to their mouths and stomachs, asking for food. But it was too late, we had already begun pulling away. They looked on with dirty, wanting faces, and then turned back to the street to try again. We had been separated by a small piece of glass and an entire world at the same time. But from the air, it was too easy to be blissfully ignorant of the inveterate dereliction down on the ground, and the colorful tin roofs of Kathmandu sprawled across the valley and then up over the hills like wildflowers.
Inside of our loud little plane, a milky smog hanging over the city soon dissipated into cleaner and higher cold air that could be felt invading the cabin. The noisy, functioning madness of the capital was now behind us. After a few minutes airborne, Eastern Nepal’s rolling hills grew spines and transformed into mountains, which rose until their summits looked down on us from well above the altitude of the plane. Our pilots weaved through them expertly despite our plane being rattled by pockets of dicey air and wind, but landing in Lukla is not for the aerially-afraid. The runway is cut into the side of a ridge at 10,000 feet, pitched uphill at a 12% gradient, and extremely short, so the captain has to get those shaking wheels on the ground and then bring the vehicle to a very quick stop by turning off the main incline and into a small parking lot.
We hopped out into the high Himalayan air, stepped off the runway, and turned two corners to put us on the main cobblestone drag of Lukla. After a quick brekky and a hot tea, we’d be officially on our way.
Two
The journey to Everest’s base camp can be roughly split into thirds. The first is spent in the company of the lower Dudh Kosi river, walking along both sides of its banks, crossing over it by way of high hanging suspension bridges and looking upwards along hills cloaked in Rhododendron, Juniper, and Pine. The second begins at Namche Bazaar, the largest village on the path, and from this point until Dingboche or Pheriche (depending on one’s route) things get tougher on the brain and the lungs — constantly moving up and down ridge lines, now within the technical bounds of Sagarmatha National Park. The final third begins with a flank west, to move around the collection of peaks of which Everest is a part, and then north onto the Khumbu glacier, which acts as a highway to take you to the Goddess Mother’s base.
Exiting the gates of Lukla — thresholds that we wouldn’t walk back through for another twelve days — Ganesh and I descended a boomerang in the trail and into the massive gorge of the Dudh Kosi to kick things off. In the morning sun, the glacial-fed river reflected the color of blue gatorade, strewn with massive boulders and slithering around the protruding ridges like a Himalayan Pit Viper.
Those incipient hours of the jaunt were a truly ambrosial undertaking. We trotted along, passed prayer stones (being sure to always walk on their left, as to be properly welcomed onto the mountain), took in the sunlight, and had a few Everest Lagers at lunchtime. It was a Friday, no less. That night we shacked up in a guesthouse where Ganesh had stayed before — we had it all to ourselves, as we would have most places for the rest of the hike — with a Tibetan couple who had opened their home to travelers beginning a few years prior. Their place was located in the village of Phakding, which was only a few hours walk from Lukla, which meant it was only a few hours walk from the airport, and thus only a few hours walk from the wider world of resources — so this ended up being one of the most comfortable places we would stay for the next pair of weeks. As we moved further away from the trailhead, the accommodation would become continually threadbare. It’s striking to realize that we were already many, many miles from the nearest road, and that everything existing in the villages without helipads (most of them) had to be carried there. It is especially hard not to notice this on the rare occasion that you find an actual toilet or an esoteric western product on a shop shelf, long distanced from their sources.
Our shelter here was well-appointed with a large food menu, a proud list of global beers, actual WiFi, a TV, modern plumbing, and the mother of all mountain amenities: heat. It also had — tacked crookedly to the back wall in very blasé fashion, like the presence of A-list Hollywood movie stars was not much fussed about — a piece of paper signed by Jake Gyllenhaal and Josh Brolin, along with a pair of kind personal notes that they had written while staying for a night during their shooting of the movie Everest. The furnishings higher in the hills were a bit more sterile, and certainly much colder, but the views outside of a chamber window became increasingly aligned with the Elysian.
A wet gloaming soon settled over Phakding, heavy with blue pre-dusk mist. One of the many benefits of doing this trek in February — trading the warmer spring weather and blooming rhododendrons for the privilege of empty trails — was the solitude for which this timing afforded. Meeting other travelers is always nice, but in situations where you are constantly squeezed into a room with other visitors, the sounds and sense of a place can be easily lost in loud talk and foreign stories. At some points along the way, we happily packed into guesthouses as if they were Minnie’s Haberdashery. But that first night, settling into my own room, which was up in the attic, I was able to listen. From my bed I could hear the voices of kids bouncing off of the stone walls of the village. Bells hanging on the necks of passing yaks, donkeys, and horses rung softly along with the clacking of their hooves on cobbled streets. The river rushed softly down below. That room was very cold, but filled with blankets and pressed between two large windows — it was inviting in its own, high-altitude sort of way.
Waking up from this perch in Phakding, I scrubbed the window free of steam and was caught completely off guard by two hulking peaks that had magically appeared from behind the wall of the river valley. The Dudh Kosi was looked after, watched over, by these sentries. They must have been covered in an invisibility cloak of high fog for all of the day before — the clouds being barely noticeable — but now, at six on a Saturday morning, their razor-sharp ridges were lit by the moon and slicing upward to pierce the predawn sky. They were Numbur and Tengi Ragu Tau, welcoming us into the weekend.
Just before leaving, on a fencepost near the toilet around back of the guesthouse, I came across a limerick written in clean hand:
There once was a man from Phakding
Who fancied himself one day’s king
But he met a nice girl
And narrowed his world
So today all he has is this ring.
Doubtless penned by some itinerant Anglo bachelor, the ink looked like it was still wet — this was definitely a recent scribble — and I thought we might run into the author at some point down the line. With a bowl of thick porridge and a wave, we left Phakding behind.
It was a full day’s hike to Namche Bazaar, which is by far the largest village on the trail; it is the hub of commerce and human connection within the Khumbu region. Namche — “Sherpa HQ,” as Ganesh calls it — sits in a concave depression at the top of a ridge like a giant bowl, being stared at by the summit of Kongde Ri from across the gash of a deep valley. Its layout is what I might assume is medieval: a stone labyrinth of nooks, crannies, overlapping alleys, and havens thrown like a tangled net up the side of a steep hill. We had followed a young Sherpa family — mom, dad, two young girls, and a piggybacking baby boy — up the twisting path that leads from the river up into the town. The kids waddled along the route laughing in their tiny colorful puffer jackets, always taking the steepest shortcuts, and no rest stops.
Our accommodation in Namche was exceedingly cold and lean, but our young host was warm and generous. The place was a single long hallway with a small kitchen at one end — with walls as thin as plywood boards, many missing windows, and thin mattresses stacked on the floor. Given its obvious insulation issues, I might have said at first that it was a shelter offering protection from the wind, just not the cold — but the shed was angled perfectly towards the consistent alpine zephyr as to propel a below-freezing draft down its chute and over every bed. My piping-hot water bottle slipped out of my sleeping bag that night, and was frozen solid in the morning. But despite the permeating chill, one of the best meals on the mountain was had here. Three of us huddled into the kitchen around a skillet hanging over a wood fire and grabbed a bucket of chang, the milky local rice wine. We dipped into it liberally with plastic measuring cups, smiles growing a bit each time. Our host, a sixteen year-old who was currently dreaming of becoming a chef, pulled a pig shoulder out of the refrigerator and started hacking it to bits on a stump next to the fire using a kukri — a machete carried by many Nepalis that has had practical uses in antiquity spanning everything from preparing hors d’oeuvres to assassinating enemies. The room was small — filled with fresh vegetables and jars of spices, painted Tibetan prayers, and one large picture of the Dalai Lama looking down over our stove. Nothing like knocking a few back and butchering an animal under the dubious gaze of His Holiness. The crispy pork curry was excellent.
After a full extra day spent in Namche to acclimatize to the elevation — in which the official schedule involved staying in bed, reading, and being stuffed full of chapatis, dhal, rice, sweet coffee, and other creations from the aspiring chef down the hall—Ganesh and I made off for the next leg of the journey. Twenty minutes beyond the village square, after bending a corner and getting the first real unobstructed view north, it became immediately clear why this is considered an inflection point on the map. It is a turn in the trail that has made a capital-R-Romantic out of many mountaineers and travelers in modern history. Using the lush green gully of the Dudh Kosi as a pedestal, the snow-white mountains of the high Himalaya launch into the sky. Carved in some celestial workshop, they stretch for the entire scope of one’s vision from left to right, which is a surreal thing when taken on so suddenly. We were already at a decent altitude — about 11,200 feet — but the mountain range in the distance protruded from our hills with such an insane disregard for the normal ratios and standards of nature that it was hard to even make sense of their height; these ridiculous things were almost an additional 20,000 feet higher than we were at that point. The black dome of Everest was smack in the center of this glittering picture, snow and wind blowing off of its peak, with the Herculean mass of Nuptse on the left and the fist-like spike of Ama Dablam on the right.
To this point, the experience had been a ramble through nature, but from this point, it was to be more of a climb. We would constantly be moving up or down, ascending or descending yak-choked switchbacks and quietly monastic stretches of trail, usually followed by two or three dogs, clearing one prominence only to lay eyes on a whole new group of others, settling on high ground for the night and gazing across the valley at some vertiginous hamlet where we’d be sleeping tomorrow, knowing that it would take a full day to get there.
Three
Evenings in the Khumbu were peaceful but brutally cold (has that been established yet?) — everyone was clad in their warmest gear at all times of the day and night. Standard sleeping attire consisted of just about all of one’s clothes, the biggest coat, a subzero sleeping bag, and many blankets. Once the sun went down and dinner had been eaten, there were really only two acceptable places to be as far as the body’s wellbeing was concerned: either the sleeping bag, or huddled within a few centimeters of the ubiquitous cast-iron stove that sat in the middle of most guesthouses, which were heated with dried yak dung (a most renewable resource). The black smoke from the burning excrement would quickly fill eyes with tears and pores with grime, but it was a proper price to be paid for the life-giving warmth of the fire.
The standard guesthouse, or “teahouse,” was not quite as congenially snug as ours in Phakding and not quite as austere as ours in Namche. The spaces were more often than not, people’s homes; they usually were made up of a small kitchen adjoining a sitting room with low benches or cushions on the floor that surrounded a stove, attached to a few extra bedrooms covered with one coat of some brightly-colored paint, with two thin twin beds and plenty of extra blankets. They were usually adorned with a name that used the same formula as all of the other guesthouses (Everest Inn, Ama Dablam Lodge, Khumbu Hotel, Annapurna Suites). One innkeeper with either a very keen cosmopolitan eye or a different business entirely — I couldn’t tell — called his spot The French Laundry. Walking through the streets of a village, you were encouraged by their signs and selling points (ROOFTOP. FLUSH TOILET. GOOD BREAKFAST. HOT SHOWER.) to try and win your business. The windows were tattooed with stickers of all kinds: a Sri Lankan expedition up Everest in 1998, a defunct helicopter charter company in Kashmir, a guide for all of your trekking needs in the Gobi Desert, an outdoor supply store in Wollongong, a flag of Wyoming, a lone instagram handle for who knows who in who knows where. These were worn with pride and acted somewhat like an instant stamp of validation — not unlike a Google review or a TripAdvisor rating. The more stickers, the more that meant this place had hosted many a traveler in the past.
I thought it was enjoyable and funny to hear hikers talk about guesthouses and villages with new expertise, as if a few weeks before they didn’t look at the map of the region as a tangled collection of similarly-sounding places. Yes, we’re heading to Lobuche tonight, and how about yourselves? Wonderful. But which way did you come, through Dingboche or Pheriche? Dingboche, yes, so did we. Heard the Pheriche route was a bit washed out. Stayed at the Everest View as well, lovely spot. Come again? Yes of course we spent a night in Namche, how could you not? Ah, you skipped it and went from Phakding straight through Tengboche to Pangboche? That’s quite a big day, not sure I’d recommend it. Anyways, up to Gorak Shep for us tomorrow — should be a nice push.
A brief note on food. Usually the best way to go about eating, on this trip or anywhere, is to have what the locals are having. The menus at most guesthouses may be large on paper, but surely the quickest way to exclude yourself from the inner circle after arriving in someone’s home is to order macaroni and cheese or a pizza when everyone else in the room is going to make a curry together. That said, the key high-volume dish of Nepal, certainly of the Khumbu region, is dhal bhat — dhal being lentil soup and bhat being rice, usually served with either a curry or spicy gravy to keep things interesting. The dishes are refilled until everything that has been made has been eaten — on queue, five minutes after initial serving, hosts were always happy to come back out of the kitchen and dump more rice onto a plate or soup into a bowl, making most meals effectively bottomless. It is a moving thing to be offered so much by a new acquaintance who has so comparatively little. Regarding protein, it’s whatever is available. If the Buffalo is there, you have your curry with Buffalo. Chicken, yak, or only veggies today? The same. And although they happily would prepare anything (given the supreme generosity of Sherpa hospitality), making someone dig deep for a bit of tired beef or run down the mountain for some pork will not bode well for the intestines or the schedule. Meals here are warmth, get it in quickly and get a lot of it. “Namaste, dhal bhat with whatever’s on, please” — that is one’s protocol on the trail. Incredibly — with the exception of an extremely high-utility brick of pemmican that we were fed for breakfast in Gorak Shep — the food got better and better higher on the mountain.
Five or six days into the journey, my initial trail-bound elation was squarely locked in a confrontation with the altitude and the temperature, and the vibes began to ebb and flow a little. The days were magical, but the Khumbu keeps early hours — and after finishing our trek, having dinner, and playing a few rounds of cards (the Sherpa company that I kept in those weeks were perennial gamblers), everyone would usually be in their sleeping bags by seven or eight o’clock, settling in for a frozen stretch of night. It did, however, feel just right to be reading books by the light of a headlamp, wrapped in many layers of down insulation and breathing ice, while over the hills and far away from home. Even though I was moving through Krakauer and Kipling, not Shakespeare, and only hiking to Base Camp, rather than making an assault on the summit — I felt in some sense to be relieving the glory of olde British expeditions on Everest, dreaming of joining the ranks of the scholar-mountaineer, the itinerant-sportsman, the gentleman-adventurer of long gone, pre-Elizabethan eras. Granted, in contradiction with these Romantic mountain ideas was a strong urge to be sipping gin & tonics in some warm and lovely garden back in Kathmandu, but any second-guesses melted away with the coming of the morning sun; the warmth and the realization of where I was on the planet easily quelled any emerging mutinies of unrest over solitude within the mind.
Four
The saturated colors of the lower Dudh Kosi valley — rich with deep greens and blues — were becoming a thing of the past. We were at that point entering into an entirely different realm of tonal beauty, one coated with the bright whites of snow, the deep grays of alpine limestone, the earthy hues of high-altitude grasses, and the piercing aquamarine of ice.
It was amongst this backdrop that phase three of the trek began, with a walk between Pheriche and Thukla, which to me was probably the most stunning piece of the entire trail apart from its grand finale. This was a single giant gorge with sweeping, symmetrical slopes on both sides, forming almost a perfect letter “U” of a size fit for a God’s alphabet. I viewed it as the gates to the upper Khumbu. On one side, the mountain was black and wore a set of sharp peaks like some demonic crown, and on the other, its counterpart was white and had a single angelic summit — this was a stare-down between alpine good and evil. In the middle wasn’t a gushing blue river, like there had been lower on the trek, but instead a basin of brown farmland — neutral territory — with a trickling pattern of limpid rivulets running across its face and connecting with each other randomly like rainwater down a window. This wasn’t the most common route to take (there was a more popular trail halfway up the side of the “good” mountain), so the few anachronistic structures down here were largely unburdened by the passing of international visitors — they looked like they were truly of a different era in time. They were dark huts made out of stacked stone, certainly with no bright signs out front (GOOD BREAKFAST). Yaks grazed the slopes freely, either munching on some grass or staring off into eternity, as they tend to do. All this amounted to something out of Middle Earth, and Ganesh and I spent an afternoon walking along like Samwise and Frodo on our mission towards Mordor.
We exited this Tolkein-esque scene after a few hours and made the final big directional turn, north, towards Base Camp. It was a steep climb. Tonight we’d stay at “The Pyramid,” an interesting (and warm) anomaly in our run of mountain residences. The Pyramid is an Italian research center with a few guest rooms attached, nestled by itself in a lonely digression off of the main trail. On arrival, we learned that most of the scientists were currently off-duty, and out front there were some Sherpas having tea, chatting happily, and flipping through international radio stations at high volume. A few Himalayan ravens and leonine mastiffs kept them company and lazily welcomed us in.
On the way there we had passed a memorial section of the trail, where markers, stupas and stones pay a tangible respect to climbers lost on Everest. The resplendence of the Buddhist prayer flags — some new and some very old —stood out from the neutral tones of the rocks underneath them; they snapped and fluttered loudly in the high winds that arrived every few minutes. Rob Hall is here (the revered kiwi guide who lost his life in the now infamous 1996 disaster on Everest), and so is Scott Fischer (a well-known American climber who died the same day), along with many other local Sherpas and international alpinists. I took a break next to one plaque — a tribute to three Sherpa legends who had summited various 8,000 meter peaks a combined 25 times and were killed during a terrorist attack in Pakistan. The inscription read: “These men have finally slipped the surly binds of Earth to touch the face of God.”
Being an Italian outpost located on a distant swath of Earth, far from the comforts of home, you would be correct in thinking that The Pyramid had an espresso machine on the premises, but it was unfortunately broken, which killed any hopes of finally getting my hands on that fabled yak milk flat white. The tantalizing elixir of real coffee had once again escaped our grasp. Instead of indulging in a warm cuppa of non-instant, I took a look at the bookshelf — it contained six or seven Dirk Pitt novels, all in Italian, and a few cookbooks, and a user manual for the 2003 Microsoft Office Suite, and a copy of Anna Karenina that I was unprepared to dive into for multiple reasons. The effects of the altitude were making it much tougher to read anyways, so Ganesh and I spent a couple of hours flipping through local channels on the TV — a contraption we hadn’t seen in a week. I learned that many of the Top 20 Nepali music videos are highly sensual, that every country’s version of American Idol seems to have a Simon Cowell figure, and that all the Sherpas present seemed very keen on catching the tail end of the business news. I also met Dom: an American teacher, veteran, and climber (a real scholar-mountaineer) who was spending a few months acclimatizing before his attempt on Everest. His team, if successful, would be the first entirely-Black expedition to make it to the top. Dom infused our time at that stop with inspiring and fascinating conversation, and his trip made my own seem incredibly soft and short in comparison.
The Pyramid did have insulation, and while it wasn’t necessarily warm, the extra few degrees removed that most gelid edge of sleep and made it tough to leave in the morning. An hour’s walk beyond breakfast, we crested a switchback-covered hill formed entirely of boulders, and made the push towards 17,000 feet. One of the very highest permanent human settlements on the planet, Gorak Shep is a small collection of dusty buildings hidden from view behind huge mounds of shifting rock and scree — terrain that is constantly in motion. Emaciated stray dogs, like tumbleweeds, floated back and forth across the landscape. The setting at this point was an uncomfortable combination of very dry, very cold, and very scant of oxygen. But the higher elevation rewards an entirely new view: Everest’s amphitheater.
Five
The village of Gorak Shep is settled just off the edge of the Khumbu Glacier, which becomes visible as it exits the Western Cwm (the long valley between Everest and Nuptse, hidden from this angle, containing the climbing route up Everest) in a jumbled vomit of seracs and ice blocks the size of skyscrapers. The first leg of the path up the big mountain involves a scramble through these terrifying prospects — “the icefall,” as it’s called. Ladders are tied together with ropes and tossed over the giant crevasses, which change form insidiously by the day. I am shamelessly happy to be stopping at Base Camp. Around the camp, the surface of the Khumbu makes itself look a bit more elegant, twisting up into the air like stiff peaks in whipping cream. Further down, towards us, the ice picks up a surface layer of dust and rock that has tumbled down from the surrounding mountains. The insanely deep lacerations in this glacial skin reveal that its blood is not red, but blue…first the pale aqua color of a frozen pond, then a deep sort of ultramarine, and finally — if given the frightening chance to peer down into the hellish subterranean void — black.
Your ears will be happy to remind you that everything is constantly moving up here. Mini rockslides on the path to Gorak Shep rumbled a few times during our walk there. When we finally reached our guesthouse and were about to head inside, a small avalanche cascaded down the face of Pumori, sounding a bit like distant thunder. And further along that day, once we got to Base Camp and were granted a close personal audience with the glacier, its mass could be heard growling from time to time — long, creaking messages from the deep like it was trying to communicate something to the humans on its surface, who didn’t speak the same ancient language of ice and natural power.
Entering the village, while looking at a map of the national park that described our location, I caught another installment of Khumbu poetry written on the post from our limerick-penning friend. It had a similar theme to their earlier piece of work:
There once was a man from Tibet
Who realized he wanted to jet
But the thrill of new lands
Slipped right through his hands
So today mental trips are his bet.
Ink as vivid as a new tattoo. We were hot on this guy’s trail, and bound to get ahold of him soon.
The weather that morning — when we reached Gorak Shep and re-grouped before the four hour, out-and-back sortie to Base Camp — was as sketchy as it had been all trip. But things often changed extremely quickly up there, so we decided to give it a go. At first this did not seem like a wise decision. Ganesh and I were the only people trudging through that little patch of the world for an hour, and we pushed through what was at first relatively calm skies, then high winds, then hail, then rain. The wind was so relentless at one point that our crampons (a set of metal spikes attached to one’s boots that offer better purchase on ice and snow) were the only things keeping us upright. This was, to me at least, some true Himalayan weather, and it only seemed right that it was in firm control of our final ascent to Everest’s realm. It almost wouldn’t have felt right to easily wander up to this extreme place with soft blue skies overhead. At some point during that maelstrom of turbulence and precipitation, we huddled underneath a rock and assessed our situation. An Australian hiker and his guide passed us, heading downhill. Holding their hoods above their heads in the high winds, the Aussie yelled that the visibility was too weak and the winds were too strong (mate); nothing could be seen, they were heading back down and would try again tomorrow. But his guide said something to Ganesh in Nepali, they gave each other a fist bump and a smile, and my leader signaled that we should keep going. Did these guys know something we outsiders didn’t? (well yes, always). Had this hiker called it quits too early? Was this the poet? There were lots of questions and few answers in that eager, stormy moment. But in any case, off we went, leaning forward into the gale and crawling over the rocks, towards the apex of the planet.
To his expert navigational credit, Ganesh led us to Base Camp in the extremely low visibility. I never would have known that we had arrived, except that our new shelter was located underneath a banana-shaped rock with “EVEREST BASE CAMP” spray painted across it in red lettering — the centerpiece of many an Instagram post uploaded by hikers who have come here. The winds and precipitation had started to relent, but it was sharply cold and still very foggy. And then, after about fifteen minutes, the sky — as it tends to do up there — changed. It wasn’t blue, but it was transparent. My guide would attribute this sudden altering of our high-altitude fortunes directly to the Gods. Personally, I wasn’t so sure, but something divine or meteorological or with more power than our puny human forms crouched under that rock had moved the weather elsewhere. We emerged, and may just as well have been on the moon.
Being so close to mountains so big, and having them come into view immediately rather than gradually, was jarring. Think of sitting on the floor directly in front of a massive plasma screen TV and then flicking it on to a Planet Earth episode. The spectral masses of Nuptse and Everest’s South Col guarded the highest summit of all, the pyramid just behind them, in a truly stunning picture. The black clouds of the storm had abated and been replaced by a metallic sort of overcast that hung lazily on top of everything; the light that did make it down to ground-level shot through the icefall and turned its chopped-up surface into a kaleidoscope of unpolished chrome and turquoise.
Ganesh and I had made it to the roof of the world. We were more than three miles above sea level, and Everest’s summit was two miles higher still. The rough weather had deterred any other company — not that there was much to begin with — but the only other other soul up here was a lone German who was camped out and planning to make a winter ascent of the Western Ridge the following week. I was trying to take in every moment, knowing well enough that I may never get back to this place, but I also had been writing a lot on the way up, so can’t deny that there were budding narratives and half-built sentences rattling through my head — thoughts on how to best share these experiences. Ganesh wouldn’t share his take on the balance between storytelling and enjoyment until the next morning, a few hundred feet behind us, on Kala Patthar.
Up there — 16 hours later — we’d be freezing but otherwise in maybe the perfect state to absorb a new idea, to take a piece of advice to heart. We were alert, on account of the full thermos of coffee and the bitter mountain air, and we were also beyond a certain barrier of emotional vulnerability, on account of the intoxicating effect of the altitude and the ineffable beauty right in front of us. A few passing thoughts that I had at that moment, malleable like hot wax, remain pressed into my memory with a stamp bearing Everest’s morning outline. Every so often, one of us would interrupt the silence.
“Surely you will tell friends about the journey, lah — show them pictures and maybe write one of your stories. It’s good to share these things. Important.” Ganesh had chimed in, continuing his thoughts from the way up. He had a way of being declarative and inquisitive all at once, often making statements in the form of questions while already nodding his head, whether the subject was dinner or philosophy. “But underneath has to be your own feelings of the place, yeah? If you had an idea of what this would be like, and now it’s different, is that a bad thing? And if your head was elsewhere while here in the nature, then what was the point?”
In the end, it seemed best to let this string of anecdotes mostly tell themselves — to not necessarily share a single story but a collection of them, to not blindly add the backbone of a Hero’s Journey in an attempt to be tidier. Nothing is really tidy. Sometimes the individual episodes within a journey are all rapping their knuckles on the front door at the dwelling of a common theme, or arranging themselves to be tied in a bow and presented as a simple lesson. But the real thing will always have been more complex — a collage of overlapping thoughts and images and conversations — than anything that an aspiring narrator could possibly convey accurately with words, which are a lovely but often poor compression of experience. The big decision for the teller of any tale, real or imagined, has always been what to reveal and what to withhold. The writer offers a glimpse of something — possibly magical — and the reader has to do the rest. Even amongst the purest of intentions within the binds of a non-fiction account, there will always be a membrane of subjectivity separating the two. And of course, coming up with a caption for the picture (or even a whole story for the page) before the trip itself is an alluring but dangerous thing.
I thought about that as the sunlight inched its way down the peaks ahead of us, in a final Himalayan dawn.
Coda
Four sleeps later, we would be sitting in a dark and smoky cellar back in Lukla, ending the trek with a few hours of food and local beverages.
Those days in between Base Camp and the flight back to Kathmandu — the descent — wouldn’t be altogether easy. Coldness, tiredness, and general readiness to be off the mountain started to take mental center stage. The desire for that cold G&T in a warm garden was unshakeable during the multiple fifteen-mile days. I had completely lost track of what clothes I was wearing under the layers of outerwear and my face was dried out from the constant contact with high sun and yak dung vapour. I caught a glimpse of myself in a rare mirror hanging outside of a bathroom in Pangboche and thought I looked as if returning from the trenches at Verdun.
But the hygiene was forgotten over the span of that entire final afternoon as our host cooked momos, samosas, parathas, chili eggs, and kebabs one-at-a-time and one-after-the-other on top of a raging wooden fire. I was the only one in the room who didn’t speak Nepali and it didn’t matter one bit. A group of young schoolgirls came in for their lunch break — eating a full plate of dumplings each — and then came back again after school, laughing to discover that we were still there, a few more empty buckets of chang on the table.
/S
Kathmandu, March 2022
