Postcard From... Nepal

The air has two hands gripped around my neck, tightening with every step. My tonsils, plump and throbbing, weep silent tears. It is day two, and my greatest fear has manifested:

I am climbing Mount Everest, and I am sick.

Not sick-sick, but sniffly-sick. Aeroplane-sick. Sleepless-sick. Excited-sick.

The pancake I ate for breakfast sticks like glue to the insides of my stomach. I feel heavy, stuffed full of sweet fluff and nerves. Two forces are at war within me; one is pleasure, one is pain. I cannot discern where one begins and the other ends.

The mountains, they whisper.

Come, they say. There’s something up here that you want to see.

Doubt, he hisses.

You’re tired, aren’t you? Sick, too. And the altitude, well, that will kill you soon enough. But first, I think that pancake’s coming back up.

I come to a flat ridge, frantically shaking my backpack. I strip off two sweat-soaked layers of fleece. I claw at the bag’s zips and pockets, manically, hysterically, until I find them. My prize. My reward. My saviour.

Lozenges.

Pause. Breathe. Relief.

I fall ungraciously onto my bottom and throw back as many of the little blue suckers I can fit into my mouth. My eyes water from the pain, the pleasure, and the menthol diffusing its way up my nose.

Suspended metres above me is a bridge laced as beautifully as a ribbon in a baby’s hair. Below it is a ferocious glacial stream, charging through shrubs and boulders with unfathomable power. Nature’s juxtaposition – the sky and the stream, the still and the steady. The water’s swishes and swirls paint a route up into the mountains that crown it from behind.

I nod, to no one and nothing, but rather at everything.

It is the time for walking.