Nepal + Everest Base Camp

Scratched into the back of a diary I kept in 2016 are the words Everest Base Camp.

 
I don’t know where the idea came from, or where I was when I wrote it, or why I wrote it down at all; but it’s on that back cover where the roots of Everest reside. Over the subsequent years, the idea of this mountain reserved a particular sort of personal intrigue. It was never a question of if I was going to go; it was when.

During the latter half of this year, in my final semester of university and the peak of my corporate distaste, I found myself nose-deep in the Terms and Conditions section of high-altitude travel insurance. In the months that followed, I spent every morning before work on the StairMaster, and every evening in a research fog of the Himalayas.

The mountains were my religion and outdoor gear shops were my church.

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On the flight from Singapore to Kathmandu, I met Keith.

Now, I should reiterate that I never meet people on aeroplanes. Ever. It’s a special and unique human interaction that I’ve always felt I was missing out on. That was until I met Keith. At 73 years old, his dusty hiking boots were hitting the tracks of the Himalayas for the umpteenth time. Keith had been to Everest Base Camp two years prior… at 71 years old. For the entirety of the night-time flight, we gibbered on and on about trekking routes and Sherpa culture and Nepali dumplings called Momo. As the plane descended into Kathmandu, he tore off a corner of the tattered in-flight menu and wrote down his phone number.

You’re about to have the time of your life. Contact me when you get home, I want to hear all about it.

****

Kathmandu is a chaotic cluster of leaning buildings and crumbled roads and stray dogs. The hundreds of North Face knock-off shops spew gear into a tangled web of streets, where people, local and foreign, whiz around like trapped flies. Overwhelming, is probably the most accurate summary. I felt unsettled for days; I just couldn’t get the rhythm of the city. Just when I thought I could put away my map, I was lost again.

But then, it stopped. That feeling, the overwhelm, it went away. My map took permanent residency at the bottom of my backpack. I wrote: Look at where you are. You are not at work. You are not studying. You are not at the gym, or on Facebook, or cleaning the house. You are doing nothing. How freeing! I see a street that intrigues me, so I go down it. My feet hurt, so I find a café and have a tea. I do whatever I want, whenever I want, and the only consequence I face is how much pleasure I receive. Is that not the truest form of personal fulfilment?

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Then, it was the time for walking.

Walking.

Walking.

A plane as delicate as paper delivered us to the foothills of the great giants, to a village called Lukla. The lower mountain areas (lower being 2500m to 3500m altitude) were gentle slopes of lush, green forests. Simple dwellings lined streams of icy blue, gushing water. The serenity of the valley was disrupted only by the crunch of gravel underfoot, and amicable chatter from passers-by.

Idyllic, is the word for it.

Our route took us to both Gokyo Ri and Everest Base Camp over 19 days. Each night, we’d pull into tiny towns shrouded by mountains, staying in teahouses, usually only occupied by our group and the owner’s family. Our team of four Aussie girls and two Nepali guides garnered plenty of attention on the track: we were infamous for our obsessive Uno playing and enthusiasm for showers (which were not a part of the daily routine for almost three weeks). There is something very unique about a friendship that spawns from physical and mental exhaustion. It took one full day before we were sharing updates on our bowel movements; you can just imagine how close we were by day 19. Without those five people, well, I wouldn’t have made it to the airstrip, let alone Base Camp.

No appetite, a constantly full bladder, headaches, nausea and breathlessness became very normal symptoms of daily life at high altitude. The insomnia, however, was perhaps the cruellest of all. For the first five days of the trek I’d had only ten hours of sleep in total, kept awake by constant claustrophobic, hypothermic panic. As you can imagine, walking 8-11 hours a day in such conditions was, to be polite, fucking tough.

The day we reached Everest Base Camp was stellar. The final stretch is basically a sea of boulders. We scrambled up and down for three hours, before stepping onto the Khumbu Glacier, and finally arriving at Base Camp. Elated and exhausted, we frolicked around under the crystal-clear skies, so close to Everest and Lhotse that it felt as though you could reach out and touch them.

From Base Camp, at 5500m altitude, it took us only three days to get back down to Lukla (blessed be the oxygen). Walking up was such a pain in the ass - there were moments every day where I would think to myself “I HATE THIS. I ACTUALLY HATE THIS.” - but the moment the trek was over I was overwhelmed with melancholy. To say farewell to the mountains, to the simplicity of life, to the blissful WiFi-less-ness, to being out in nature and moving my body every day – how could anyone want to say goodbye to that?

It was, in every way, shape and form, the best experience I have EVER had. Truly. Every minute of sleeplessness, every ache, every squat toilet, every degree colder; it was all worth it. I look very much forward to the day when I stand, breathless and un-showered, in the heart of the Himalayas once again.