Acclimatizing in Dingboche

(October 5, 2016)

We hiked through thin air and dense fog. Intermittently, the sun pushed the clouds away to reveal a majestic mountain peak for a fleeting moment. Everything inside of me was breathing — my stomach, my eyes, the blood in my head. We climbed to 5,100 meters, taking baby steps up the mountain with little oxygen.

When we returned to the teahouse, I just lay back in the sun and let it burn my headache away to a dull, functional throb. The cure for an altitude headache is to lie in the sun and wind until it dissipates. It may take 2 cups of masala tea, two pieces of buttered toast as well. Tomorrow 5,100 meters.

Feeling the Altitude in Second-person

(October 6, 2016)

As you approach your destination, your head starts to throb, and you place one foot in front of the other with every effort you can—baby stepping it but slower. Then you go inside and you’re not sure what to do, so you take ibuprofen and sit outside to will away the headache. Then you can stumble back inside and sit still, still, still, and close your eyes, willing the oxygen back into your blood.

You go to take a piss in a hole in the ground that smells like an everyone-who-has-passed-through-here piss, and you can’t squat because your knees are too stiff. Your piss hits everything but the hole, mostly your shoes and socks. Since your ass is so high in the air, your piss trickles down your thermal underwear. You decide that today will be the day that you throw away the underwear that you have been wearing since Namche Bazar, where you had your last shower and changed your first pair.

You get your sleeping bag and wrap your damp, sweaty and piss-laden body in it as if it might actually help get you warm. You force yourself to order potato soup because if you have another cup of garlic soup, you will die. You realize that the grey liquid floating in the bowl in front of you is garlic broth with some uncooked potatoes in the bottom, and you cannot eat it because as the oxygen tries to creep back into your bloodstream, it makes you want to vomit everything else out of your system.

You lean your head back against the window and fold into a semiconscious state. You open one eye and it doesn’t seem so bad, and by the time you open the other you start to hear someone talking about horses, so you join in realizing that you can talk now and it makes you feel better.

You realize that the sky is blue, and if you go outside, you might glimpse a towering mountain peak. But that would mean putting on your shoes, which are all the way on the floor near your feet. You remind yourself that you should drink water by the liter-full, but you pack is over there and you cannot ask anyone to bring it to you because they cannot move either. So you do it, you drag your soggy backpack toward you and perch it on the bench closest to the light and take a sip, then rest.

While doing this you hear some American-sounding English on your left and you just have to invite in that sweet sound with more conversation even if it is about sports. Four pm is the magic hour for the yak dung fire to be lit. You get that delicious Mad River Glen after-ski glow when your itchy wool hat can come off and you actually consider peeling your socks off your puckered white feet.

This is the time of the day, when people sit around, talk, play cards, which vary internationally with clubs called crosses and the queen of spades, the black bitch.

October 9, 2016 (Sunday) Lobuche to Everest Base Camp

After we sent two of our team off in a helicopter with AMS, I took our team leader aside and told him I could not make it to base camp. I could walk a little way, but then I needed a day before we moved on to the base camp. He seemed fine with that, and I knew it relieved Danya, who was more sick than I was. When we reached Gorak Shep (5,140 meters/16,863), I was clear about not making the now two-hour trek to base camp. I was so sick at this point I did not care. Since there was no sun, my sun treatment was no longer a remedy. It was easy for our team leader to convince me to make the two-hour trek to base camp. After all, I had come that far…

Making it to Everest Base Camp

The highlight of the Everest Base Camp was a little pink bird that did not want to fly. He was more beautiful and peaceful than the gigantic cairn where people took turns taking selfies and group photos for Facebook. I felt little pride or sense of accomplishment. The realization that I had to make a two-hour trek back to Gorak Shep heightened my anti-climax. I do not know why I thought there would be a teahouse waiting for us at base camp. We slogged our way back for two hours.

That night when I drew a thick blanket over my sleeping bag and tried to keep the blood pulsing in my temples at bay, I prayed, which is not what I do. I took the only prayer I know (the serenity prayer) and I repeated it to the rhythm of my pounding head.

Why?

By the time we reached the town below Gorak Shep, I looked at Danya and said, let’s ask for a helicopter. At this point, I was vomiting and walking at a snail’s pace. I wanted the relief of lying in the hospital, breathing thick air and pumping IV fluids into my veins until I felt better again.

I baby-stepped it to the next stop, repeating the serenity prayer the entire way. I do not think that I was accepting the things that I could not change, and at that point, courage was not a part of my vocabulary, and I had left my wisdom with the pink bird at Base Camp or somewhere before.

Irony

The great irony—you knew it was coming, didn’t you—was that we did the trek so quickly that we finished three days early. Our leader had followed a typical regimen for acclimatization, one that would fit most hikers. For some reason, it did not fit Danya and me. For the first time in my life, I was asking someone to slow down. For the first time in my life, I was the last one in line because I couldn’t move any faster.

This irony was lesson for me. Should we have gone slower? Maybe, maybe not. Altitude sickness is not something anyone can control or predict, it just happens. Two out of the six of us who started the trek showed no signs of it at all. They could have gone faster or slower and gotten altitude sickness, but they didn’t.

In the midst of feeling so horrible I wrote, adventures should be fun, not so ridiculously challenging that they make you sick. Trekking to Everest Base Camp challenged me beyond my capacity. It taught me how tiny I am in this universe of glaciers and rivers that start as tiny rivulets from a leaking glacier and turn into raging rivers to be crossed by swaying suspension bridges.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

2016 Meters

Why am I listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall at 2016 meters in Phakding, Nepal? I am five baby hands away from Mount Everest on the map. People with souls burrowed deep in their black brown eyes flow by to the tune of Pink Floyd and Bob Marley. My companions chatter in and out of Malay and English. I sit nestled in the Himalayas, a baby cries in the silence between the next 60’s hit song. Children with smooth dark skin covered with bright red patches of weathered skin hold hands and skitter along the cobbled path. I can imagine growing up here where there are no cars and the silence is as deep as the river carved under mountains 5,000 meters high smeared with snow – towering nodules amongst swirling clouds.
This morning I spotted the Himalayas through the spinning propellers of our tiny plane as we rose to 3,600 meters.  Antoine de Saint-Exupery in Wind, Sand, and Stars writes about how when you fly you see a part of the world that no one else gets a chance to see – the land that can only be seen from a birds’ eye view.

3,440 meters

We threaded our way through town in a light rain, four fluorescent figures cloaked in Gortex. We crisscrossed the Milky River twice on wire suspension bridges, marching across canyons on air. The sweet smell of balsam and other evergreens clinging to the cliffs at 3,440 meters reminded me of home. The path is a well-worn stream of yaks, tourists, and porters stretching in front of me for as far as I can see, which would be the next destination, Panboche. On this day, it pleased me to know that I would be able to tread this path again on the way back to gain a new perspective on the majesty of the world.

The next suspension bridge that we came to hung over another one about 30 feet below. Another 100 feet below that the river merged with the Khumbu Glacier. Frayed prayer flags flew perpendicular in the wind as my steps floated with the bounce of everyone else’s step. Suspended, I wanted to capture everything around me in one breath.

Porters, permanently stooped by loads twice their weight, sidled their way through German and Chinese tourists. They carry smooth wooden stools to prop under their butts when they need a quick rest without having to release their carefully balanced load. There is a code on the trail that those who make it all the way learn quickly: always make way for the porters out of sheer respect; move to the inside of the trail when a yak train approaches you for they too have heavy burdens to bear and little sense of doing anything else than moving forward. Young porters take on the stooped posture of their grandfathers, but you can still see the younger boys looking on with respect as their older brothers and fathers bear extreme weight for 20 dollars a day.

These heavy loads propel beasts and men forward. The yak’s feet flex with each careful step they take. Porters take sure-footed steps in flip flops, crocks, knock off hiking boots or sneakers.

The Yaks are the only traffic in town. They take the stairs like retired ballet dancers with heavy bells clanking beneath the necks. We walked up the stone path out of town at seven in the morning over-dressed in thermal underwear, which I promptly removed. A woman was sending her naks (female yaks) out to pasture. When she left them alone to make the rest of the trek up the hill, they took to nibbling the plant life on their own with little encouragement from a swinging rope and an occasional pebble missile aimed at their back end.

Waiting for the Mountain above Namche Bazar

To acclimatize, we walked up to 3,860 meters to catch a glimpse of Everest. These tall mountains are finicky about when they want to peek out from the clouds. The more you wait, the less likely they are to pop out for a moment. I feared that if I went to the toilet, I would lose the chance to see the mountain.

The trees got low and sparse leaving room for bluebells and fire red leaf flowers to grown. The snow-capped mountains seemed to get bigger and higher with every step that we took. Occasionally, a gust of wind revealed a rock-faced mountain so high that it was hard to tell whether or not is was a part of the sky itself. The sky was true azure and the quiet was as soft as the air was fresh. I felt the steady nature essence that never ceases to center me — so close to the mountains and sky that I could touch them if I stretched my soul far enough. My lungs burst wide open to let the hollow space inside of me leak out slowly while the clouds brushed up the mountainside.

We headed to 3,800 meters to a Japanese hotel with a view of Everest if it felt like revealing itself. Everyone waited for a peek at the infamous mountain. Some people got impatient and left, others just left. I propped my feet on the rocks, and drank in the sun. What was out there behind the clouds was so vast and beyond me that I did not really care if I saw the mountain or not. There is something intriguing about the idea of these magic monsters hiding behind the clouds as you tromp along. Sometimes the snow on the mountain and the clouds merge and you have to look hard to confirm whether or not you really saw that mountain. I was grateful that the mountains revealed themselves to me as slowly as they did.

D.D. Danya

Heading out from Nacmche Bazar

D. D. Danya

High end toilet

First glimpse of Everest

Rhododendron Forest

Rhododendron Forest

Bridge down

Chinese tourists

I am glad this trail was closed

The shopping trip

When we were in Katmandu there was no way to avoid buying our supplies for the trip. All I needed was a sleeping bag, thermal underwear, gloves, a hat, a warm coat, and wind pants to complete my inventory. Aside from some socks, underwear, two t-shirts and a toothbrush, that is all anyone needs to trek the full length of the Everest Base Camp trail.

Shopping should never last over two hours. You go into one or two stores, buy what you need and leave. I don’t squabble and bargain, I just take what I get with whatever reasonable price I can. For camping equipment, I know what I need, and I made my purchases for about 100 USD in about a half an hour. Some people look at shopping as a hobby or a passion. They love it and do it whenever they can. Some people love to shop—I like it about as much as a serving of lima beans that my mother used to force me to eat.

The group I was with had a different definition of shopping. Since I was trying to hone my team player skills, I stuck with them as they spent four hours going from shop to shop to get the best price for all the items they could have bought in the first store.

I like efficiency. Going to five or six shops and bantering over the price of the same items when you can do that in one shop makes little sense to me. I was proud of my patience as I stumbled from one small shop to the next in a torrential rainstorm.

The Kathmandu and Lukla Airports

I like third world cities about as much as I like shopping and lima beans, so it was a relief to find myself at the airport early the next morning. From what I could decipher, we were going to be waiting for a while. I held twin babies, conversed with people from all over the world, and soaked in the scene. I chatted with two bright Nepalese boys on their way home from boarding school for the holidays.

Hiking gear clogged the crowded floor and provided people with backrests, people who shared the same anticipation as I did. Finally, we got the signal to go. Everything we owned, including our bodies, was weighed. Then we stepped over the baggage scale, grabbed our stuff, and made our way to waiting room two—a holding tank of eager trekkers and people journeying home.

A man sat next to me and proceeded to yell into his cell phone so loudly that I wanted to burst out laughing. I looked across the way at an Israeli man who was raising his eyebrows and grinning at the whole affair. His name was Elbenar, and I quickly joined him and his girlfriend Noah. I would continue to bump into them over the course of the trek.

Then 16 of us were loaded onto a tin bus and driven out to the runway where several two prop planes waited. “Twenty minutes,” the lady in charge told us, “stay on the bus.” It wasn’t Malaysian heat, but it was pretty close. Soon we leaked off the bus like fried eggs, eager to hop into the frying pan. I quickly found a place to pee amidst some broken down airplanes, and this would probably be my most luxurious toilet experience over the course of my journey.

On the plane, I sat across from two Nepalese girls of about six or seven years of age traveling alone, and delighted to cash in on the sweets that were passed out along with the cotton they gave us to stuff in our ears.

There were two Germans sporting bow ties. One wore wool-blend stretchy light blue pants held up high above his waist with suspenders and a matching coat. The other sported a wool scarf. I break into a sweat, simply describing them. I pegged them for teachers. I ran into them later on the trail at one of the earlier stops. I am not sure they had any idea what they were getting themselves into.

The flight was very Antoine de Saint-Exupery if you have ever read Wind Sand and Stars. The airstrip at Lukla is 450 meters long and 20 meters wide, ending with a large stone wall and a chain-link fence. We landed on the steep uphill runway and halted within two meters of this wall, which probably would not have done much to stop us.

We started hiking immediately from the airport. We wound our way through Lukla, the starting point of the cobblestone base camp trail past Starbucks. Within a few hours, we arrived at our first tea-house where we would spend one night.