9 days later

So here we are…9 (I think?) days of trekking later and we have finally arrived in the large(st) Sherpa village and trekker’s hub: Namche Bazaar, about 12,000 feet above sea level. Back when I was sick, I kept thinking…everything will be better once we get to Namche. Luckily, my health resolved itself long before Namche. Now we’re CLEAN, and we’re washing all our clothes and even ate a pastry.

There’s much to say about the past 9 days, but at the same time, it all blends together…we have a hard time remembering places we stayed and our daily treks, even a day or two later.
Most days are pretty similar, and occur as such:
6:00 am: we awaken.
6:30 am: Breakfast. I usually have porridge or a pancake and a hard boiled egg. Then we pack our stuff up. By
7:30 am: we are on the trail. Around
11:00 am: we stop for 1.5 hours for lunch. By
12:30 pm: we’re on the trail again. By
3:30-4:00 pm: we generally reach our final destination. We settle in, rest, read, write, chat, wash (if possible), and order dinner.
6:00 pm: we eat dinner. My classic meal is garlic soup with chapati (bland tortilla-like bread) and a hard boiled egg. Then comes the struggle of staying awake until at least 7, which we have decided is a much less embarassing bedtime than 6:10. By
8:00 pm: we’re asleep, on most nights.

We trek each day with our Sherpa Guide, Chitra, and our porter, Bul Bahadur. Chitra is 35 and has a wife and two kids (boy and girl, 9 and 7) in Kathmandu. He had very little faith in me and my hiking ability at the beginning (even before I got sick)…dunno if he’s changed his mind or not. Bul Bahadur is our tiny 28-year-old long eyelashed porter. There’s something very charmingly childlike about him. He’s of the Chhetri (2nd highest) caste, and has a 22-year-old wife and two boys, ages 4 and 6, in Okhaldunga (yes his wife had a baby at 16. And that’s normal here). He speaks very little English, but he’s ridiculously helpful. Wherever we go he puts himself to work in the fields, in the kitchen, collecting firewood, doing laundry, etc. He carries all our heavy stuff, tied together, by a strip of tarp strung across his forehead, yet still beats us to our destination almost every day.

Porters in general are amazing. Tiny little guys…probably 5′3″, 110 pounds on average, carrying about double their body weight of kerosene and other items (either that or gear of trekkers like us) for 6 or more days straight, in a bulky basket that they carry like Bul Bahadur, by way of a strap across their foreheads. A lot of them are really young too, the ones we asked were 18 but we’ve seen a lot that look younger. And seemingly impossibly, they probably arrived in Namche (or Lukla) 3-4 days before we did.

Each night we stay in a Lodge aka Hotel aka Guest House. They’re run by families, and all I’ve seen operate as both a lodge and a restaurant. Rooms are simple, two small beds with a thin mattress and hard pillow, and a bare lightbulb (usually in an inconvenient place) that only sometimes turns on. If you’re lucky, the bathroom (a squat toilet) is down the hall, but more often it’s downstairs and outside. In retrospect, I am very lucky that I had food poisoning in Jiri as opposed to somewhere else, as our room there had not only an attached bathroom but a flushing toilet (we hadn’t seen one since, until today).

On the trail from Jiri, it was often the same small group sleeping in the same town each night, so we made a few friends. Our first were Canadian, Jay and his uncle Phil (similar younger/older dynamic) although we haven’t seen them since Sete, 6 days ago. Our closest friend is Stephanie, 30-something French girl who is a sailing instructor by summer and in charge of a ski school by winter. She’s here on her own, for almost as long as we are, with her guide and porter. Our Sherpas must be friends because we’ve spent the past 8 nights in the same lodge as her. There were also two very nice young couples, one British and one Swiss, at our pace, a speedy and odd older French couple (they’ve passed us by now, at times we saw them running up the mountain), and an extremely large and boisterous group of Germans (they cure hangovers by drinking a concoction of milk, honey, and salt). Now that we’re on the main trail, there are lots of Japanese as well. Mostly European tourists, especially French, German, and British, and hardly any Americans (met our first today, actually).

It’s been said that those looking for a wilderness experience should avoid trekking in Nepal. TRUE. Every few minutes on the Jiri trail we passed someone’s house/lodge/farm (or some combination of the three), and along the trail we ran into fellow trekkers, their guides, porters, and regular Nepalis doing their daily chores. Wherever cultivation is possible, it seems to be cultivated. Their view of farmland is much more lenient than ours (they farm on hills so steep, they must carve it into stair-like platforms). And this is just in the hills, which, by the way, tower over any mountain I’ve seen in the Sierras. They’re lush and green and ascend high into the clouds. They’re not just high, they’re WIDE, so broad…I can hardly believe that anything could be so massive and then, protruding out like a shark’s fin, I’ll see the jagged white outline of a Himalayan mountain. Above the clouds. The hills look so soft comparted to those sharp, angular mountains.

The trails up these monsters are not bad, although they are littered with trash everywhere. We’ve also become familiar with the concept of “Nepali flat”…Chitra will tell us the trail is flat when really it’s up and down, up and down (as opposed to hours of steep UP or worse, steep DOWN, that we’ve become accustomed to).
For quite a few days I was still nauseous and vomiting, but we somehow still made it to our next stop faster than most. I’ve felt fine for the past 4 or 5 days, so it looks like that ordeal has finally passed.

I’ve begun to judge our elevation by our proximity to the planes flying overhead (to and from Lukla/Kathmandu). Sometimes when we’re crossing a high pass, they seem so close. For the record, we’ve cumulatively (according to Poppi’s altimeter watch, which, by the way, is about 300 feet low each day) climbed at least 28,160 feet and descended at least 23,140 feet.

Now that we’re past Lukla, the trekking has changed completely. Before, it was just a few of us hiking (separately) through remote Nepali villages; now we’re in with crowds of people on a dirt highway. We’re both so happy that we chose to come from Jiri–it was such a different experience.
It’s been a wild few days. I’ve been headbutted by a water buffalo, I’ve seen a spider the size of my palm, I’ve had to wait for countless trains of donkeys and (now) cow/yak crossbreeds to go past (carrying heavy loads), been outdone by a 7 year old up a steep hill, and learned that you can make a ping pong table out of almost anything flat.

Our next move is a well-deserved rest/more importantly, acclimitization day here in Namche, before we head up, up, up, eventually to Gokyo at 15, 715 feet, and the peak Gokyo Ri at 17, 575. Excellent views of Everest and the surrounding peaks, we’ve heard. From there (weather and time permitting) we head across the Cho La pass to Kala Patthar (another great viewpoint) and perhaps Everest Base Camp at 17,598 feet (although we’ve heard it’s rather unremarkable). We’re not sure how long this will take or where we’ll have internet access, but we’re due to hike down and fly out of Lukla on November 15. I’m sure we’ll have some sort of contact before then…!

Love to you all…