Jurassic Park

I decided to check out part of the "other" Nepal, the lowland tropical valley. I booked a three-day, two-night tour in Chitwan National Park, at a place called the Island Jungle Resort. It's the only guest accommodation on the island, so I was looking forward to a respite from the chaos of Kathmandu. I was especially looking forward to seeing the park's famous wildlife while riding on the back of an elephant.

Here are the elephants at the river for their morning water.



I was "guaranteed" to see rhinos, probably crocodiles, and, if I was really lucky (or unlucky), a tiger.

If I had locked myself in the bathroom of my guest house in Kathmandu, turned off the light and curled up in the corner for three days I would have seen as much wildlife. I stumbled into what is perhaps the world's most remote tourist trap.

It was like a cruise ship stranded in the middle of the jungle. Most of the tourists were elderly Germans. It was nice for a change to be part of the young crowd, since I tend to fall on the upper end of the age curve for backpackers. I didn't see many animals, but I saw a lot of dinosaurs!

We didn't get to choose activities. Our first day we did the Jungle Walk. We were also scheduled to do a Crocodile Walk and a Bird Watching Walk. It turned out that the first part of the Jungle Walk actually retraced the path we took to walk to the resort from the boat. I jokingly said that it was all the same path, and the only difference was that for the Jungle Walk we were supposed to look down and for the Bird Walk we were supposed to look up.

It makes both proud and sad to report that I was absolutely right. It was all the same trail! No wonder we didn't see any animals. It was a frickin freeway of tourists. Even the dumbest animals on the island had figured out that it was the I-95 of trails and stayed far, far away.

I met a group of similarly disappointed travelers, and we managed to have fun with it. I hung out with girls from England, Australia and Holland, and a couple from Germany (her) and Israel (him). The Aussie and Dutch girls managed to flirt their way into a second elephant ride, during which they saw a rhino.

It was the only rhino any of us saw.

The head guy there is one of those people who loves the sound of his own voice. He also has quite an elegant bouffant hairdo. I regret not getting a picture of him. He wore khakis and a polo shirt, but considering the setting and his pompous nature he should have borrowed one of Ricardo Montalban's white suits. He would have made the perfect Nepalese Mr. Roarke. De boat! De boat!

One of the evening programs was a slide show. Dinner was scheduled for 7:30. At 7:45 he was still going on and on, and either the tourists were really polite, or they were actually enjoying it.



The subject of the show was the wildlife of the park. So he was showing photos of all the animals we couldn't actually see!

The rest of the group were only half joking when they said I should lead the hikes, because I pointed out most of the few animals we saw. A few deer, a couple boars, one monkey (just one), a few egrets and ... something else.

Our guide took us to where the crocodiles would be at the right time of year. I noticed a twinkling in the hollow beneath a log in the water. My fellow travelers weren't convinced when I pointed it out, but upon further review I'm convinced it's the eye of a crocodile:



Our guide, on the other hand, pointed out what he said was rhino poop and also what he said was a rhino footprint.

I should mention that while we were told we would have English-speaking guides who were experts on the local flora and fauna. Our guide didn't actually speak English. He had memorized routines. If one of us made a comment or (gasp!) asked a question he would have to go back and start over.

Sometimes I find myself wishing I didn't think so much. I wish I wasn't such a skeptic. I wish I didn't have that little cruel streak that makes me start conversations like this:

Me (in my most innocent, sugary-sweet voice ): Which way did the rhino go?
Guide: Excuse me?
Me: Where do the tracks lead?
Guide: Excuse me?
Me: Why is there only one footprint?
(The rest of the group groans and rolls their eyes.)

Then we stopped by a place where we were told rhinos swim. Rhinos are the size of cars. They can weigh well over a ton. This was where rhinos would swim if they were the size of housecats.

The next day as we walked by the rhino swimming hole our guide pointed out a tiger paw print. This caused much excitement. Someone in our group asked how old it was. Old, our guide replied confidently, over a week.

But I had to do it again:
"Why wasn't it here yesterday?"

I excused myself from future walks and sat by the river with a book and a beer. One of the activities I missed was the elephant feeding, during which our guide explained the mysterious relationship between elephant and its driver, or mahout.

The mahout starts as a boy, usually at about ten years old. The mahout is usually given an elephant to look after and care for for the rest of the elephant's life. The elephant and the mahout come to be best friends. The mahout would never abandon his elephant. One of the girls asked the guide how long this particular mahout had been with this particular elephant.

The guide asked the mahout in Nepali, and translated into English, and with a straight face:

"One year."

(Confused glances all around.)

There are three types of mahouts. The Yukthimah use ingenuity to outsmart their elephants. The Reghawan use love in their training, and the unpopular Balwan use cruelty to teach their elephants to behave. Guess which type we had.

Mahouts use tools such as an ankusha, a pointed metal bar with a pointed metal hook, like a fishhook, on its side. The top is used to poke the back of the elephant's head to keep it moving forward. The side is used to hook its ears and pull it. The mahout also had a wooden stick which was officially to be used to prevent branches from smacking his guests, but which was actually used to whack the elephant. Furthermore, there was a chain around the the elephant's throat which was attached to a rope halter on the back of its neck. The halter had two loops in it which the mahout used as stirrups. This put his feet in position to continuously kick the elephant in the back of the ears to keep it moving forward.



Elephants are enormous, tough animals. I don't know whether any of this caused any pain. It just seemed really unnecessary. And there was no doubt who the boss really was. From time to time the elephant would turn off the trail and plunge into the forest, despite whatever the mahout might do to make her do otherwise. They're incredibly intelligent animals, so my guess is that she was just having a little fun tormenting the four tiny humans sitting on its back. And I can't say I blamed her.

So I felt a little guilty about riding. And it was disappointing seeing no wildlife at all. I didn't feel quite as bad when we participated in the daily bathing. In the afternoon the elephants are led to the river where they roll around and spray themselves with water. We were all given the opportunity to get in the water with them and even climb aboard.



That's yours truly sitting on the back of an elephant, getting a blast of water in the face from its trunk.

The mahouts would have the elephants roll and dunk to shake us off, which they didn't have much trouble doing. I think perhaps the elephants might enjoy this part of the interaction. This is me.



And these are two German children on a completely submerged elephant, with a piece of, um, byproduct floating nearby.



So I can't really say I've seen Chitwan. If I come back to Nepal I'll try staying somewhere in the main park. You know, where I might see an animal or two.

Pokhara

I'm in Pokhara now, the other main tourist hub in Nepal. I'm in the tourist area, called Lakeside, and I like it so much more than Kathmandu. It's a lot more relaxed and the setting is beautiful. Just outside my room there's a rooftop patio from which I have a great view of the Annapurna Massif. The massif is a wall of peaks, including some of the most famous mountains in the world.



On the right is Machhaphuchhare (6,993 meters), the famous "fish tail mountain". The mountain is sacred to the Hindus and thus climbing it is forbidden. Now I can say I've seen Machhaphuchhare and Machu Picchu, although I can't say it quickly!

There are five peaks named Annapurna. On the left is Annapurna South. In the center is Sarangkot, the hill from which the paragliders take off.

The Massif is so, well, massive, that no matter where you look here you see the mountains. This is main street in Lakeside with Machhaphuchhare looming over.




I went up to watch the sunrise from the Pagoda. It was a little cloudy, so the views were a bit disappointing. Here's a view of Pokhara, the lake and the massif in the early morning light.



I went back up again with two girls I met rafting, Israeli sisters named Michal (left) and Ricky (right). I think the view was better the second time...



And this is the stupa itself.



The helipad cracks me up. This is a Buddhist monument, after all. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism usually is translated "life is suffering". But I guess that doesn't mean that if you're a rich tourist that you should have to "suffer" to walk or take a taxi to the top.

Rafting the Kali Gandaki

I went on a three-day whitewater rafting trip on the Kali Gandaki river, just southwest of Pokhara. I've taken waterproof disposable cameras on rafting trips before but the pictures never turn out well. And you can't get photos of the good stuff -- the rapids -- because you're too busy paddling and trying to stay in the boat. So I don't have many photos.

This is the site of our campsite on the first night:



There were 13 rafters. One was a guy who was born in Nepal but who was visiting for the first time in 20 years. There was an Estonian couple. The rest were young Israelis. They were all incredibly friendly and welcoming. They spoke English whenever I was around and, if they spoke in Hebrew, one of them would always make a point to translate or give me the gist of the conversation.

The river itself was just okay, quite frankly. The scenery was pretty, of course, but we couldn't see the mountains from the river, which was a bit odd. Rapids were Class III to Class IV, nothing too crazy. Normally I like to take a turn in the front of the raft. It's a much wetter and wilder ride up there. But the two guys in the front of my boat had no intention of sharing. The Estonian guy, in particular, didn't interact with the group at all -- even his wife -- and he was as useful in the boat as the Venus de Milo. But since the water was pretty tame I was content to let them have their fun.

The rafting company was absolutely top notch. The guides were great, the food was fantastic and plentiful, and there were all sorts of little touches that I hadn't seen even on trips in the US. Like this:



In the back is the latrine tent, which better tours in the US will provide. In the front is the latrine helmet. It's how you know whether the toilet is occupied. If you go to the tent, you take the helmet with you, then put it back when you're done. The lesson here should be obvious: Grab a helmet early in the morning or else you end up with the latrine helmet!

I've had some pretty bad luck with travel agents and tours lately, so it was such a relief to deal with professionals and to travel with good people. The rafting company is called Shai and it's right under the Everest Steak House in Pokhara.

Krishna, my boat guide and the leader of the tour, is on the left here. He became interested in becoming a river guide when he was one of the little urchins who hang around the camp and do chores in exchange for food. And a little volleyball.



And of course we helped the local economy. You have to reward the type of entrepreneurial spirit which leads a local family to set up a shop selling beer, whiskey, cigarettes, chocolate and Coke for a single river tour. On an island.



When we stopped for lunch the next day some local boys were playing cricket. A cricket pitch is usually about the size of Yosemite National Park. These kids were playing on a stretch the size of a small suburban driveway. As I understood it, the rules were simple: If you hit the ball in the river you lose.



The bowler is in white and the batsman has just hit the ball, which is barely visible in the air between them.

This is the take-out point, where the grey Kali Gandaki is joined by another river, the Modi Khola (I think). The other river flows from a mountain spring and is a bright green color, so as they mix it creates a marbled effect that made me wish I really knew how to use my camera.



Much further upstream the Kali Gandaki valley has the distinction of being the world's deepest. Yet again, the sense of proportion and distance is completely out of whack here, because the altitude of the river is at about 2,200 meters, or about 7,300 feet. This means the bottom of the world's deepest valley is quite a bit higher than the highest point on the Appalachian Trail (6,643 feet).

That's because the river runs between the seventh- and tenth-highest mountains in the world. Dhaulagiri is 8,167 meters and Annapurna I is 8,091. From the top of Annapurna to the river below is about 19,400 feet, over three times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have time to get up to that portion of the trail.

Paragliding

A few days ago I went paragliding, which is where you jump off a hill with a parachute on your back and hope it opens. It's quite exhilarating and relaxing at the same time. You float on thermals, columns of warm air, the way birds do.

Since I don't actually know how to do any of this I went tandem, with a "pilot", who tried to show off, but ended up taking a wrong turn, so we had to land early. It was fun while it lasted. I highly recommend it, but do NOT go with the Blue Sky company in Pokhara.

(We were supposed to land on the other side of the lake and have a van drive us back to town. We landed on the wrong side, so I walked up to the office. I calmly pointed out that I was supposed to have been in the air for 30-40 minutes and got about half that. She asked where the rest of my group was so I pulled her outside, pointed to them way up in the air and said, "Up there!" They offered me a free t-shirt...)

I took a cheap disposable camera because I didn't want to spend the rest of the day looking for my digital camera after I dropped it a few thousand feet. So the picture quality is even worse than usual, but you get the idea.

Here I am with the Annapurna Massif in the background.



And this is the view looking down on Pokhara.



This is what it looks like from the other side of the lake, from a Buddhist monument called the Peace Pagoda. I wasn't fortunate enough to get as high as this guy, the tiny dot in the middle of the big cloud.

My new favorite restaurant

On the trail I ate almost entirely vegetarian. I ate a ton of vegetarian food, but still managed to lose weight. So to fatten up for the next trek I've been eating every day at the Everest Steak House in Pokhara. The original, which I didn't visit, is in Kathmandu. I wish I had. Look at this:



They have 28 types of steak. You get two huge hunks on a sizzling metal plate with fries and veg. Wash it all down with a bottle of cold Everest beer for a grand total of about six bucks. It's the best steak I've ever had, which is odd, since this is primarily a Hindu country. Cows are sacred to Hindus. In fact, I found it pretty hilarious that I was eating a steak while watching traffic go around a cow that had decided to rest in the middle of the street.

I asked how they were able to serve such wonderful steak in an area where cows are considered sacred. I was told the meat is imported daily from Calcutta. In India. Another Hindu country. So now I'm even more confused ... Seriously, though, because the country is so geared towards tourism you can get a reasonable interpretation of your national specialty here, no matter where you're from.

Here's a better look at the beer bottle, which has the Coolest Label Ever:



It's the famous picture of Tenzing Norgay from the first ascent in 1953. In the western world, for decades, it was said that Sir Edmund Hillary was the first man to climb the world's highest mountain. The fact that he had a partner was rarely mentioned.

Much like Matthew Henson, the African-American who actually planted the American flag when Robert Peary's expedition reached the North Pole for the first time in 1909, Tenzing was a brown person, and so at that point in history he simply didn't count in the western world.

Incidentally, there are no pictures of Hillary on the summit because Tenzing didn't know how to use a camera. Oops! I can't belive that didn't come up in conversation all those weeks when they were preparing and climbing. Try to imagine the conversation of the summit. "Ok, that's good. Now you take a picture of me ... You WHAT?!

Actually, Hillary was quoted late in life, with his usual good humor, as saying "Tenzing did not know how to operate the camera and the top of Everest was no place to start teaching him how to use it." The deep and abiding friendship and respect the two men had for each other is that for most of their lives they refused to say who set foot on the summit first. They did it together. That was their story and they stuck to it until late in life when Tenzing divulged that Hillary was the first.

The Nepalese have a deep and genuine affection for Sir Edmund, and with good reason. He spent the rest of his life using his fame and notoriety to help the Nepalese people through the Himalayan Trust, which he founded. The Lukla airport, site of the recent crash, was originally built to help transport materials for the building of hospitals and schools.

I saw the first school he built, in Khumjung, which also has a monastery famous for having what it claims to be the scalp of a yeti.



Don't laugh. Most of the "evidence" of yetis comes from serious mountaineers. The first yeti prints were taken on Eric Shipton's failed Everest expedition in 1951, which Hillary was actually a member of. Reinhold Messner, the greatest mountaineer of all time, claims to have seen a yet and wrote a book about it called "My Quest for the Yeti".

I slept twice in the village of Machhermo, site of the most credible account of a yeti. In 1974 a young girl was abducted (but managed to escape) a yeti and three yaks were killed. Most of this can be explained, of course, but I haven't heard a decent explanation of how the yaks ended up with broken spines.

In "The Snow Leopard", Peter Matthiessen's account of a trek he made to the remote Inner Dolpo region and simply one of the best books ever written, the author's companion is George Schaller, one of the world's most esteemed field biologists. Schaller thinks the existence of a yeti is entirely possible. After all, Matthiessen named the book after the animal he hoped to see on the trip, but never did. People spend years in the mountains looking for the snow leopard without ever seeing one. The elusiveness of the yeti, then, is not necessarily evidence that it doesn't exist.

Just last week a Japanese expedition on Dhaulagiri, a mountain I can see from my guest house when the sky is clear, took photos of what they claim are yeti footprints.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/21/nepal-japan

But Sir Edmund himself sent this scalp to the US, where it was determined it was made from the pelt of a serow, a goat-like Himalayan antelope. He and Tenzing reported seeing giant footprints when they scaled Everest, but as they grew older they both became more skeptical.

Aside from that one macabre piece of decor the monastery is pretty and cozy.



They use the scalp as a means to solicit donations from the steady stream of tourists that come through every day. More power to them.

Short update

I'm in Pokhara now, the other main tourist hub of Nepal. Internet cafes are more expensive here than in Kathmandu but much slower, so this will be a short post with no pix.

Since my last post I spent a few days in Chitwan National Park. I got to ride and "help" bathe an elephant but other than that it was the World's Most Remote Tourist Trap.

From there I took a bus to Pokhara, the starting point for hikes in the Annapurna region, which is actually more popular than the Everest region because of the relatively lower altitude.

Today I went paragliding. Tomorrow I leave for a three-day rafting tour on the Kali Gandaki river.

Fun stuff to report as soon as I can get a decent connection. It's funny I spoiled I've become. These computers don't have iTunes installed? I'm outta here!

Abode of Snow

In Sanskrit, hima means "snow" and alaya means "abode". So the translation of Himalaya actually has a ring to it in English!

I did a 16-day hike through the Everest region of the Himalayas. There were six hikers in our group, plus three guides and three porters. Because of the thin air, the bright glare of the light and the sheer magnitude of the scenery it's hard for a point-and-click photographer like myself to take decent photos. I took nearly 1,000, and they're going to require a lot of Photoshop magic. But you get the idea.

There was just too much to see and talk about in a blog post!

We flew from Kathmandu into Lukla, the airport where the fatal crash was a few days ago, then hiked on from there. I already posted a pic from the second day of the trip, when I got my first view of Everest from the ground. We spent the next two nights after that in Namche Bazar, one of the bigger towns in the region despite the fact it looks like it was nailed to the side of a hill.

This is the view from my window at the Moonlight Lodge.



And this is a picture looking down on the town during a day hike we did to acclimatize. Because it's at the confluence of two rivers, the Bhote Kosi and Dudh Kosi, this was considered a good place to build a city.



Namche is listed at 3,440 meters, although there's a quite a bit of altitude difference between the and bottom! (I'm trying to learn to think in meters since everyone else in the world does. I'm too lazy to do the conversions so multiply all the numbers by 3.3 to get the number of feet.) The town ends abruptly at a cliff that drops down to the Bhote Kosi river, with Kwangde (6,187 meters) looming on the other side.

We did see some rain but on the days we really wanted good weather we got it, like the day we did the hike from Namche. Just at the top of the hill we got a glorious view of three of the world's most famous mountains. On the right is Ama Dablam, then Lhotse in the center then the big guy himself.



To get an idea of how the skewed the sense of space and dimension is, consider that Ama Dablam is a mighty 6,856 meters. But it's nearly 2,000 meters shorter than Everest (8,850). They look like they're sitting nearly side-by-side but Everest is a 1.25 miles higher than Ama Dablam.

Everest is a big, hulking brute of a mountain. It's famous blunt summit looks like a boxer's nose. Although it's much shorter, Ama Dablam is a much more beautiful mountain. It almost looks sculpted.

The Everest region basically looks like the letter Y. From the Namche area (behind me in this photo) you make a hard left to get to Gokyo Ri. The valley on the right side leads to Kala Patthar and Everest itself.



The town in the center of the picture is Phortse Tenga, which is on the other side of the river, and which we would hike through several days later. The plan was to climb Gokyo Ri, then cross a pass called Cho La to get to the other side, and then climb Kala Patthar and visit Everest Base Camp (EBC).

Cho La is scary and dangerous under the best of conditions -- a hiker died there three days before we were scheduled to climb it -- so we decided to skip it and instead walk all the way back down and up.

My Lonely Planet travel book has a section in the front where the authors talk about their favorite trip within the country. One author wrote his "second favourite was watching people see Cho La for the first time -- everyone without exception responding with a squint and an appalled look on their faces. 'Up there?! You've got to be ****ing kidding me!!'" (His italics, not mine.) So I wasn't sorry to skip it.

I did the hike specifically for the view from Kala Patthar, but I decided to do this particular hike because it also went to Gokyo Ri. The scenery there was supposed to be fantastic.

I simply can't imagine a more spectacular place.



In this photo are two of the five bright turquoise glacial lakes (they really are that color), the tiny of town of Gokyo and the Ngozumpa Glacier, Nepal's biggest. The tip of Ama Dablam is visible in the far distance, about a third of the way from the left side of the photo. And in the center a U-shaped dip in the clouds -- Cho La.

Oh, but the really good stuff is in the other direction. Not only can you see Everest, but you can also see the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-highest mountains in the world: Lhotse, Makalu and Cho Oyu. (I believe Makalu is the peak just to the left of Ama Dablam in the above photo.) There are only fourteen 8,000-meter peaks in the world and here you can see four of them!

In this picture you can't see any of them, but you can see Gyachung Kang, which is the world's 16th-highest mountain but just misses the prestigious 8,000-meter cut (7,897). Beneath me is the glacier and, yeah, it's a pretty scary drop.



The hike to the 5,357-meter summit was a killer, partly because the mountain looks so plain. It looks like a big, round hill. But it's quite steep, and there are no real landmarks, so it's just and endless series of switchbacks over monotonous terrain. Doesn't look like much, does it.



In the foreground you can see someone drying yak dung into patties. Because most of the region is a national park, cutting of trees is forbidden. In many places there are no trees, anyway. Dung is a common and surprisingly efficient source of fuel. In a harsh environment, you use what you have. People would go down the trails and collect dung left behind by yak herds. We'd see them walking with their big baskets strapped to their backs, full of poop.

The Himalayas are a relatively new geological phenomenon, and the growing pains are evident everywhere. You can't really see it, but scientists say Everest is moving about 6 cm northeast every year. The evening before I climbed Gokyo Ri (the mountain) I climbed the ridge separating Gokyo (the town) from the glacier. In the distance I could hear avalanches or landslides.

I walked along the ridge towards Cho Oyu as the sun was setting. The top of the glacier, at the foot of the mountain, had been melting in the sunlight all day. The cracks and booms of the splitting ice sounded like a battle in the distance.

On the right is the glacier, which does a hard right turn around the gray, rocky hill on the right. The ridge is on the left side of the photo. In the center is Cho Oyu, considered to be the easiest 8,000-meter peak to climb, which is like saying it's the easiest alligator to wrestle. And on the other side is Tibet.



So we zipped down one side of the Y and back up the other to the village of Gorak Shep, the jumping-off point for Kala Patthar and EBC. By this time two people in our group had split off because they were doing a shorter version of the hike. I ended up climbing Kala Patthar by myself.

This is the sun rising behind Nuptse.



This is why you climb Kala Patthar: An unobstructed view of the world's highest mountain.



And this is looking down on Everest Base Camp. In the center, just to the left of the glacier, colored tents are barely visible.



To put the extreme terrain in perspective, consider that EBC is at roughly 5,360 meters, or 17,688 feet. The highest point in the Rocky Mountains is 14,440 feet, more than half a mile lower than the bottom of Everest.

Put it another way. One of the goals of serious mountaineers is to climb the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on each continent. The second-highest of the Seven Summits is Aconcagua, in Argentina. There are 23 mountains in Nepal higher than Aconcagua.

And this is Kala Patthar.



No, not the majestic, snow-capped peak. That's Pumori (7,145). Kala Patthar is the lump in the foreground. Like Gokyo Ri, it's not much to look at, and probably wouldn't even be mentioned on a map if the views from the top weren't so fantastic.

The Tibetan name for the mountain is usually transliterated as Chomolungma, the name of the goddess who lives on the mountain. Oddly, there was no name in Nepali for the mountain, so in 1956 it was christened Sagarmatha, "head of the sky". Well, it sounds nice in Nepali...

The English name was given by British Colonel Andrew Waugh, the surveyor general of India, in honor of his predecessor, Sir George Everest. I haven't been able to find out for sure one way or another, but it doesn't appear Sir George every actually saw the mountain! It's not as bad as naming two continents after an obscure Italian explorer, but it's pretty high up there on the list of cool things named after people who really didn't deserve it.

However, the name does fit. "Ever" implies timelessness, and "est" is a suffix used to express a superlative. I guess we should be thankful Sir George's last name wasn't Klunk or Flatt.

Oddly enough, there is no agreement on how high Everest is. Nepal officially considers it to be 8,848 meters but most of the world agrees it's 8,500.

I didn't actually make it to EBC. I made it down to the Khumbu Glacier, but then a snowstorm blew in. I wasn't prepared. And EBC really isn't much to see. It's just a bunch of tents. And due to q quirk in the geography, you can't see the summit from EBC because what's called the West Shoulder blocks the view. It was a disappointment, but Kala Patthar was the real reason I did the hike.

The hike back took us through Tengboche, famous for its monastery, and its views. In the bottom right-hand corner is an internet cafe. On the top left is the trail we took to get to Kala Patthar, and on the bottom left is the trail we took on the way back. It was really cloudy, so we only had glimpses of Ama Dablam through the clouds on the right. But the center of the view magically opened up long enough for me to take a photo of Everest and Lhotse.



I could go on and on. So I'll add one more pic and end the post. In a village called Pangboche we at the Everest View Lodge. This was the view from my window.



(Seriously, though, in the morning we could see it, and Ama Dablam was right there.) Ok, then, one more.

Sherpas

Sherpas are an ethnic group of Tibetan origin. The name means "people of the east". They settled in the Himalayan region sometime in the past 500 years or so. They became legendary from their work on the original Himalayan mountaineering expedition for their almost superhuman stamina and good humor.

However, sherpa (with a lowercase 's') is a generic term used to apply to anyone who assists climbers. On my trek we had a head guide, two assistant guides and three porters. None are ethnic Sherpas. The three porters did about 99.99 percent of the work.

I am in awe of these guys. The hikers all carried small daypacks and the porters carried our backpacks as well as their own gear. So they were each carrying three backpacks. Like so:



But that's nothing. Because the terrain is so steep and so high, the only way to transport anything up or down the mountains is to carry it. Yaks do some of the work, but the vast majority of the gear is carried by people.

That means toilet paper, Pringles, kerosene, lumber, windows -- everything. I'm still astounded that it's possible to hike for weeks in the world's highest mountains without needing a tent or food. I don't think I hiked more than an hour between lodges.

These are mostly cozy, clean places that offer beds and homecooked meals at surprisingly cheap prices. Normally after a hard day of hiking come the chores of setting up camp, starting a fire, cooking, etc. What a relief it is to arrive at an inn and be able to sit in the warm common room around the hearth, have someone serve you a hot meal and then go to sleep in an actual bed.

And everything in those lodges was carried there by people. If you consider for an instant that maybe $2 is too much for a candy bar, you realize what it took to get it there, and suddenly the price seems pretty reasonable.

Porters either tie the baggage together, as ours did, or use a basket, called a doko. It's about 2.5 feet wide by 2 feet deep, with a flat bottom. Think of a big, wicker coffee filter. The bottom is flat so that they can rest using a t-shaped piece of wood called a tokma. They can simply stop when they're tired, rest the tokma under the doko, and take a breather. When they start moving again the tokma becomes a walking stick.

They'll fill the basket up and then as many boxes on it as they're able to carry, sometimes a foot or two higher than their heads.

To put it in perspective Americans can understand, we saw two young guys each carrying dokos with 10 cases of canned beer. Here they are resting on their tokmas:



Let's do the math:
24 cans of 355 milliliters = 8.520 liters per case
A liter of water weighs 1 kilogram
8.520 liters weighs 8.520 kilograms
10 cases weighs 85.20 kilograms

So, with the basket and the actual packaging of the beer these two guys were each carrying around 200 pounds on their backs.

But wait, there's more. Whether they use a doko or not, sherpas secure the weight the same way, using a tumpline. This is a strap that they brace against the top of their head, allowing them to lean into the weight, thus transferring all of the stress onto the spine. (You can see the tumplines in the top photo.) It seems absolutely insane that the tumpline is the onlything securing the weight to their bodies, but you can't argue with the results.

Sherpas are not big people. This is me with our three porters in Namche.



They look like kids from the local little league team, but (from right to left) Asharman is 20, Lakapa is 22 and Dhana, Asharman's little brother, is 21.

When we stopped for the night the hikers would be in bed before 9 p.m. but all the guides and porters would hang out and play cards together all night. I believe the going rate to hire a porter is $10 per day or less, plus expenses. These guys do work that you couldn't find an American to do at any price, and yet they were always smiling, always laughing, always friendly. It was truly humbling.

Westerners like to wring their hands at what they perceive as exploitation of the local people by the tourist industry. But tourism is the only industry here. If these people didn't carry gear for tourists they wouldn't have any work at all. It really is the only way to get stuff from place to place. The more they carry, the more they get paid. The trails used by tourists are the same ones locals use to get around. We passed hundreds of people every day. This is a country where there is dignity and prestige in putting in a hard day's work. What a concept.

Yaks do some of the work, but even they pant and sweat on the steep trails, which are also narrow. When yaks are coming, you get out of the way. I think that's a pretty good rule to follow anywhere, that when you encounter an animal that weighs 1,000 pounds, is carrying 400 pounds of gear and, oh, by the way, has foot-long horns, you yield the right of way.

Because Nepal is Hindu and Buddhist in most parts killing and eating cows and yaks is not allowed. Lodges offer meat dishes, but usually this means the animal was butchered in Lukla and the meat was carried to the lodge. Seeing (and smelling) baskets of animal parts on the trail was enough to turn even a serious carnivore like me into a vegetarian on the trail.



Shops and lodges also sell yak cheese and yak butter, but strictly speaking this is not something you should eat, because a yak is a male, and I'd prefer not to consider where the milk came from. The female is called a nak. (Most of the animals are actually cow-yak hybrids.)

It's allowed to eat an animal that died because it "fell off the trail" (wink, wink). Despite their bulk yaks are actually quite nimble and sure-footed. In the center of the picture is a black one grazing on the face of a sheer hill.



So the odds of one "falling off the trail" are roughly about 0.0 percent.

Lukla

I had planned on starting my post about my Everest trek with a joke about how the most dangerous part of the trip is the airport in Lukla. But then a plane crashed there Wednesday while trying to land, killing 18, with only one survivor.

It's surprising there aren't more incidents here. It's a testament to the skill of the pilots here. The airport is a pretty crazy place. The runway is just over a quarter-mile long and rises about 60 meters to help planes decelerate on landing and accelerate on takeoff. It also does a U-turn at the end. Here's a picture of a helicopter landing.



The lodge I slept in is just to the left off-camera, so I could see the runway from my window. I hung around for a couple hours yesterday afternoon trying to get pictures of planes landing and taking off, but there were none. You can see other tourists lined up by the fence taking photos and locals waiting to score gigs as porters for incoming tourists.

By the time I arrived the airport was running normally. Most flights go in and out in the morning, because pilots have to fly by sight and can't land or take off when the clouds roll in. It's completely chaotic but fantastically efficient at the same time. Planes don't sit on the runway for more than 15 minutes while they're unloaded and reloaded.

Though it was what everyone was talking about there was little sign of the tragedy. In fact, while I was sitting there a group of Nepalese kids walked by, dressed up and with pink paint on their foreheads for a local festival. The little girl in the middle is one of the most beautiful children I've ever seen, but you can't really tell here because she's too busy sticking her tongue out at me.



Oh, and the name of my airline was Yeti Airlines. I saved both the boarding pass and the barf bag for my scrapbook.

Plane crash

Just a quick note to let everyone know I was not on this plane.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7658258.stm

I am scheduled to fly out of that airport on Friday. This may push my departure back. I'll post again when I'm safe and sound back in Kathmandu.

Self-portrait, Kala Patthar

I'm back in Namche Bazar after hiking around the Himalayas. I just had my first hot shower and cold (well, lukewarm) beer in about two weeks! Yippee! I am as sore and tired as I have been in a long, long time. But, oh, the things I've seen...

This is me yesterday on the summit of Kala Patthar. It's an ugly little lump in the midst of otherwise spectacular Himalayan peaks, and "only" 5,545 metres (18,192 ft) high. That's over two miles shorter (that's two miles straight up) than its most famous neighbor. But what this otherwise unremarkable mountain can boast is the best unobstructed view of Everest, seen here with a wispy cloud halo.



The peak just behind my head is Nuptse. In the bottom center is the Khumbu Glacier. To the left is the Khumbu Ice Falls. Just off-camera to the left is Everest Base Camp. Climbers go up the Ice Falls through the gap between Nuptse and Everest to the ridge in the center of the picture, then up to the summit on the other side.

I have now seen Everest from just about every angle except one: the summit. And I never will. Climbing little Kala Patthar was about as much as I could handle!

I'll be back in Kathmandu in two days. At some point thereafter I'll post more pix when I have a cheaper and quicker connection.