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.
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