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Week 8: Coming Home
May 31, 2016
Today is the day I was originally meant to leave Nepal to fly home but since Nick and the team summited earlier than most seasons I have been home for exactly a week. It has been exactly two weeks since I departed base camp. It seems like it has been much longer.
After Nick and the team reached the summit on May 13th they spent that night sleeping on oxygen at Camp IV. The next night was spent at Camp II and on the third day they arrived home, well to base camp, where I proceeded to give Nick a gigantic hug. I spent the day listen to Nick and the others as they recounted their experience of the summit. They talked about having a troublesome start because it took nearly two hours to find the fixed lines in the snow outside of Camp IV. Then when some unexpected gusts of winds threatened to turn them around Pemchhirri urged them to wait. They had enough oxygen so they sheltered by a rock formation for about half an hour above 8,000m. Thankfully, instead of worsening and creating storm conditions, the winds subsided enough for them to continue on to reach the summit.
The team took a day at base camp to rest and pack. I took the opportunity to interview Nick, David, and Pemchhiri. On May 17th we walked out of base camp. We stopped into Gorak Shep for tea so I could say goodbye to my friends Pasang and Chitra from last year. Pasang asked me if I would be returning next year. I said “No” but maybe in the future. We trekked from base camp to Pangboche in the first day and from Pangboche to Namche in the second day to arrive in Lukla on the third. That is 42 miles in three days.
The next day our chances of flying out by airplane were dashed before breakfast. The clouds that had been plaguing the airport town for the past week, backing up air traffic, set in once more. Two years before though, Nick and another repeat member of this years team, Steve, had been delayed in Lukla for several days due to weather and eventually Jagged Globe chartered a helicopter to take the team down to Kathmandu rather than have to change the dates of their commercial flights home to Heathrow. Steve was not keen to repeat the past so he arranged for our team to helicopter out that day. So Steve, if you are reading this, THANK YOU. It was an exciting flight, at least for the first five minutes before the clouds really broke. We took off from Lukla at the slightest sign of a break in the fog. It was not much of a break but it was enough for the pilot to navigate over the hillside under the clouds through a series of steep turns no more that one hundred feet above the ground. I would bet you that Nepal is home to some of the world’s best helicopter pilots.
We arrived in Kathmandu after an hour ride. The feeling of stepping on smooth pavement was disorienting after nearly two months of rocky uneven terrain. The chaotic traffic of Kathmandu made the nine kilometer bus trip to our hotel nearly as long as our 138km helicopter flight from Lukla. The hotel was absolute luxury compared to how we had been living. I took two showers the afternoon we arrived and lounged in the provided bathrobe. Nick finagled a flight departing the next morning so we all had a goodbye drink in the hotel bar that evening. I woke up at 6 am the next morning to have breakfast with Nick and bid him farewell. We’d become good friends and shared so many unique experiences that I was sad to say goodbye. When the time came I was sad to say goodbye to everyone actually, especially when the others spoke about meeting up in London because I knew I would be an ocean away.
Mary and I did some sight seeing in Kathmandu one afternoon. I finally saw The Monkey Temple. It was impressive but I was disappointed that most of the monkeys I saw were picking through the trash on the hillside. We also checked out Durbar Square in Patan. The square was full of old Buddhist temples. We even saw a low budget movie being filmed complete with back up dancers. The sight seeing didn’t go farther than that though. The city with it’s heavy traffic, dust, and heat was a bit too much for our exhausted bodies and our minds used to the tranquility of the mountains. One night the team remaining in Kathmandu had a celebratory dinner with many of the team’s Nepali climbers. For two of the Nepal climbers it was also their first Mount Everest summit.
As wonderful as my time in Nepal had been this time around I was ready for my flight home on May 23rd. I was tired from the two months abroad and I was bracing myself for the 30 hour transit time if would take me to make it back to New Jersey. The people of Nepal have given so much to me over the past year from yak cheese and sweets to footage from the top of Mount Everest. I would like to do more to return the kindness. One thing, of many, I have learned from my travels in Nepal is that you may go somewhere for the location but it’s really the people that you meet that make the place worth going to.