With the help of Doma, a 23 year old sherpa who has climbed Everest twice, Wanderlust treks up to the 5,545m high Mount Everest base camp
WHAT’S THIS?” I had to shout above the clamour of the horns and drums around me.
“Yeti skull.”
I must have misheard. “WHAT?”
Instead of repeating, he pointed to a sign above the cabinet. ‘The Yeti Skull of Khumjung Gompa’, it said. Ah, that’d be a yeti skull then – a tall, conical dome covered in long ginger fur. Silly of me not to recognise it quicker, really.
The trek to Everest Base Camp is full of surprises – not least the fact that, actually, it’s not just about the mountains. If you took away all the bumpy bits, the Khumbu region of Nepal (as it is more properly known) would still be an amazing place to trek.
Sherpa culture, with its Tibetan roots, ancient village communities and all-pervading Buddhism, provides a bonus that most people – focused as they are on getting to Base Camp – don’t expect.
And now that Nepal has finally turned its back on 11 years of guerrilla fighting, insurgency and instability, this year is the perfect time to go. Comrade Prachanda, leader of the Maoists, has signed a peace deal with the government. The corrupt king has been stripped of power. The stage is set for Nepal to reclaim its rightful place as the epicentre of world trekking.
Because if it’s trekking you want, nowhere else on the planet really compares. Of the ten highest mountains in the world, eight lie within Nepal’s borders. Just as interestingly, its mountain areas are densely populated and have been for millennia. So when you go trekking, you are walking on trails that have been used for centuries, through villages that have been there for just as long.
The Base Camp trek doesn’t start with huge peaks and incredible vistas, it starts with deep valleys and little farming villages.
It also starts with a heart-stopping flight into Lukla – the nearest road is four days’ walk away. Perhaps because of this the Khumbu is a fascinating mix of the old and the new. And we witnessed both on the walk up to Namche Bazaar, the main village of the area. At 3,450m, Namche provided the perfect chance to both acclimatise to the thin air and make a leisurely exploration of the Sherpa heartland.
We walked through a maze of stonewalled fields dotted with narrow trails and squat houses. Each building was immaculately kept, a sign of the civic pride that is so evident wherever you look in the Khumbu. Women worked hard in the fields against a backdrop of snowy peaks. The monsoon was finished and they were turning the soil for the next crop of potatoes. A tiny, stooped old woman, clearly not up to the harder work of tilling, was walking around picking up great steaming piles of yak dung and rolling them carefully into cannonballs before putting them in a basket on her back.
Just behind her, the wall of a hut was covered with splats of these dung balls, stuck thinly to the stone to catch the morning sun. They were being dried to use as fuel instead of precious wood. In each was a neat palm print.
But if that seemed medieval, there was nothing outdated about our first stop, the Hillary Trust hospital in Khunde. When Sir Ed first climbed Everest in 1953, he – like everyone else who comes here – was overwhelmed by the generosity and spirit of the Sherpa people. He wanted to do something for them using his new-found fame to raise funds. When he asked them what they wanted, he got a typical Sherpa answer: they wanted hospitals, schools and bridges. With a bit of healthcare, education and transport they could look after themselves, thank you very much.
And they have. The little field hospital in Khunde is staffed by a doctor from one of the local villages.
“We mainly treat lowland Nepalis who come up here for work,” Dr Kami told us. “They work too hard, get dehydrated and don’t acclimatise properly. Because of our funding, we treat them for 30 rupees.” That’s about 35p.
Hillary’s work has meant that life expectancy in the Khumbu is now ten years more than in the rest of Nepal. The Hillary Trust even paid for Dr Kami’s medical degree – in Fiji.
“I loved it there,” he told us, then paused for effect: “I learned to swim.” There was a silence while we all digested the importance of his statement.
Leaving probably the world’s only swimming Sherpa, we walked to the next village, Khumjung. By the time we stepped into the dark interior of the gompa (temple) there, it was already getting cold. There was a service going on. Monks sat cross-legged down each side of a central aisle, blankets over their legs.
On their laps were the ancient prayer-scrolls that they were working their way through. Every now and again, they banged drums, blew horns and flutes. The light was dim in the afternoon, the air dry and cold. With the noise, the smoke from the candles and the demon faces staring down from the walls, it felt otherworldly.
By the time I got out a ten-rupee note to leave as an offering, it didn’t seem so ridiculous to be shown a yeti skull in return. This was the Himalaya, the abode of the gods. Its spirituality is defined by its people, and by now I was getting to know our Nepali trek staff.
Take Doma, for example, one of our four guides. A shy 23-year-old, he had climbed Everest twice. Yet he worked from dawn to dusk making sure we were comfortable and well fed. Sherpas have a humility born of living among really, really big mountains that suggests they understand exactly their place in the world. It’s a very Buddhist viewpoint – why take things too seriously, when this life is so short? After all, there’s another life around the corner.
Up here, people were closer to heaven – 4,000m closer. There was a quote by Voltaire on a monastery wall: “It is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once.” Clearly Voltaire had a bit of Sherpa in him.
Dosed up on philosophy, we trekked on through peerless mountain scenery, tramping ever upwards. It was breath-taking and fascinating in equal measure – but I guess when you’re among the world’s highest mountains that shouldn’t be a surprise.
What was a surprise was learning that, on this Base Camp trek, Everest Base Camp was not the primary goal. After all, why would you trek for a week to look at a campsite on a boulder-field?
The ultimate goal was a ‘small’ hill above base camp called Kala Pattar.
It stands at 5,545m. That might be a tiddler compared to 8,848m Everest, but it was enough to make me nervous. By the time we reached its base, we’d spent seven days walking and acclimatising for the ascent – but that didn’t mean it would be easy.
“Bed-tea, sir.” The smiling face of Doma woke me up and he handed me a hot cuppa. It was dark – 4.30am.
The inside of my tent sparkled with frost. I had just spent a night sleeping 100m higher than the summit of Mont Blanc. According to the thermometer on my watch, it was -8°C. And that was inside.
Setting off at first light, we trudged along at a snail’s pace. Up here, there is about half the amount of air there is at sea level. After so long in the mountains, we were snotty, coughy, sneezy, sniffy, dirty, sunburned, chapped and tired.
I shuffled along, blinkered by hat, sunglasses and scarf, taking tiny regular steps and panting like I was finishinga marathon. The sun was up and, with 50% less atmosphere up here, the UV was fierce.
After what seemed like an eternity, we reached the last teahouse (the basic lodges that dot the Himalaya) before the climb to Kala Pattar’s summit. The owner told us she’d just overheard a radio message from a US expedition on Everest itself: 14 people were standing on the top of the world at that very minute. Resuming my uphill struggle, I imagined I could see them. If they could do that, I could climb Kala Pattar.
Step by tiny step, I edged closer to the summit, Doma pacing behind me as though this was a Sunday stroll. For him it probably was, but for me it felt like I was breathing through a vacuum-cleaner with the power turned on. Every time I stopped, it took two full minutes of recovery before I remembered to look at the view. Every time I did, a little bit more of shy Everest revealed itself.
I spent two hours shuffling along thinking “just one more step”. And two hours of shuffling – miraculously – adds up to 500m of ascent.
“This is without a shadow of doubt the best view I have ever seen in my whole life,” gasped Ian, an experienced Alpine climber. He was sitting at Kala Pattar’s summit when I got there, looking around in wonder.
An icy wind was blowing. I sat next to the summit prayer-flag and drank in the view around me. Wherever I looked, there was a mountain. And not just any old mountain – one of the highest on the planet. Ice blinded me through my sunglasses. The sky above was a darker blue than I’d ever seen it. Above everything towered Everest, its white plume flying as its head poked up into the jet-stream winds.
If it felt like this to climb Kala Pattar, I couldn’t begin to comprehend what it must feel like on Everest itself. I looked up at the summit of the highest mountain on earth. It looked close enough to touch. I turned to Doma, who was standing next to me.
“Would you like to be up there today, Doma?” I asked.
He shook his head emphatically. “Not today. Very windy, very cold.”
Ian and I looked up at the plume and thought about this. He was right. Down here – down here at 5,545m – was quite high enough.
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