Everest

We flew into Lukla, a mountain village 4 days walking from any road. The plane sat about 15 and the girls picked the seats in the first row. They wanted a roller coaster ride and got one as the plane flew into a valley, took a right down another smaller valley and then shot down into a runway that finished at a mountain wall. A quick thrill before the long walk.

We had a quick breakfast and began the 2 day walk to Namchee Bazaar, the biggest village in the area and a crossroad between the Everest region and Tibet. The bazaar lies on top of a ridge that separates two valleys and the switch backs  are loaded with yaks carrying loads, humans carrying loads, and us, carrying nothing and dying.

Namchee was clouded in and it wasn't until the next morning that we noticed that we were among some very large mountain peaks covered in snow. Nicole and Hannah were bundled up in their sleeping bags, cold, cold, cold. They wouldn't even open the window to see the mountains they were so frozen.

From Namchee we spent a day reaching another higher ridge, closer to Everest. Again the clouds were low and the rain poured down in the afternoon. Tengpoche Monastery is one of the highest in the world at 3800 meters. The lodges were few and scattered around the monastery. Our guide Naryan thought the sky would clear in the night. Ava and I woke up at midnight to get a full moon view of the surrounding mountains and Everest.

The next morning was again cloudy, but they quickly broke to reveal Everest, the nearby peak of Lohtse and the dramatic close up of Aba Dablam, which soars like a fairy tale peak that would house a castle. The morning was filled with sounds of the monks being called to prayer with conch shells and knocking sticks.