A Tale of Two Everests. A Tale of Two Sickies. Hmm

Hillary=normal
Jordan=BOLD

H:
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.  Ain‘t that the truth.  This is the story of our adventure to Everest, and if it seems like a bipolar tale, its because it is.  Jordan and I have decided to co-write this post, so that we can let you in on how different our experiences were at different times.  So bare with us, it may be lengthy and a bit redundant.

Let me start out by saying the my expectations were quite high for this trek, 8848 meters high to be exact.  Everest was my Mecca of sorts, the whole reason for coming to Nepal in the first place.  Yes, Annapurna was great, but the REAL reason I were here is to see Everest with my own eyes.  I’ve come to view the Everest  region as somewhat of a celebrity.  Actually traveling to the little villages along the trek that I’ve read about so many times in “Into Thin Air” was both surreal and somewhat disconcerting, like I was meeting the lead singer of a band that I listened to thousands of times.  Or something like that.

I also felt like Everest was my baby.  I’d done the research (but I do most of it anyways) and I’d chosen a difficult route for Jordan and I.  The Three Passes Route.  It would take us to all three valleys in the region, cross over three mountain pass higher than 5200 meters and give us some the best and most varied views of the big hills.  It would take us around 20 days to trek, about twice as long as the Annapurna trek and longer than I’ve ever continuously hiked in my life…..My, how things change.

To back up a little bit, the week before we left for Everest, still in Pokhara, Jordan came down with what we initially thought was good ole bacterial travelers diarrhea.  So we loaded him up with antibiotics and called it good.  But he kept getting sick.  Finally after 4 days, he seemed to be back to his healthy six-meal-a-day-eating self again.  So we high-tailed it back to Kathmandu, taking a weekend pit stop in Bhaktapur for the Dashain festival, and then before we knew it we were sitting in the front seat of a tiny airplane bound for Lukla, where we would touch down at  the deadliest airport in the world and start our trek.  I’m gonna paint a little picture of how airports work in Nepal for you.  We walked with our backpacks into a giant, hot, squished-with-people room, and looked for our ticket counter.  Of course nobody who works for the airline is standing behind said ticket counter, so we plopped our bags down and waited in line (because we got there 2 hrs early).  Finally after an hour and a half of waiting with no signs of  “hey, lets check you guys in, now”,  Jordan approached someone at a different ticket counter to see what the deal was, and wouldn’t you know, our flight was delayed.  You see in Nepal, you aren’t on the 8am or 9am flight, you are on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc flight of the day, and whatever time that leaves is when you leave.  So our flight was delayed, and because all the other flights before our flight were delayed too, it was starting to look like we were not going to get a ride to Lukla that day.  But Jordan was very sweet ,Southern, and flirtatious with the only female employee in sight and got us on the flight that was “leaving right now”.  So after a little groping/security check we were checked in and only had to two wait 2 more hours until our flight left.  The flight was uneventful, I think.  I honestly can’t recall specifics because I was too busy freaking out in my head. Since we were in the front two seats, Jordan was busy memorizing the fuel shutoff steps displayed in the cockpit.. In case we crashed into a fiery ball in the mountains. Most of my flight was spent chanting the Hail Mary in my head (the parts I could remember anyway) and then freaking out more that I couldn’t even remember the whole freaking Hail Mary.  Anyways, we landed.  So thank you 7 years of Catholic school.

Anyways, Lukla, from here we had a nice short walk, mostly downhill to Phakding, where we spent the night.  The next day was our biggest hike in terms of elevation gain, over 1000m to get to Namche Bazaar.  From here, I’m handing to laptop to Jordan:

J:   Oh Namche, the loveliest village on the mountianside. Resting at appx. 3500meters and 26 hiking miles Southwest of Mt. Everest, Namche Bazar is a common spot to spend an acclimatization day and do some last-minute shopping of quality locally-made down goods. I spent the first day successfully convincing Hillary that she did NOT need a full-body goose down expedition suit for the Three Passes hike. If you are familiar with Hillary and her opinion of cold-weather camping, hiking, surviving, etc.. then you know that this is not the first time I’ve had to coax her back off that ledge. The only difference was that in the US, these bad boys cost $1500.. And in the copy shop capital of Namche, you could bring home your very own goose down Michelin Man suit for about $200.  We finally decided on scooping up a black “Millet” down jacket for Hillary and a school-bus-yellow “Mammut” down vest for myself. All for 5000R.. Or about $60!

We had found a little lodge called Holiday Namche, which was nestled high on the Western flank of the amphitheater-shaped village and offered astounding views of the craggy spires surrounding the river valley from our room‘s window… all for about $3/night. I spent the evening  eating water buffalo curry, swapping stories  with a professional trail runner from Chamonix, France, and making fun of a rather pompous guided-n-portered British group all wearing hats, shirts, and sweatshirts emblazoned with “Everest Base Camp” who loudly professed over satellite phones to have just gotten off … ‘expedition’.. to the hardest hike in the world. 

Now it is quite hard to pinpoint a sickness on a single dish or cup of liquid when you’re enjoying such suspect culinary treats. Did I get the bug from the delicious roadside, hand-served 60rupee slop in Pokhara.. Was it the buffalo curry whose protein was sourced from a farm 8-days walking downhill from Namche.. Celebratory cocktails with questionable ice in Pokhara with the Anglo-Franco-Yanko team after the Annapurna Circuit?   Well we just don’t know.   But I can tell you for certain, that the last thing you wanna do is get sick at 11,500 feet, while using a shared bathroom, and after eating spicy veggie momos!   The next days are kinda a bathroom-bed-bathroom-bed blur, and luckily our room was up two flights of tunnel vision-inducing stairs. After three days of this nonsense, I was so weak and dehydrated that simply  walking the 100yds across the village left me confused, stumbly, and rather demoralized. We decided I needed to see a doctor, and the land donated for the newly built medical clinic was in the best spot possible.. 600 vertical feet uphill from the village. I decided that I would rather succumb to an unflattering dehydration-induced death in an unmarked toilet stall than walk uphill ANYWHERE.  Luckily,  on our walk back the lodge, I blearily stumbled into the front door of a previously unnoticed pharmacy. Hillary asked for some IV fluids, and the nurse who ran the shop cheerily handed her a 0.5Liter glass bottle of Lactate Ringers while saying, “Look, it doesn’t even expire until next week!” We decided against this option. After a quick chat, we concluded that I was suffering from a protozoal infection of Giardia. We picked up a few doses of Tinidazole, and I stumbled triumphantly towards the lodge and my bed.  I felt a bit better the next day, so we took a stroll up a ridgeline to 12,600ft to a vantage of Everest and my BFF, Ama Dablam (my favorite mountain of all time).


So instead of just one acclimatization day in Namche Bazaar, we spent a whopping 4 days there.  Jordan was real trooper through it all.  I, on the other hand, got itchy feet on day 2.  “What do you mean you can’t just go for a walk through town?” I would whine.  Its my own fault I suppose, I brought quite possibly the most boring book on this trek and I tried to find any excuse not to read it.  So after 4 days at 3500m, I figured we would be “super acclimatized” but it became clear that we were simply not going to be able to do our planned trek.  The fact of the matter was that Jordan was too weak and we didn’t want to risk being in more isolated valleys and him getting sick again.  Change of plans.  Instead of taking a clockwise, west to east trek over the Three Passes, we decided to continue the trek up the classic Everest Base Camp route, where, if Jordan was feeling better we could rejoin the Three Passes trail and do it in reverse, counter-clockwise from east to west.  The next day we set off for Tingboche, a little village in the saddle between two mountains with an active Tibetan Buddhist monestary and one kick-ass bakery.  It was a tough hike for the both of us.  I was carrying a little more weight in my pack and Jordan was still dehydrated and calorie-depleted.  But after the long uphill slog, we both had the most overpriced and delicious croissants and chocolate cake.  The next day Jordan was feeling much better and we had an easy jaunt to the next little town of Dingboche.  Per the guidebook, we were supposed to spend another night here to acclimatize, but Jordan and I figured we would be fine, what with all the extra time in Namche.  Plus we wanted to get up to Chukkung, a little outpost that serves at the starting point for climbing the nearby Island Peak.  Now, even after 4 days of Giardia-induced fluid deprivation, Jordan still had a bit of peak-bagging fervor.  Unfortunately, that night in Dingboche, I got the first symptoms of altitude sickness.  I’d had trouble sleeping the night before in Tengboche but I figured it was just the cold weather and lack of insulation in our tool shed excuse of a guesthouse room.  But the next night, in Dingboche, I didn’t sleep at all.  Well, actually I would sleep for 30 minutes or so and then I would stop breathing, which would of course wake me up with the terrifying feeling of suffocation.  You see when you climb to high altitude with less oxygen in the air, your body compensates by breathing faster and deeper, to get your lungs and muscles and brain the oxygen it needs.  But you also “blow off” a lot of carbon dioxide when you exhale.  So when you go to sleep, because your CO2 levels are low and that’s the primary drive for your brain to say “hey you idiot breathe!” your brain is all like “nah its cool the carbon dioxide levels are fine” and you stop breathing for long pauses, letting your CO2 levels to rise back to normal levels.  But because you aren’t breathing,  your oxygen levels drop low enough for you brain to get a little stressed out, at which point you wake up gasping for air.  So that was my night in Dingboche.  And after a few waking-up-by-suffocation episodes, I started to have a lot of anxiety.  That’s another symptom of altitude sickness.  Anyways, I decided it was time to give up the goose and start taking Diamox, a medicine to help the body acclimitize more quickly.  Its an annoying drug.  It makes your face, hands and feet numb and tingly, and it makes you pee all the damn time.  We also decided it was necessary to spend a rest day in Dingboche.

Dingboche turned out to be one of our favorite villages in all of Nepal. We spent two nights here, and spent the time gazing up at the Northern side of Ama Dablam, attending an education clinic concerning AMS, and drinking tea while being entertained by the young man breaking a coal-black stallion at our lodge. We spent a great deal of time getting to know our fellow trekkers and the village locals while watching the young horse buck and gallop his way down the stone path outside the lodge. We were fascinated by the stories from a Brazilian fellow who had climbed Everest, Cho Oyu, and was on high on Manasulu during the late September avalanche that killed several climbers. He was celebrating his 50th hike up to Kalapathar while guiding trekkers that night. Much dancing and beer ensued!

Our next destination was the village of Chukung: a contender for the top spot on our trek. Walking steadily through the remnants of a receding glacier, we boulder-hopped, stream-jumped, and yak-dodged our way to this tiny outpost near the bottom of  8,000meter (and seldom climed) Lhotse. I had a two-day struggle with my desire to climb a Himalayan peak.. And after much debate with the frostbitten angel and ice-tool-wielding devil on my shoulders, I decided it was not worth forking over $900 for a guided trip up the 20,000ft+ Island Peak.. Mostly because I had no clue how I would perform that high up after being quite sick earlier in the week. Nothing says “Wha Whah” like turning around and spending almost a month’s-worth of trip fund on a failed climb..  Instead, and for FREE, we spent our days hiking up Chukung Ri to a vantage around 17,500ft and simply looking in awe at the surround giants of ice and stone.      This was how I spent November 3, my 28th birthday: with my girl, an ear-to-ear grin, and an overwhelming amount of gorgeous alpine scenery before my eyes. (I declared that I had two birthday.. Since Nepal is 12hrs ahead of Seattle time, I had a Nepal birthday and an American birthday.. And I squeezed every minute out of it!)  On this day I captured my favorite picture from our trip so far: a panorama from Island Peak over to Ama Dablam.. Stunning (I should mention here that I started getting a gnarly headache and nauseous on the day hike up to Chukkung Ri.  I was a whiny, bitchy, slow-moving mess.  Jordan kinda got jipped in the happy-smiley girlfriend department for his birthday.  At this point, it was clear, I wasn‘t going to be able to do the first pass.  I was having acute mountain sickness symptoms starting at 4400 meters and was dragging ass.  A 5500+ pass was just out of the picture.   We would have to just go to Everest Base Camp on the standard, filled with European tourists, route.  Wha-wha.)

We decided to walk the long way around to the village of Luboche, which took us back down to Dingboche, and past Taboche and Cholatse.. Two Westward-listing peaks with strangely shaped chutes of alpine ice that we dubbed the Death Slides. Instead of following a lower trail that followed the river, we opted to gain a higher ridge to the North and wander Westward through seasonal yak “karkas” (pastures) in the direction of Lobuche. This turned out to be a great decision, as we were alone for hours on end, save the random yaks grazing. We pulled into Lobuche late that night, after an eerie stroll through boulder fields littered with chortens erected in honor of climbers who did not return from the surrounding mountains. We were treated to a blazing sunset set reflected upon the icy summit of Nuptse while chatting with an entertaining couple from Buffalo, NY. It was refreshing to talk with folks about dark beers, food covered with cheese, more food, buffalo wings, NFL, more beer, and cheesebuuuuurgers!

The next day from Lobuche we hiked a short 3 miles up to the last tiny outpost of a village, Gorak Shep, just a hop, skip and a jump from Kala Pattar and Everest Base Camp.  The start of the day was an easy flat walk through the terminal moraine of the Khumbu Glacier.  It was supposed to be a small vertical gain day, lucky for me.  I was feeling much better after descending down from Chukkung and then staying overnight in Lobuche, which was an almost net-even altitude gain.  That being said, any kind of physical activity apart from walking very slow on flat ground left me gasping for air and having to stop every 10 minutes or so.  About an hour into the walk up to Gorak Shep, we came to a pretty tall little hill.  Surely, I thought, this will be the only height we will gain and then it will be relatively flat from here.  Wrong.  After struggling up a dusty, chossy, steep hill, I realized we would only have to go down the other side and then back up another hill, and another hill after that.  Somewhere along the way I started to get a bit of a headache.  And then we saw it, the Khumbu freaking Glacier.  And then we saw the very start of the Icefall.  And then! And then! Everest poked its big black pyramid head out from around Nuptse! It was exhilarating. Here I am, close to something so huge and famous! We dragged ourselves into Gorak Shep, and then I started to feel like absolute shit.  Pounding headache.  Sensitive to light.  Every part of my body ached.  I choked down garlic soup.  Apparently, that’s supposed to help with altitude sickness.  Our plan for the day had been to rest for awhile at the guesthouse then take a walk up to Everest base camp.  But all I could think about doing was laying down in a dark room and moving as little as possible.  “I’ll just lay down for an hour” I told myself, then I’ll get up and we’ll take a walk up there.  I started to feel very fuzzy.  Sort of drunk and very very tired. But my head hurt so bad I couldn’t sleep.  I had an internal debate for about thirty minutes of “is it worth it to get up and go pee?”  At this point, Jordan came to check on me, saw that I was in pretty bad shape, and started to realize that we would probably have to go back down.  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.  I belligerently argued with him for awhile that I was fine, I would be fine tomorrow to hike up to 5500m to Kala Pattar, even though at present I was quivering in the fetal position at 5200 meters.  But, in the end, I realized we had to go back down.  It was either that or risk getting worse and having to max out my credit card with a helicopter evacuation.  So Jordan took all the weight out of my backpack except for the sleeping bags and down jackets, and I ataxically stumbled my way down back to Lobuche.  Jordan took a video of me trying to figure out which way to walk around a boulder in the middle of the trail.  First I went left, then right, then back left.  Looking back, it was scary, and we made the right decision.  But at the time, I was so disappointed in myself.  How could I get altitude sickness now? I’ve already done the AC, and felt great at 5400 meters.  What was wrong with me now, when it mattered to me more?  Plus I felt  like I ruined Jordan’s Nepali birthday.

Walking back down to Lobuche was the strangest experience.  Like, I actually noticed my head feeling clearer and clearer. Like my brain was working that much better with the tad bit more oxygen.  Once we reached town, I was coherent and even intellectual.  We had birthday grilled cheeses and went to sleep in the coldest bed I’ve ever slept in.  At this point, after having admitted to myself that it just wasn’t meant to be (or that I was just a big baby), I felt like I couldn’t spend one more minute than I had to in the mountains. I was just….done.   We left Lobuche bright and early and decided to go as far as we could.  Typically people stop in Dingboche or Tengboche for the night.  But I figured, why stop hiking at 3 in the afternoon and spend another cold night eating crappy noodles, when we can walk all the way  back  to Namche and eat slightly less crappy noodles and sleep in a much warmer bed.  So that’s what we did.  Twenty-three miles of downhill-uphill-downhill for 9 hrs, the last hour of which was walked in the dark with headlamps.

Returning to Namche was like returning to modern civilization.  Hot water showers!  Expensive crappy beer! No more headache!  After a completely gluttonous rest day (like eating 2 large yak cheese pizzas for breakfast) we knee-banged it back down to Lukla to try to get a flight outta there.  Back to the craziness of Kathmandu.

Side note:  We started this blog entry right after returning to Kathmandu but as you know, we didn’t finish it and now, I’m sitting here in Chiang Mai, Thailand trying to recall events and thoughts that are already starting to blur in my memory.  Re-reading the earlier portion of the blog, I realize now that my side of the story  is almost solely describing  my various ailments and bodily discomforts, which is a large part of what I remember from that particular trip.  But of course, I also remember the scenery. Its just harder to describe.  Its there in the background of my head.  It almost silly to try and talk about  it. It would sound stupid. The mountains were ….Big is all I can say.  Making me feel small.  Making me wonder how in the hell people can carve a life out in a very inhospitable place.  Its also weird how my mind’s eye was sort desensitized to beautiful, huge mountains.  The first couple dozen you see, its like “whoa, oh my god, awesome” and all that.  And then when its all you see for 6 weeks, its just….what’s there.  Funny huh?


Anyways, we left Lukla on a similarly tiny airplane, in a similarly organized and orderly process as how we came.  Haha.  But as I sat in my front row seat and peered out the window, chanting my abridged version of the Hail Mary, I became sort of sad to think that I would never come back to the Himalayas.  It just didn’t seem right, that this experience would be my first and last.  No, I was already starting to miss it, just a little bit.  I was mesmerized to look out and see the huge looming mountains of pure, hard white give way to the scrunched up blanket of green, earthy hills, terraced into concentric shapes in such a way that it looked like a topographical map.  To see huge rivers, diverge into various smaller ones and then disappear between mountainsides.  Then those thoughts of piqued curiosity and maybe even adventure crept back in.  “I wonder how far that river goes”….”I wonder what’s beyond those last hills”…”I wonder what those  people down there are doing right now”.  Yes, I’ll definitely come back again.

Geez.. I just read through this blog entry again now that it is finally done.. Thanks for getting through it guys! Long one..