The Nepali Flat

by Gordon Alexander

  ‘The path to Base Camp change every year. Every year, Base Camp change the places. Just dependings on what the glacier is a doing,’ Subash told me and I nodded.

  After climbing down, we cruelly had to climb up again. My knee was doing a weird clicking thing that made me anxious, especially seeing as the going was so rough and uneven. But it wasn’t long before we were there. I saw Subash take a couple of long steps. It looked like he was walking on flat ground. He was walking on flat ground! The things you get excited about at high altitude! I joined him and was greeted by the group of Estonians congratulating themselves in the form of a big group hug. Behind them a large and untidy stone cairn was wrapped in old, decaying prayer flags. Beyond that was a lunar landscape littered with bright-coloured tents.

  I sat on a large rock and traced the route of the arresting Khumbu Glacier, the beginning of the ascent of Mount Everest. The ice was brilliantly clean. Without sun-glasses I was unable to stare at it for more than a few seconds. We sat in the middle of the most spectacularly desolate amphitheatre I had ever seen, with walls of rock and ice rising dramatically all around us. It would have been entirely gloomy save for a slither of daylight down the valley, the way that we had come from.

  I looked upon Base Camp and the people strewn around the place. These people would be here for weeks, acclimatising and getting themselves ultra-fit before waiting for that small window of opportunity, and then they’d risk everything to get to the top. I understand professional mountaineers doing it, but not these client types that pay huge amounts of money to be guided to the top.

  With the exception of 1977, people have died every year climbing Mount Everest from 1969-2013. Since 1970, 220 have perished attempting to reach the summit. That is a lot of people to leave behind. I’m not really going to join the great mountaineering debate, but it does just strike me as a bit of a selfish thing to do; risking your life to climb a mountain, particularly if you’re an amateur.

  Mount Everest wasn’t climbed until 1953 for a good reason. It is among the most inhospitable places on our planet and we are not meant to be there. If you took someone from sea-level, picked them up and plopped them on top of Mt Everest, they’d enjoy the view for a few seconds before promptly passing out. Then they would die. 10 people gave their lives away in 2012, nine in 2013, 19 in 2014, most of whom died in a single avalanche (or ice fall). On the 25th of April, 2015, at least 22 people were killed when the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, after an avalanche thundered down the slopes of Pumori and in to Base Camp.

  It is not getting any safer. I looked at all those people at Base Camp and I felt sorry for them. Some would have less than a month to live.

  So with that sobering thought I snapped some pictures and we headed back the way we had come. The long climb down into the Base Camp basin meant a dangerous and sapping climb back up to the flat ridgeline past the dicey-looking boulders. I’m not going to say it was an easy hike back to Gorak Shep – nothing was easy at that altitude – but I will say that it was a lot easier. Faster too. It had taken close to two hours to get to Base Camp, but our return journey only set us back a little over an hour.

  As we joined that flat section immediately before the village, we came across the guide and girl, still struggling back to Gorak Shep. At least they’d almost made it. I motioned to Subash that he should ask them if they wanted help again, which he did, and received the same response. Both guide and girl had a balaclava-type setup, so I did not really get to see what either of them looked like.

  The closer we became, the faster Subash went until eventually I let him have it and began a nice relaxing stroll back to the Lodge. I was in no real rush to get there. There was nothing to do. My laptop battery was flat with no real hope of charging it. I wasn’t looking forward to dinner. I wasn’t too excited about going to sleep in a bed built for a Barbie doll. So I sat outside the front of the lodge for a good long time, looking up at Kallar Pathar, a big mound of rock offering excellent views of Mount Everest, which we were due to climb in the morning.

  I couldn’t say I was looking forward to it. I was exhausted. Behind it, Pumori rose sharply and disappeared in vast swirls of cloud. It began to snow. I watched as the guide and girl made it back to the lodge. The guide cleaned the mud off his boots on the cobblestone pavement and I watched as the girl made a feeble, uncoordinated attempt to do the same. She almost fell over and so gave it up and stumbled inside. I felt terribly sorry for her. Subash had another word with the guide, who told him that there was a helicopter coming for her tomorrow morning. It could be too late by the morning, I thought.

  I realised they had Wi-Fi at the Lodge, so armed with some battery on my iPod I logged on and let the world know I was still alive. The wifi worked intermittently and cost so much I’ll have to sell my car when I get home. Gorak Shep is a real bastard of a place. I hope you’re picking up what I’m putting down.

  I dined on fried potatoes, cooked with turmeric. They tasted like potatoes and turmeric. I put a big dollop of tomato ketchup on the side of my plate and dipped a big potato greedily in. Well I should have tried the ketchup first, because it was off. Who knows how long they’d had it for. It was rancid. Not for the first time that day I dived for the napkin and spat out my food. I sacrificed my knife to scrape the ketchup and the defiled potatoes even further to the side. I got the salt and poured a little bit onto my hand and licked. It tasted a little bit like salt, so I used plenty of that to mask the insipidity of the dish.

  I was sat next to a Chinese man about my age with a friendly, approachable, babyish kind of face. We spoke for a little while, but his English was limited and my Chinese non-existent. I watched as his food was placed in front of him. He’d ordered chicken soup and a plate of fried rice. He was about to have a bite when his guide leaned across both Subash and myself, moved his bowl of soup about a foot across the table, then moved his plate a few inches before moving both the bowl and the plate back to where they had been in the first place. The Chinese man and myself looked at each other, raised our eyebrows and then burst out laughing. Sometimes they just want to be helpful when there is absolutely nothing for them to do (like when Nima brought me jam to go with my eggs).

  The man dipped his spoon into his soup while I watched intently. He raised it to his lips and blew on it gently before draining the contents into his mouth. He then made a face as though he’d just bitten deep into a grapefruit, skin and all, then turned to me and said, ‘Ahh no good.’ He pushed the bowl of soup aside and commenced with the fried rice. I knew what it tasted like. I’d had two spoon-fulls for lunch and that was enough. Horrified that his bowl of soup was no longer in line with his plate, the guide lunged over me and Subash once more, and moved the bowl into five different locations so that his client would know the trouble he was going to, before moving it back in line. It was all very funny.

  Despite the circumstances I went to bed a contented man. I had reached the most far-flung place of the trek and now I would be heading back towards civilisation minus a dangerous pass to tackle. It was mostly downhill, save for a tiring climb in the morning.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Downhill

  Sleep comes easily to few people at this altitude and it was the same for me. It was a long, long night. On the rare occasion that I did doze off, I’d be awoken by a great need for oxygen, and I’d find myself gasping for air. Another time my left leg, which was dangling over the cut-off edge of the bed, had gone completely numb as my blood circulation had been cut short. I had to get up and dance on it for a few minutes to revive it. Of course it was cold as well. It was the coldest place we stayed at. It was -9 degrees before I went to bed and that was only at 7pm. By 2am I was fed up. I grabbed my iPod, a book and my head lamp and disappeared under the covers for a few hours to see me through until dawn.

  After what may have been the longest night of my life, I realised that dawn was slowly approaching. It was, however, far too cold to move anywhere. I didn’t even have to expose mysel
f to the air, just moving was enough to upset the warm equilibrium I had created for myself inside my sleeping bag. To move turned 20 degrees to -20 in one breathtaking instant. I glanced at my thermometer. It was -26 degrees. I’d agreed to meet Subash at 6am for the climb of Kallar Pathar, but when I found the energy to glance at my clock, that time was already long gone.

  It was approaching half-past. I got up and layered up. It was a struggle. I threw on a fleece and a jacket and went to the toilet. En route, I looked out the window in the hallway and was confused not to see anything out the window apart from white. I went down the stairs and unlocked the front door. It was strange that I was so late up and yet I was the first one out the lodge. I opened the door and realised what was happening. It was snowing. It was a blizzard. If you think I’m wasting valuable energy, Subash Gurung, to climb to a view point with no view, then how wrong you are!

  I trundled back to my room. I was relieved. I remembered joking with Subash the day before about how I might send him up Kallar Pathar with my camera to snap some photos. Now we’d both be saved the exertion.

  I fiddled around in my room for a little bit, packing some stuff away. I mucked around with the sleeping bag for a while, but my room was too small to even pack my stuff. I became frustrated and went down for breakfast. It was a little after 7am and I was still the first to arrive. I ordered egg chapatti and a pot of milk tea and sat down to watch the snow falling outside. A thermometer in the dining hall that had been set up to take a remote reading from outside read -19 degrees. Brrrrrr. The yak dung fire was already in full swing, and once inside I had to layer down a few.

  I’m not too sure how you mess up chapatti; a round, whole wheat flour-based bread of Indian origin with egg on top, but they did. It wasn’t a loss of appetite from altitude either, I was ravenous. The bread was way too floury and hadn’t set properly in the middle. It tasted like it was cooked on the yak dung fire. No pan on top – just straight over the fire. I tried, but I couldn’t eat it. It tasted like smoky yak crap. I filled myself instead on the 1.5 litres of milky tea enforced with way too much sugar.

  Subash had woken, seen the weather and gone back to sleep, so he didn’t surface until after I’d ‘finished’ my breakfast. I went back upstairs and just sat on my bed and tried to catch my breath. I had no intention of packing, I was going to wait until Nima knocked on my door and then I was going to get him to do it for me. I’m not ashamed of it either. He was just over half my size and would find it far easier to pack a bag in a shoe box than I would. Instead I picked up my boots and sat on them in a vain attempt to thaw them out. I’m from the tropics. I don’t know how to unfreeze boots without a microwave.

  Nima came and packed for me while I kind of fiddled around with my camera. When he was finished I kind of almost had enough room to put my boots on. Then we were off! It was back the way we had come. We climbed steeply out of Gorak Shep just as the last few flurries of snow settled on the ground. I stopped and looked back. Kallar Pathar was still cloaked in cloud, but perhaps the top 500 metres of Pumori had burst through and stood proudly in the morning sunshine. It was quite a sight to behold. We carried on and passed trekkers in dribs and drabs coming the opposite way. They were slow and weary looking and I didn’t envy them in the slightest. We were, in contrast, positively skipping off the mountain. It was for the most part downhill and we were absolutely flying. Every metre of elevation we lost I found a new lease on life.

  We came to the top of the rise on which I had overtaken the Koreans and stood and stared in amazement as a hoard of trekkers scampered up the valley in the opposite direction. This was the real Khumbu Highway. There were hundreds of them. A large group had already collapsed on rocks at the top and were busy attempting to get air and water in their bodies, while an ant-like trekker trail was carving its way up the hill as many more joined at the bottom. And then looking out there were people coming from everywhere. If I’d been a day later I would have had an even more miserable time in Gorak Shep. Subash and I stared at each other in wonder.

  ‘Wow you is a very luckys man,’ he said.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘With all these people impossible to find room for one persons. If you stay in Gorak Shep tonight you is sleeping in the restaurant!’

  ‘Next to the mixed fried noodles?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said with a smile on his face.

  We began making our way quickly down the slope. As with the day before, people ascending stopped and stared with wonder and mild exasperation at our ability to move with such haste. Just the day before I had thought it superhuman, and now I was that man.

  ‘You gotta love it, don’t cha?’ an overweight but exceedingly friendly American man rhetorically asked me as I went past him.

  ‘Absolutely!’ I replied. ‘Hey, this hill is the hardest thing you’ll do today. It’s pretty steady after that.’

  ‘Right on, buddy,’ he answered and he slapped me on the back as a huge smile encompassed his whole face. I could have been friends with that man, but alas we had many miles to go. I turned on my heel and recommenced the descent, drawing praise and wonder from everyone as we went. The next day, hundreds of people headed back down the mountain with a spring in their step, thinking that the big, hairy bloke wearing the t-shirt wasn’t that supernatural after all.

  ‘Holy shit, I think I see the firefighters,’ I said to Subash. I could tell because Rob wore bloody ridiculous, light-blue leg protectors all the way up to his knees, which he was currently sporting with a pair of shorts.

  ‘Yes, is them!’ Subash confirmed.

  I had a quick chat with them. Steve had a serious case of mountain sickness and therefore they both had to turn their back on the Renjo La. He told me he thought his head was going to explode. He had a hideous-looking lump the size of a golf ball on his neck, and all-in-all the two of them looked like shit. I gave them my best, keen to get the hell away before I was subjected to a story involving ladders, fire extinguishers and grannies trapped in chairs.

  It wasn’t long before Lobuche came into view. Subash hawked and spat on the ground. Quite right. He enquired if I needed a rest, but on finding out it was only one hour to the next town, I opted to carry on. I’d seen enough of Lobuche in this life-time. We followed the same path for some 15 minutes, before it branched off from the turn-off to Cho La. I looked down at the vast snowfield that we had plodded across two days before, and was slightly mortified to see two huge gaping puddles right where the path had been. One was about half the size of a football field.

  ‘Umm Subash,’ I said in my most nonchalant of voices. ‘You know that giant snowfield we crossed two days ago? That wasn’t a snowfield was it? That was a lake, right?’

  ‘That one there?’ he asked. ‘Yes is lake.’

  ‘But we walked straight over the middle of it.’

  ‘Yes it was a frozens.’

  ‘Yes, but now it’s not.’

  ‘No problems man, frozen two days ago.’

  ‘But how did you know how thick the ice was?’

  ‘Because I am the guides!’

  I left it at that.

  I looked to the west one final time and traced our route back up the valley to the Cho La Pass, shuddered slightly, then stepped onto yet another new path. We came across a large yak train on a rather narrow path covered in deep snow. We actually had to step off the trail and dig ourselves a new snow ledge and we had to do it quick. Yaks wait for no man. I looked ahead to see Nima high up away from the track, forging a new way effortlessly through knee-deep snow. It was very impressive. The path began to curve around to the east so quickly that we couldn’t see more than 20-or-so metres in front of us, the mountain wall obscuring the rest of it from view.

  When it eventually straightened up, greeting us was a great deal of stone cairns scattered around randomly on the ensuing flat ground. Prayer flags joined a few of them together. These were the memorials to all the people that lost their lives climbing Mt Everest. Saw-tooth peaks cut the sk
y in a mesmerising 360-degree panorama, lending a most climactic feeling to these people’s lives, as though they were meant to end up here. A more dramatic and fitting location there never was. I sought out a pile of stones larger than most. Wind-blown snow had covered the last three letters of his name, but I knew it already. It was the memorial to Scott Fischer, the climbing guide that had perished in the infamous 1996 climbing disaster on Everest, immortally recorded in Jon Krakauer’s excellent book Into Thin Air.

  We stayed for perhaps 10 minutes, sitting in silent contemplation in this most sombre of places. Then we got up and walked across yet another pass, this time the Thok La at 4830m, before dropping down just over 200 vertical metres to a place called Dughla in a little under 20 minutes. It was straight down. We passed a few trekkers coming the other way, all of whom looked absolutely spent, but still had a way to go before getting to Lobuche.

  Dughla was almost completely wiped out in 2007 by what they call a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) and now it comprises only a couple of buildings perched kind of haphazardly out in the open on the middle of a fairly relentless slope. It just seemed a bizarre place to put a settlement. We stopped and I topped up with water while sitting outside in a large courtyard. The place was teeming with trekkers, most of whom had stopped for lunch en route to Lobuche. I can imagine them getting there, looking up at the climb ahead and thinking they’d rather get some noodles and tea in them before attempting such a thing.

  We weren’t there for long, having decided to push on to Pheriche for lunch. The sun was shining in Dughla yet as soon as we stepped onto the path it disappeared and was replaced by an ugly, black cloud that was dumping a serious amount of snow on us. The path was narrow at first and we had to pause and step uphill to allow the throngs of trekking groups to guide themselves around us. Some were friendly, some were not. In one group, I think they were kiwis, every single person thanked me for stepping aside. It was quite funny. It went like this: