It was definitely worth seeing, after a four-day trek up the Khumbu Valley.
I took a selfie with it as evidence that I’d been there, and that I’d actually managed to see it.
The story of the skull was an interesting one. I was told that the local villages used to have a combined religious festival. As the festival got bigger and bigger, the people from Khumjong decided that they wanted to run their own festival.
It was customary, when a village left, to give it a gift – normally something quite valuable or useful.
The villagers from Khumjong were given this skull – the yeti skull – a useless object that they didn’t see as having any real value.
They were so disgusted by their gift that they used the skull like a football and kicked it all the way back to their village.
Now, of course, it’s absolutely priceless and of extreme scientific interest. It’s also great for Khumjong’s tourist industry – people come to Khumjong just to see the yeti skull. They had actually been given something immensely valuable, but had thought it to be useless and worthless at the time.
At least they had the last laugh, I thought, as I thanked the monk, bowed my head and left.
I poked around the monastery for a while longer before heading back to the lodge for the evening, ahead of the dusk. It would be impossible to get back in the dark as there were no streetlights – in fact there was no electricity and there were no streets. Just winding dirt tracks between the houses and fields, which were surrounded by dry stone walls.
The lodge was one of the nicer ones we stayed at on our way up the Khumbu Valley, but mains water? Forget it. Mains sewage? Forget it. The only electricity came from solar power, and was just enough to light a bulb in the main dining area.
If you wanted to charge your phone, you had to take it to the front desk and pay $3.50 – they’d plug the phone in behind the desk and you’d come and collect it later on. If you wanted to log in to their intermittent wifi, you had to pay $5 a day. They didn’t give you the wifi code either, in case you told everybody else – they took your phone from you and typed it in. It was all quite crafty, quite industrious. They were certainly embracing Western commercialism – and why not!
Phurba Tashi’s family cooked a meal for us. Some of us then played cards for a short while before heading to bed.
I was sharing a room with John again, and as I lay on the thin, uncomfortable foam mattress, wrapped up in my sleeping bag, the room lit by the bright moon, I thought about the trip.
I’d been away from home for a week now and there was still a long road ahead of me. In a week’s time we would be arriving at Everest Base Camp, three weeks after that we would be beginning our summit attempt.
I lay awake in the cold, unable to sleep.
* * * * *
The following days involved leapfrogging from small village to small village, staying in increasingly basic lodges on the way. After we left Khumjong, we trekked up to Phortse, where we stayed in Phurba Tashi’s second lodge.
By now, I noticed the thinness of the air as it rattled through my lungs. We were at an altitude of 3,840m, the same elevation as Sauyr Zhotasy on the China-Kazakh border, one of the most prominent unclimbed peaks in the world.
The scenery became rockier, steeper and sparser – the treks became harder work. I took less time to appreciate our spectacular, and by now sparse surroundings, opting to stare instead at my feet and my walking poles as I progressed.
In Phortse, I went for a walk around the village, which consisted of many small stone houses, clustered together on a plateau high in the mountains. There were a number of terraced fields with neat stone walls surrounding them. Hundreds of years of labour must have gone into creating these delicate terraces, right next to the houses.
In these terraces, the villagers grew vegetables, and I stopped, watching a group of four women planting potatoes. They waved at me as I stood watching, so I waved back.
Nearby, there was a small stone hut, no more than two by three metres, with a blanket draped over the entrance. A small, elderly woman came out – I could see a simple bed inside.
How anybody could survive the freezing conditions of the winter and the floods of the monsoons in this hut was beyond me…but somehow this woman did.
She made her way into a nearby field and started working on the soil. She wore strange, twisted leather gloves.
I walked closer, realising that they weren’t gloves at all. Her hands, through years of hard work, had become gnarled and distorted.
She looked at me; I smiled and pointed at my camera, which I held in my hands.
“Can I take a picture?”
She held out one of her leathery hands, with the palm open to the skies. I gave her a dollar, which she hurriedly pushed deep into her pocket before standing for the picture.
I thanked her, bowed and then wandered around the maze of little dirt tracks, trying to find my way back to the lodge. It took nearly half an hour of zigzagging backwards and forwards through the maze of paths. Frustratingly, I could see my destination in the distance, I just couldn’t figure out which path led there.
When I finally returned, it was time for dinner, and then bed, ready for an early start the following morning.
Acclimatisation
Our plan was to climb to Lobuche Base Camp and camp for the night, before climbing back down again in the morning.
Lobuche is 6,200m high, over 1,000m higher than Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Europe. And this was supposedly a ‘practice mountain’. We would not only be climbing to Lobuche Base Camp – after settling in at Everest Base Camp we’d be returning to Lobuche to climb to the summit.
We were spread out on the trek to Lobuche Base Camp. After a few hours, I turned a corner and could see a figure waving at me in the distance.
I shielded my eyes from the glaring sunlight.
The person waved with both arms above his head – what was he doing over there? That couldn’t possibly be where we were staying, could it? It was off the beaten track, in a thick snowfield – but then I spotted the tents; tiny little pockets of colour buried in pure white snow against a backdrop of the snow-capped peak.
Fantastic – tents covered in snow for my first tent night.
I made my way over slowly, breathing deeply in the thin air.
We each had our own one-man expedition tent, which had already been set up for us. There was just enough room inside for my Therm-a-Rest, with my bags by my side.
I could feel the thinning air, sure, and I certainly felt a strain on my body, but I arrived at Lobuche Base Camp (BC) in fairly good spirits.
I was dreading the moment when the sun would set and all the warmth would dissipate within seconds.
We sat around in the mess tent at Lobuche BC, whiling away the hours until it was bedtime. Each of us could see only via our head torches.
Nobody wanted to go to bed. We were all dreading it.
Eventually, the time came and people started drifting off. The mess tent, now devoid of the body heat of the group, became colder and colder.
There was nothing else to do… I stood up and headed out.
I padded through the thick snow to my tent and unzipped it, untied my shoes and crawled into my sleeping bag fully clothed with beanie hat, and including my downing jacket. This wasn’t the most brilliant of ideas, as the layers of insulation stop the sleeping bag from warming up so quickly, but I couldn’t bear the idea of taking my clothes off in these conditions.
It was truly miserable. I could see my breath rising from my mouth in great long plumes of warm air – losing all that heat from my body. I wished I could bottle it up and shove it down into the sleeping bag to keep me warm.
I turned off the head torch and lay there in the darkness. It felt spooky and very claustrophobic, but there was nothing for it but to get on with it. It
wasn’t as if I could just say that I’d had enough and nip inside to a nice, warm house. I prayed that they would not find a frozen corpse in the morning.
I stayed awake for three hours, until fatigue finally got the better of me.
* * * * *
I felt even more miserable the following morning.
I awoke to the sound of somebody banging on the canvas of my tent.
“Hot tea, hot tea, hot tea!”
I sat up, shuffled forwards and unzipped the tent. A Sherpa thrust a cup of tea towards me.
“Namaste,” I said.
“Namaste – hot tea.”
The tea was hot and sugary; just what I needed. It tasted great in these cold conditions.
I heard the crash of a gong, which signalled breakfast – I had survived my first tent night.
It had snowed again during the night, hiding our footprints and half-burying the tents. It was almost as if we’d never been there.
Our expedition chef, Bill (the highest chef in the world), hadn’t joined us on our trek up to Lobuche Base Camp; he’d gone straight to Everest BC to get the kitchen ready, so the Sherpas were cooking for us.
Bacon.
I pulled my shoes on and rushed over to the mess tent, where they were serving not only bacon, but eggs as well. This immediately cheered me up – thousands of metres above sea level and it’s bacon and eggs for breakfast.
I tucked in, as if I hadn’t eaten for days and I’d never tasted anything so good.
I sat back contentedly; ready to take on the day. Our plan was to hike up towards rock camp, stop for the night and then head back down and then straight on to Everest Base Camp. Tomorrow was the big day – the day we were due to arrive at Everest Base Camp.
We all set off up Lobuche, heading for the rock camp. I was the last to leave, as usual, but I made good progress. This was the first bit of real climbing that required our crampons, and there was one difficult section where we needed our harnesses and had to put in a fixed rope to scale it.
We arrived at the rock camp, where the two-man tents were already set up. I was sharing with John. It was a cold, uneventful night, and next morning John and I boiled snow on our little gas burner to make tea.
I packed up my belongings in the tent. I found myself glancing over at Everest more and more. She stood, impressively dwarfing Lobuche, tall and proud. The Goddess of the Universe.
First things first, however – it was time to visit the loo.
There were no toilet facilities at Lobuche rock camp, so we had to use plastic bags. It was illegal to shit on the mountainside, so everybody trekking down would be carrying little plastic bags filled with their own faeces.
There wasn’t anywhere to get any privacy, either; I noticed a small dip in the snow… as good a place as any.
With my crampons on, I climbed down into the hole, plastic bag at the ready. There was an odd squelching sound, different from the usual crunch of the snow.
I looked down… I had trodden in somebody else’s shit. Somebody had decided to use this hole, with no intention of picking up his or her waste, and there I was, standing in it.
I scraped my boot in the snow, getting rid of as much as I could, grumbling to myself all the while.
* * * * *
The following day, after trekking down Lobuche, we started on our journey to Everest Base Camp.
The route became increasingly steep, the paths more rugged and dangerous. Yaks pushed past us, urged on by Sherpas, who guided them by chucking stones at them. It was a long slog, but I was excited to get there at last.
There was one final village to pass through on our way to Base Camp – Gorak Shep, the last stop for supplies for the mountain.
The village is not inhabited all year round and exists purely to serve those going to Everest. Not even the local Nepalese wanted to stay all year round – nothing grows at this altitude – it was just rocks and ice and dirt… oh, and yak poo.
Gorak Shep – or Gorak Shit as we dubbed it – sat on the edge of a frozen lake bed, covered in sand, which would have resembled a desert, had it not been for the freezing temperatures.
The few crude structures in the village looked ready to collapse at any moment, but still, even here, there was wifi.
I sent a message to my girls, to let them know I was doing well and that we were nearly at Base Camp. I paid through the teeth for the privilege.
We didn’t stay at Gorak Shit long and were warned not to eat anything before we carried on.
We were walking through the bleak, barren landscape – a world apart from the luscious, picturesque scenery further down the valley – chatting casually among ourselves. Everest Base Camp was drawing closer with each step, when suddenly we stepped into what appeared to be a graveyard.
It was a bit of a shock.
We had become used to the plaques and memorials that we had seen at periodic intervals en route to Base Camp; markers for those who had lost their lives on Everest.
But here were a whole load of them, all together. The wind whistled over the barren, treeless landscape. It was haunting, spooky.
We took a small breather and I went to look a bit closer. There were loads of small piles of rocks, with dedication plaques adorning them.
They all bore similar obituaries… ‘Dedicated to so and so, born this date, died this date – loved climbing’.
It really hit home the risk people were taking – the risk I was taking – just to get to the top of this mountain. This wasn’t a jolly or a walk in the park; people die regularly on Everest.
Of course, these bodies would all still be up there, preserved by the ice-cold conditions. The families have no hope of getting them down, so they have to make do with a plaque on some stones nearby. There were some really heart-rending descriptions of the dead, and small areas had sprung up with many dedication plaques to dead climbers from the same countries. There was a big Polish area, a Nepalese area, an Indian area and a Chinese area.
I walked past a large pile of rocks displaying the memorial plaques of three Indian climbers. I stopped and read each of their names.
This graveyard covered only a small amount of the total number of people Everest had claimed. Over 200 have made this mountain their final resting place; over 200 lost souls in this harshest of environments.
The colourful Buddhist prayer flags that surrounded the graveyard flapped in the wind.
I walked over to a large, marble memorial.
in memory of george leigh-mallory & andrew irvine
last seen 8th june 1924
and all those who died during the pioneer everest expedition.
It was odd, I thought – you never hear much about these guys. The guys who tried and failed and died. Their memories are only kept alive by these plaques in remote places, forever looking up at the mountain on which they died.
It could have been so different. It could have been Edmund Hillary’s name on this plaque, his body freezing to death on the mountainside, with George Leigh-Mallory as the decorated and celebrated hero of Everest…but it seems history only remembers the victorious, the successful.
Mallory and Irvine attempted to climb Everest in 1924, but Mallory’s body was found only in 1999, when an expedition set out to discover the fate of the exploratory pair. Irvine’s body has never been found. The debate about whether they actually reached the summit before meeting their fate still rages on. Mallory had a camera on him on his fateful climb and when his body was found they hoped to develop the film and find out if he had made the summit, but it was not possible, so there is no official confirmation that he reached the summit, which means the names of Mallory and Irvine are lost in the thick mist of history.
I found myself praying that my name wouldn’t end up on a plaque in this eerie graveyard.
After ten minutes or so, we moved on. The mood was
decidedly less buzzing, but that soon changed.
We rounded a corner and there, far across the flat valley floor, at the foot of the Khumbu Icefall, we could finally see it: Everest Base Camp (EBC).
A sea of tents spread out over approximately a kilometre, an array of yellows, blues and oranges marking the closest thing to civilisation in this desolate landscape.
As we approached, the enormity of Everest towering above it became rather intimidating. The mountain had looked massive from the moment I had first set eyes on it, but from this close proximity it filled the sky like a behemoth, dwarfing the landscape around it. Next to this undisputed queen of the skyline, even Pumori, Everest’s 7,000m-high neighbour, paled into insignificance.
I could understand the religious fervour that surrounded her – I could see why she was considered holy.
We kept walking until we reached the large boulder that marked the boundary of the rudimentary settlement. ‘everest base camp’ had been crudely etched into it and prayer flags were tied to the top, pulling outwards as if it were a maypole.
Everest Base Camp is actually on the glacier that fills and winds its way down the middle of the valley, a slow-moving ice floe covered in large rocks and boulders. It was quite easy to forget that – it certainly looked like solid land – but Base Camp was constantly on the move.
We were led by our expedition guides to the area of Base Camp that was to become our home for the next six weeks, as we acclimatised to the conditions, practised climbing and waited for our turn to attempt the peak.
A large white pod, a structure made from strong metal poles with a thick white lining pulled over the top, was to act as our social space and team briefing area.
A scattering of rugs lined the floor, with chairs and tables also dotted around. It was kind of an arctic common room, with an old gas heater for warmth. We were told this would only be turned on after five o’clock, to save fuel. When we first arrived it wasn’t working at all, although it did provide heat sporadically thereafter.
Aftershock: One Man's Quest and the Quake on Everest Page 6