After a failed attempt on Everest in 1922, the British climbing legend George Mallory, who would later lose his life on the upper slopes of Mount Everest, reported to a joint meeting of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club that the greatest lesson learned from the expedition that year was that the Sherpas “far exceeded their expectations.” They carried loads to 25,500 feet, he reported. Some three days in a row. Seven Sherpas also died in an avalanche on the North Col to learn this lesson. They were Everest’s first recorded fatalities—the first of many more to come, for both the Sherpas and the foreigners.
Lakpa’s father, Nima, who worked in the mountains during the climbing season, wanted to give his son another career option, however. And so he convinced a generous foreign client he often guided to pay for his son’s education in Kathmandu. With only one year of rural schooling behind him, Lakpa abruptly found himself plucked from the mountains, put on a small, bone-rattling plane, and deposited swiftly in a boarding school surrounded by over a million people and a thick cloud of smog.
It proved to be an unstable place for the young Lakpa, in more ways than one.
Placed inconveniently near one of the world’s most active fault lines, where the Indian subcontinent collides violently with Asia, Kathmandu was first razed by the movements of the earth’s crust in 1253, then again in 1259, 1407, 1680, 1810, 1833, 1860, and once more in 1934. Tens of thousands died. And the next major quake will likely be worse than all of them.
The off-white haze hanging over Kathmandu is also a threat, but less sporadic. Smoke and soot, which billow up from the city’s myriad brick factories, buses, cars, trucks, motorcycles, and scooters—cradled by an amphitheater of mountains—linger, even at night. People walking on the labyrinth of narrow, busy streets—flooded by, in addition to motorized vehicles, bicycles, cows, chickens, dogs, food carts, street children, and beggars—can be seen wearing surgical masks to help filter the grit of the air from their lungs. Those who don’t cover up cough black phlegm.
Lakpa spent the next eight years in the city attending boarding school, where he learned to read, to write, and to like beer, cigarettes, and motorcycles. He was allowed to return to his family’s farm in Chaurikharka for one week every year. He liked beer, cigarettes, and motorcycles, but not school. After failing his final exams in tenth grade, he left school for good and returned to the mountains, without any idea as to what to do next. “I had no plan,” he admits. “None.”
Lakpa’s cousin Kili, meanwhile, had become a highly skilled climbing sherpa, working for one of Nepal’s largest mountaineering outfitters, Equator Expeditions. Knowing his younger, educated cousin didn’t have a career plan, he volunteered to teach Lakpa the basics of mountaineering: how to put on crampons, tie knots, and camp at altitude in the Himalaya without freezing to death, all while guiding on an “easy” nearby, nontechnical, 20,075-foot mountain rising up from the Khumbu Glacier called Lobuche East. Lakpa, as it turned out, proved to be a faster learner in the mountains than he was in the city, and he caught on quick. The only problem he encountered was on the summit, where an acute case of altitude sickness—a blinding headache that “made lights flash in my eyes,” he says—nearly immobilized him. This, of course, did not dissuade him from venturing back into the mountains.
Not long after climbing Lobuche East, Kili took Lakpa to 20,305-foot Island Peak, another “trekking mountain,” on which Lakpa had no difficulty and proved to be a valuable member of the expedition, namely by making the clients laugh. His infectious, broad grin never left his face the entire trip. He would often crack jokes and was caught singing happily to himself regularly—he still does. “It’s what I do when I’m happy,” he says.
Kili continued to hire Lakpa as an assistant on the lower peaks of the Himalaya, which in turn gave Lakpa a source of income outside of the family farm. “I climb for work, not for fun,” Lakpa is quick to point out to Westerners who ask him if he enjoys mountaineering. “Climbing is not fun,” he says plainly. As if it were obvious. “Climbing is hard work.” This is always followed by a deep, booming, open-mouth laugh. “I do not climb for fun. Climbing is my job.”
In 1998 Kili started his own mountaineering outfitter in Kathmandu called High Altitude Dreams (HAD). He sent Lakpa with a group—again as an assistant—to climb his first “technical” mountain—22,349-foot Ama Dablam, a sharp, fearsome-looking, ice-covered mountain near Mount Everest in eastern Nepal. The next year, Lakpa was sent by HAD to his first training course with the Nepal Mountaineering Association, so he could officially become certified to work at altitude in Nepal. It was a one-month course. In 2000 Lakpa was sent to another month-long tutorial to receive his “advanced” certificate. From these courses he learned, mainly, “how much I didn’t actually know about mountaineering,” he says. And it was at this time that he had his first opportunity to work on Everest, which he promptly declined.
Kili had offered him a job working as a high-altitude porter for an upcoming Everest expedition—the highest-elevation and highest-paying sherpa gig in the world. Lakpa could earn more than a year’s wages in just two months, if he said yes. It was a lucky break in many respects, because he didn’t have the level of experience typically required to work on Everest—and Lakpa, after his various safety trainings, knew this. He determined it would be too dangerous, for him and the client, so he politely turned his cousin Kili down.
Lakpa spent three more years working as an assistant on trips up shorter peaks in the Himalaya before finally agreeing to climb on Everest, contracted through High Altitude Dreams to work with the American 2003 Everest Treks 50th Anniversary Expedition Team; it was led by a thirty-nine-year-old American real estate investor from Auburn, Massachusetts, named Paul Giorgio. The trip went well, and Lakpa found himself standing on the roof of the world for the first time on Monday, May 26, 2003, at 5:57 a.m. Giorgio, an avid Boston Red Sox fan, left a black-and-white picture of New York Yankees legend Babe Ruth, “to beat the curse of the Bambino,” he says (it seemed to work).* Lakpa would eventually return to this spot three more times.
It was at this moment, on Lakpa’s first Everest summit, that he initially thought of the idea of flying off the top of the world’s tallest mountain. In his mind it was simply a matter of practicality. Much easier than walking down, he thought. He had seen paragliders hovering lazily over the smog in Kathmandu Valley when he was a boy, gently gliding on the breeze, and now he decided it would be a convenient way to get off the mountain, especially considering the long, treacherous two-day descent to Base Camp ahead of him, which has actually killed more climbers on Everest than the ascent. Much safer, he thought.
III
The Learning Curve
Pokhara, Nepal,
January 2000—Approximately 2,625 Feet
“Lakeside,” the man said, and kept walking. “A bus will be here soon. It’s 60 rupees.” Babu didn’t understand the answer to his question. Lakeside? It’s a funny word, he thought, a word he had never heard before. It sounded to him a bit like the word lake, which, in Sunuwar, the language spoken back in his village, means something to the equivalent of “a high place.” It was 5:00 a.m., and he was standing alone in the Pokhara bus station with no idea of where he was or where to go next.
A bus to take me where? Babu wondered.
There were still only 20 rupees in his pocket. The old man he had been traveling with said good-bye to him and good luck, and then he wandered off to beg on his own.
The first rays of the morning sun began to faintly illuminate the Annapurna Massif looming to the north. Rising up over 26,000 feet, they were the tallest mountains Babu had ever seen. Oh no, he thought. That’s probably where Lakeside is. It certainly looked to be the highest place nearby. And it probably wasn’t going to be a cheap 60-rupee bus ride either, he figured. It would take at least a day for a bus to get there, he guessed, appraising the hazy pyramid-shaped peak in the distance.
What Babu didn’t know is that Lakeside, the name for Pokhara’
s tourist district on the eastern shore of nearby Phewa Lake, was actually less than a mile away. He could walk there in under ten minutes. When the bus finally arrived and the attendant asked for 60 rupees to take him there, Babu was ecstatic. He still couldn’t afford the ticket, but the attendant let him on anyway, appreciating his excitement. It was only a few minutes’ drive, after all, and the young boy seemed to be particularly eager about it, even though he could have easily walked.
After only a few minutes on the road, Babu saw his first lake. The vast expanse of Phewa Tal came into view in pieces at first—a patch of blue between two banyan trees, blocked by buildings, flitting in between alleyways. Even with the punctuated view, Babu could tell that this new body of water was bigger than any of the mountain rivers he had ever seen, and eerily still: unmoving, flat, and over a mile across. Wow … what is this? Babu wondered. Then, glancing down a narrow street leading to the shore between two buildings, he saw a man on the water, sitting in a kayak, like the ones he had seen floating down the Sun Kosi River near his village. This is it, he thought.
“Stop the bus!” he yelled. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
The sun was above the horizon now, and the valley’s morning fog began to lift as Babu ran into the street. On the sidewalk, lying on the pavement not far from where he was standing, he saw a line of neon-colored whitewater kayaks, each anywhere from 6 to 9 feet long, scratched and faded from years of unapologetic rental use. Looking farther down the street in each direction, he could see even more kayak shops: their brightly colored boats sporadically lining the sidewalk off into the distance. (There are still well over a dozen of the shops in town. Pokhara is the self-proclaimed “Whitewater Capital of Nepal.”) He approached the store immediately in front of him, smiling from ear to ear, excited to have finally found a place where someone, anyone, might be able to teach him how to kayak.
“Can I have a job?” he bluntly asked the man opening up the shop in front of him. “I want to learn how to kayak.”
Evaluating the short, skinny frame of the boy standing in front of him, the man replied bluntly in return. “You’re too small,” he said with a frown. “You can’t work for us.”
Undeterred, Babu walked down the street to the next shop he could see with kayaks in front of it and asked the same question again.
“Do you even know how to swim?” they asked him.
“Yes!” Babu said, thinking that the skill his father taught him back in the village might just help him land his dream job. The shop owner didn’t believe him, however, and asked him to leave.
At the next kayak shop he visited, they yelled at him to get out before he could even explain that he was actually willing to work in exchange for paddling lessons. The rest of the day, Babu walked from kayak shop to kayak shop, asking for work with no success. He soon began to wonder where he was going to sleep. The sun was beginning to drop, casting long shadows on the pavement. He suddenly realized how hungry he had become. He hadn’t eaten all day. Finding an empty bus stop bench, Babu laid down and cradled himself for a long, cold night’s sleep. Confident in the fact that he would now, after running away from home for the second time, and after having traveled more than halfway across the country, learn how to kayak. Soon.
Charley Gaillard, owner of the Ganesh Kayak Shop in Pokhara, had known Babu for nearly two years now—ever since the small boy had shown up on a bus with a big smile and started asking every kayak shop owner in town for work. Gaillard, a lanky white-haired Frenchman in his mid-fifties who had originally moved to Pokhara in 1974 to live with his Nepali wife, hadn’t hired him at the time. Babu, despite his overwhelming desire to learn how to kayak, had wound up taking a job, out of necessity, as a trekking porter the first four months after he arrived in Pokhara, carrying supplies for foreign hikers in the foothills of the Annapurna region. After the trekking season ended in December, when the high mountain passes became too cold for tourists, Exodus Rafting, a Nepali-owned outfitter just down the road, took him on as a guide trainee. Gaillard knew that Babu helped clean the shop there, including maintaining the rental equipment, and that he seized every available opportunity to take one of Exodus’s rental kayaks out on the lake.
“He is one of only a few Nepali kayakers I know who goes kayaking for fun,” Gaillard says. “For everyone else it is work, guiding on the rivers,” he explains. “There are so many good kayakers here, but they only paddle during the tourist season. They don’t paddle when they’re not working. And I think Babu went kayaking every chance he got.”
Gaillard liked the boy and his enthusiasm for paddling, and they quickly became friends. He wasn’t looking forward to telling the young man that Exodus had closed its doors while Babu had gone back to his village and that Babu was, once again, out of work. Yet here Babu was, standing in his shop in front of him with his backpack, fresh off the bus from Kathmandu, smiling as always. Completely oblivious to the fact that he would have to start over.
“You know,” Gaillard said in Nepali laced with a heavy French accent. “Exodus is no more. It’s finished.”
Babu’s smile faded. Gaillard knew that Babu had also been sleeping at the newly defunct outfitter and that his friend, along with now having no way to continue kayaking, was both unemployed and homeless. The same position Babu had been in two years earlier, when he had first gotten off the bus from Kathmandu.
What Gaillard didn’t know is that while Babu had been away visiting his family, the seventeen-year-old had gotten married, which had turned out to be a surprise to Babu as well. While Babu had been in Pokhara learning how to kayak, his family had made arrangements for him to marry a frail-looking thirteen-year-old girl named Susmita Rai, who lived in a nearby village. They had sprung the good news, and the ceremony, upon his arrival. Susmita, who had been pulled out of school permanently for the occasion, had never met Babu before the day they got married. After being handed a small bag of clothes by her parents, she walked, alone, through the hills to meet him at his parents’ house, where they were quickly wed, and where she would now be expected to live and work. Babu promptly returned to Pokhara afterward, leaving behind a promise to return for his new child wife once he had earned enough money to bring her to west Nepal with him.
“Anyway, if you don’t have a job,” Gaillard told him casually, “maybe you can come in my place, and I can employ you. Maybe work here?” It was an offer Babu couldn’t refuse.
He spent that night, and most every night for the next two years, sleeping on the wood floor behind the desk located in the back of the Ganesh Kayak Shop. It was then and remains today a small, vaguely rail-shaped establishment not more than 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep, with kayaks stacked along both walls and one large window occupying the front of the store. Near the back, on the wall behind the low wooden desk, a few faded pictures of kayakers and rafters paddling on nearby rivers like the Kali Gandaki, Seti Gandaki, and Trisuli hang in neat, evenly spaced frames. A small wooden statue of Ganesh, an elephant-headed deity that is revered in the Hindu pantheon as “the Remover of Obstacles” or “the Lord of Beginnings,” and also the namesake of Gaillard’s shop, sits cross-legged on the corner of the desk, looking forward blithely. Never moving.
Babu earned his keep by doing odd jobs around the shop and his home: cleaning the rental equipment, sweeping the floors, and cooking meals of dal bhat for Gaillard and his wife. Babu did this happily in exchange for a small amount of pay, a place to sleep, and the chance to use Gaillard’s rental kayaks daily.
After learning some basic paddle strokes, which allowed him to move forward in a straight line and turn on the flat, unmoving water of Phewa Tal, Babu was then shown how to roll the boat right side up without having to exit the kayak, in the event it should ever flip over with him inside of it. It is a decidedly tricky maneuver for a beginner, known monosyllabically throughout the paddling community simply as a “roll.” It required him to, essentially, bend his spine sideways, in the shape of a large C, and then attempt to knee himself as hard as p
ossible in the head, thus flipping himself and the kayak right side up. It takes most beginning paddlers months of continual practice to gain any amount of proficiency at it. Babu was consistently rolling his kayak in the lake within a few weeks.
“He became a strong paddler very quick,” Gaillard says. The only problem was Babu didn’t have anyone to go kayaking with. Gaillard was a rafter, not a kayaker. And all of Babu’s Nepali coworkers only went kayaking when they were guiding, safety boating for the rafts that carried paying clients. They couldn’t afford to take the time to teach Babu how to paddle safely on a river, let alone take the time to repeatedly rescue him if he swam out of his boat, which is what beginning kayakers have a tendency to do. Babu needed someone to be on the river with him, teaching him one-on-one and rescuing him when he, inevitably, screwed up. There wasn’t anyone, though, so for the first year of his kayaking career Babu simply paddled around in circles by himself on the lake, venturing out onto the Marshyangdi and Seti Rivers only a handful of times with Exodus’s senior guides, preparing for the opportunity to work on moving whitewater, whenever it came.
Pete Astles, a clean-shaven, square-chinned, thirty-three-year-old professional whitewater kayaker from England, had just set his bag down in his hotel room in Lakeside when the phone sitting on the small bedside table next to him rang. He picked up the receiver. “There’s someone here to see you, Mr. Astles,” the voice of the hotel receptionist told him. The line was disconnected before he could ask who it was. Astles found this curious, considering he had just stepped off the bus from Kathmandu. As far as he knew, no one besides the eleven other international kayakers he was traveling with even knew he was there, and none of them would have asked the receptionist to call him from the lobby. They knew where his room was and would have just walked up to his door and knocked. He walked downstairs to reception, where he was greeted enthusiastically by a short, excited-looking Nepali teen with clear, shinning eyes and an ear-to-ear grin.
Flying Off Everest Page 4