by Mark Horrell
I scratch my head when I hear roars of laughter coming from downstairs. I don’t remember the movie being especially funny, and in many ways it’s quite the opposite. It was filmed in 1996, the year when eight people died in a storm – an episode made famous by journalist Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air. Parts of the IMAX movie cover this tragedy, and I’m astonished that people are laughing.
But I later discover that after the movie they watched The Inbetweeners, a TV sitcom about sex-starved teenagers.
At dinner I ask our Chinese team member Mel about his afternoon. I expect him to express bewilderment about the choice of TV viewing. His English is good, but not perfect, and there have been one or two confusing moments recently. In Kathmandu I asked him what he did for a living, and he replied ‘I’m an actor’.
‘You’re an actor – wow!’ I said. ‘Do you do movies or stage?’
He looked at me like I was an imbecile.
‘What?’
‘Do you act in movies or at the theatre?’ I replied, miming a rising curtain as best I could.
‘What?’ he said again.
It was only later I found out that he had said ‘I’m an architect’, not ‘I’m an actor’.
When I ask what he was up to this afternoon he looks at me mysteriously. I repeat my question more slowly, but before I finish he reaches into his pocket and produces his iPhone. He shows me a photograph of a beautiful pencil sketch he drew of Phakding’s main street. Mountains rise behind teahouses and pine trees etched in striking grey lines.
‘Well, you’ve trumped all these people,’ I say. ‘They spent the afternoon watching puerile British comedy.’
After dinner I manage to find cricket on the telly. Fellow Lhotse climber Louis is South African, and a big cricket fan like me. We stay up watching for an hour or so, and are surprised when Robert stays up with us.
‘I didn’t think Americans liked cricket?’ I say.
Robert nods at the TV. ‘Who’s the guy in the cowboy hat?’
‘That’s the umpire,’ I say, shaking my head. Then after a pause I add: ‘And it’s a sun hat.’
Day 2 – My kingdom for a horse
Friday, 4 April 2014 – Namche Bazaar, Nepal
We leave Phakding at 7.45 for another short walk up the trail to Namche Bazaar, the capital of Sherpa Khumbu. Although our large group starts out together, we’re soon strung out, passing through villages and forest at our own pace.
I’m always a slow plodder while acclimatising, so I’m not surprised when I drop to the back of the group and amble along on my own. Phil passes me at a canter early on. He tells me he needs to get to the front to slow Ian and Kevin down. I’ve climbed and trekked with Ian on many occasions, so I already know he’s a bit of a boy racer, but I haven’t climbed with Kevin before.
Kevin knows both Edita and Mel from one of Phil’s expeditions to Manaslu, two years ago. On that occasion a huge avalanche uprooted their tents and tossed them several metres down the mountain – while they were still inside. They survived unharmed, but several other teams were not so lucky. Eleven people died, and the incident was followed by a media outcry about commercial expeditions on 8,000m peaks, claiming that inexperienced climbers were to blame for the tragedy.
It was a traumatic experience that caused them to think carefully about whether to continue. The team was divided; around half of them, including Mel, decided to go home. Edita was one of those who chose to stay, and later in the season she reached the summit. For Kevin, the mountain gods made the decision on his behalf. He lost a boot in the avalanche, and could not have continued if he wanted to.
It sounds like Kevin could do with losing a boot on this occasion, too. Ian tells me later that he didn’t have a hope in hell of keeping up with him.
I walk in shade for a short distance and cross a long steel suspension bridge to the other side of the river. Phakding sprawls along the trail for two or three miles, but beyond the bridge I pass into pine groves again.
The sun comes up from behind the mountains. Beside another small community of teahouses, I stop to put on sun cream and remove a layer. The scenery is dramatic. Pine forests are wedged between sheer rock faces, and the Dudh Khosi River crashes a route far beneath us, yet it’s no wilderness – many villages with tourist lodges are crammed along the trail. The spaces between are still largely pine forest, but they are becoming swallowed up as more teahouses are built.
There are always slower people on a busy route like this. A steep trail rises and falls above the valley in broad staircases hewn into rocky cliffs. Rarely do I walk for longer than a minute in solitude before catching up with someone else. Despite my ambling pace, most of the other travellers are actually slower than me. Porters walk with giant baskets piled high with crates of beer and soft drinks. Large trekking groups only move as fast as their slowest member. They form bottlenecks, and while I prefer to amble, I have no choice but to increase my pace to get past them.
I stop frequently to let trains of dzos and ponies pass the other way. Keen to avoid a repeat of yesterday’s near-accident, I find a convenient perch on a rock and wait until they have all passed by.
After a while I catch up with Margaret and Edita. They are walking at a similar pace to me, so I end up walking with them for much of the way. Margaret walks in silence with iPod headphones in her ears, while Edita is more inclined to slow down and talk when the trail is not too steep. She also reveals a penchant for photobombing. I drop back to take a photo of them silhouetted against a backdrop of mountains as they cross a high footbridge. Edita realises what I’m doing and waves at me as she crosses, trying to ruin my photo by walking in a peculiar fashion.
Edita and Margaret cross the Dudh Khosi on a suspension bridge, with Khumbila as a backdrop
We pass a bewildering number of checkpoints, and must register our details at every one. In a layby in the middle of nowhere, there is a trekking checkpoint run by the Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal (TAAN). Next we reach the Sagarmatha National Park Office in the village of Monjo. A short distance beyond we pass an army checkpoint in the forest. Here the officer tries to keep my trekking permit, and I have to rip it out of his hands. Quite what he expects me to do at the next checkpoint without my permit isn’t clear. Before the day is out, we pass a police checkpoint near Namche Bazaar.
At least this final checkpoint provides some light relief. Margaret is sixty-four years old, but she has summited Everest from both sides and shows no sign of retiring. Back home in Perth, Australia, she is known as Supergran, but she doesn’t look anything like sixty-four, or a gran. The police officer looks confused when he reads our permit and copies down her details. When he gets to her age he pauses, looks up at her, pauses again, then finally scribbles down forty-six.
The final section into Namche Bazaar involves a long ascent of about 500m. It climbs through pine forest from the junction of the Dudh Khosi and Bhote Khosi rivers. Most of the trail is in shade, but plenty of sun beams through the trees, and it’s hot and dusty.
I’m prepared for it, and I trudge upwards, taking care not to get out of breath. At one point I pass a lady who does not seem cut out for high-altitude trekking. She is sweating profusely and struggling for breath, but she battles on.
‘How are you doing?’ she gasps at me as I pass.
‘I’m doing OK. Not far to go now,’ I say, by way of encouragement.
‘You’re doing good,’ she replies.
‘Thank you, you’re very kind.’ I fail to suppress a laugh. I hope she isn’t offended.
A short while later the tables are turned when a guide from another group races past me. Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground echoes from his iPhone. The first I know of it is when I hear Lou Reed’s voice droning in my ear.
‘I am tired, I am weary, and I could sleep a thousand years.’
This time I roar with laughter.
‘Great motivational music!’ I shout in the guide’s wake. But he’s already several metres bey
ond me and I don’t know whether he hears.
Shortly before Namche, we meet Kevin waiting beside the trail to direct us to the teahouse. It’s a kind gesture, but there’s something missing. It’s common in Nepal for the kitchen crew to meet their trekkers with a pot of hot lemon. I’m disappointed when Kevin can only provide us with directions.
‘Where’s the hot lemon, Kevin?’
‘Damn it, I forgot!’
We reach our teahouse, The Nest at the bottom end of Namche, at midday.
It isn’t such a successful day for everyone. Louis the South African is an Everest summiteer. He’s the fifth member of the so-called ‘Dream Team’, the name Phil has given to the five of us who are climbing Lhotse. Louis, Ian, Margaret, Edita and I have all climbed Everest.
Louis is here with his wife Dia, who is trekking as far as Base Camp. We are not surprised that we have reached the teahouse before them. We assume that Dia, who has not trekked at high altitude before, is wise enough to take her time.
But Phil receives an unexpected text message from Robert, who has stopped to wait for them with his friend Scott. Scott is a surgeon who has also just come for the Everest Base Camp trek.
Louis struggling. We’ve ordered a horse to carry him to Namche.
Phil’s reply is terse.
Is this a joke?
We learn that Louis has picked up some kind of illness, and that he went to the toilet an astonishing forty times last night (I have a feeling this number may be exaggerated). Now he is suffering from severe dehydration, and struggling to walk a hundred metres without stopping to vomit.
Phil is as sympathetic as ever. He spends the afternoon thinking up jokes to greet Louis with on his arrival.
‘Making an ass of yourself again I see, Louis.’
Or an old one:
‘You had a bad cough this morning. Have you been feeling a little horse this afternoon?’
He’s disappointed when Robert sends another message to say they’ve been unable to hire a horse. Instead, Robert and Scott resort to increasingly bizarre methods to get Louis up the trail.
Scott unpacks his medical kit, and gives Louis a dexamethasone injection to provide him with an energy boost. This steroid is most frequently used as the drug of last resort for climbers who are collapsing with exhaustion.
Next Robert tries short-roping him, another old mountaineering technique in which a struggling climber is helped by towing them down a mountain. Usually a two- to three-metre length of Prusik cord is used to link rescuer and victim, but a porter is carrying Robert’s climbing equipment, so he tries to use his belt instead. Back at the teahouse, we imagine Robert’s trousers falling to his ankles as Louis staggers behind. We roar with laughter.
Dorje catches up with them and lends a hand by giving Louis an extra push. Meanwhile Dia walks alongside, giving Louis every encouragement.
‘Come on, Louis, you’ve climbed Everest. Stop being so pathetic!’
They reach Namche at three o’clock, and Louis begins the long process of rehydrating. His stomach bug will go away in a few hours. As long as he replenishes the water and salts that his body has lost in the last day, he’ll be fine.
So much for the Dream Team. Ian and I now look like a pair of superstar athletes, but Ian fails to take this responsibility seriously. While I spend the afternoon snoozing and catching up with my diary, he goes out for a wander around the village. He returns a couple of hours later with a list of all the bars he’s been able to find. He insists that we have to visit all of them later tonight.
At dinner I sit opposite Kevin and Edita. I ask them what it was like to live through the avalanche on Manaslu in 2012, which killed eleven people. They were at Camp 2 when it struck, and the tail of the avalanche rolled them around as it wafted past. Camp 3 was located 400m up a snow slope above them. It was directly in line, and was wiped out.
Kevin was sharing a tent with Phil. ‘He made us sleep in the topmost tent “in case anything happened”,’ Kevin says. ‘Before we went to sleep he brought his boots inside to keep them warm. He suggested I did too, but I thought “oh, they’ll be all right out there”.’
The following morning one of his boots vanished under the snow, never to be seen again. Its loss caused him to abandon the expedition.
Edita had just woken up and put the stove on for a brew when they heard a distant rumble high above them.
‘I think that’s an avalanche,’ her tent mate Mila said, nervously glancing around at the walls of their shelter.
A few seconds later the blast threw them into the air and they found themselves rolling down the slopes inside their tent.
‘It must have been pretty terrifying,’ I say.
‘Not really,’ Edita replies. ‘It was over so quickly we didn’t have time to think about it. As soon as we landed my worry was that we might be buried under so much snow we would suffocate inside the tent. I was so relieved when I opened the zip and could see the stars above us.’
In some respects they were lucky, but they agree that Phil had made a wise decision the previous night. He could see the slopes above Camp 2 were laden with fresh snow and a potential avalanche hazard. Their camp was protected behind a large crevasse, and they intended to retreat to Base Camp first thing that morning.
A 300m chunk of ice broke off a serac high above Camp 3, setting the entire slope below it into freefall. The climbers at Camp 3 took the brunt of it, but had they read the signs like Phil they would not have been there that morning.
‘Remind me not to share a tent with either of you guys,’ I say. ‘Hopefully nothing like that’s going to happen this time.’
Louis has recovered sufficiently for Phil to make more jokes at his expense. Dia asks whether it’s possible to get some laundry done at the teahouse here in Namche.
‘Yes, but they heard what happened today and won’t take Louis’s underwear,’ Phil says.
When it’s time to take our breakfast order for tomorrow he asks Louis whether fifteen slices of toast will be enough for him to keep some of it down.
By the end of dinner Ian has been drinking Tuborg beer for much of the afternoon and is feeling quite tired. I manage to round up eight people for our pub crawl, but the evening ends before eleven o’clock in only the second bar.
Both bars are strangely quiet. Are we early or late in the trekking season? I wonder. Or perhaps Namche is not the bustling metropolis I believed it had become.
Day 3 – The seedy side of Namche
Saturday, 5 April 2014 – Namche Bazaar, Nepal
We’ve climbed to an altitude of 3,400m in just two days. Today we have a rest day, which we spend acclimatising in Namche Bazaar.
On a good day the Sherpa capital is one of the most spectacularly sited villages anywhere in the world. It lies in a bowl in the hillside hundreds of metres above the Bhote Khosi Gorge. Row upon row of multi-storey stone teahouses are piled on top of one another, stretching up the hillside, and bookshops, bakeries, outdoor clothing stores and trekkers’ lodges line the narrow streets. On a clear day the 6,187m snowcap of Kongde Ri towers over everything on the opposite side of the valley. The village is home to the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), the organisation who regulate the environment in the Khumbu region. There is a helipad and a Sherpa cultural museum on top of the hill.
Today is not a day for taking sightseeing photos. A dull grey cloud floats low overhead, obscuring Kongde and banishing any blueness from the sky. The Statue of Liberty could be sitting on the hillside opposite for all we can see of it.
Louis looks a lot better this morning after his toilet adventures yesterday. Last night we watched the T20 world cup cricket semi-final in a bar, and at breakfast I am unable to resist telling him that Dale Steyn was producing as much crap with the ball as he was out of his arse.
After breakfast I walk up the hill into the main part of Namche. Narrow streets are crammed with bookshops, trekking lodges, and stores selling outdoor clothing. I bump into Phil, who tells me
the rest of the team are at a bakery down the hill. I follow him there, and find Margaret and Edita sitting at a table, drinking coffee and tapping away on their iPads. Edita tells me some of the others are sitting in another bakery opposite.
‘How do you know?’ I ask.
‘One of them has posted on Facebook.’
Times have changed since I was last here. I go across the road, and sure enough, Kevin is sitting at a table not twenty metres away from Edita. He is also tapping away on his iPad. He doesn’t notice me arrive, so I pull up a chair and sit down opposite without saying a word. When he glances up he looks shocked.
‘That’s freaky,’ he says.
He shows me his iPad, and I see that he’s been reading a page from my blog.
‘What are you doing reading that shit?’ I ask.
We go back across the road and join Margaret and Edita for coffee and chocolate cake. One by one the rest of the team join us as Phil notices them walking past outside. Most pull out smartphones or iPads and try to connect to the Wi-Fi.
I seem to be the only person in the group not bothered about checking emails or Facebook. I know I’m going to sound like an old fogey, but for me, an expedition is an opportunity to get away from the modern world for a few weeks.
Or so I like to think, but I get sucked in too. Later that afternoon I spend an hour and a half in an internet café next door to the bakery. I try to write and send a blog post on a treacle-slow internet connection. If this isn’t unpleasant enough, I’m forced to listen to a Sherpa issuing a stream of profanities in fluent English. He sits behind a counter near the door, while I sit among a bank of computer terminals a few metres away. The phone rings and he picks it up. He grunts a few terse responses as he listens to a voice on the other end of the line.