written and photographed by Carl Duncan
Apr 2004, Vol. 8 No. 6
Namche Bazaar, Nepal — It looked as if Mount Everest had claimed another victim.
I was hiking a narrow ridge between the Sherpa capital of Namche Bazaar and Tengboche Monastery, at about 11,000 feet, when I passed a wiry Nepalese porter carrying a woman on his back. She was riding in a wide bamboo basket padded by pillows. Was she suffering from altitude sickness, I wondered, or frostbite?
But as she passed, her face didn’t carry the fearful, defeated look of a mountain victim. In fact, she was positively beaming. Moments later, another porter appeared carrying her folded wheelchair. Apparently this adventuresome woman wasn’t going to let a little thing like a disability deter her from one of the world’s classic journeys.
Fifty years ago this week, on May 29, 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first two men to stand atop the highest mountain in the world – “knocked the bastard off,” as Hillary put it in a rare boastful moment.
They came home with stories of the Shangri-la-like Khumbu, the isolated Sherpa homeland in the shadow of Mount Everest. A trickle of walking tourists eventually followed, and then a flood. And this has transformed the Khumbu in ways no one could have predicted.
A member of an early Everest expedition once wrote in his diary, “We are about to walk off the edge of the map.” Today, though Namche is still a week’s walk from the nearest road, visitors can pop into one of several Internet cafes, phone home, order a latte and catch the latest CNN headlines on satellite TV. And, as I discovered, the Khumbu is now wheelchair accessible.
I’d heard about other tourist-driven changes, too. When my wife and I set out in April on the two-week trek to Everest Base Camp from Jiri – roughly 50 miles as the crow flies – we braced for the worst: entire forests felled for firewood, trekker trash along the trail, squalid, crowded guesthouses and little but the shredded remnants of Sherpa culture left. Instead, we found spotless trails, replanted forests, a wide choice of comfortable lodges (with hot showers available nearly all the way to Base Camp) and friendly, generous Sherpas with their culture largely intact.
Fifty years after Hillary and Tenzing’s triumph, Everest has come of age as an adventure destination. Almost anyone with three weeks to spare, a few dollars a day for food and lodging, and a good sleeping bag (rentable in Kathmandu) can enjoy the journey. More than 20,000 people a year now do so, and even jaded world wanderers are fond of calling this one “the trip of a lifetime.”
With all the amenities available today, it’s hard to believe that before the Lukla airstrip was built in 1964, there were no tourist facilities at all in the Khumbu, just simple teahouses that offered a floor to sleep on to lowland porters and Tibetan salt traders who plied the trail. By 1972, however, nearly 1,500 tourists a year were venturing in. They needed food and lodging. And they had money.
In the village of Junbesi, we spent our fourth night at the Moonlight Hotel. Our $1.50 room had slate floors, varnished pine walls, bright windows and a steaming hot shower near the kitchen. Ang Choti Sherpa, the 45-year-old owner, speaks excellent English and is obviously doing very well. When she was 5 or 6, she said, the village had no guesthouses and just small thatch-and-stone Sherpa houses; it now has several guesthouses.
“My father was the schoolmaster, and he started renting a classroom to the tourists who came by. They slept on straw mats on the floor. We also grew barley and potatoes, just for ourselves – there is no market here – but when the tourists came, he could sell the potatoes, too. That was the beginning of his teahouse business,” she said.
Every night along the trail, we had our choice of lodging in similar small villages. Every hour or so during the days, we passed trailside teahouses where we could rest at an outside table and have tea or a snack or order a full hot lunch. Most sold imported canned goods such as Cokes, beer, Thai tuna,
Bhutanese baked beans and even Pringles potato chips. Bottled water was available everywhere, but rather than leave a plastic trail behind us, we filtered our own (many trekkers used iodine).
Wanting to hike encumbered by little more than a camera and a hip pack, we had hired a guide and two porters in Kathmandu. Our guide, Ram Krishna Basnet, a soft-spoken (and tireless) 28-year-old, was from a farm near Jiri and knew each village and the name of every peak we spotted. Each stop at a guesthouse seemed like a meeting of old friends. Ram would often invite us into the kitchens, the social center of all Sherpa homes, to sit on buffalo-skin stools in front of a clay stove and laugh as he translated a funny story or the latest Khumbu gossip.
Although we had tried to get in shape with a month of neighborhood walks back home, including hiking a local hill, the ups and downs at first were tough going – especially the southern section, which was one ridge after the other. Our solution, like everyone else’s, was just to take it slow, and we stopped for the night when we felt like it.
Each day was six or seven hours of walking over passes and down into river valleys. At the end of the first week, we were trail-hardened veterans as we entered Namche Bazaar, our midway point to Everest. As most trekkers do, we stayed two nights in Namche to get acclimated to the 11,329-foot altitude. A near-guaranteed layover for the thousands of trekkers who pass through each year means a steady flow of cash into the local economy. Namche is thriving.
Trekking and climbing shops abound, with prices often better than those in Kathmandu. In this terraced town of less than a thousand people, we found good restaurants, European-quality bakeries, bookstores, a bank, ticket offices for the Lukla flight back to Kathmandu and four Internet cafes. We looked over a few of Namche’s 43 lodges and chose the Namche Hotel. Our $15 room had reading lights over each bed, hot water in the tap, a carpet on the floor and a sunny veranda with an unobstructed valley view. The restaurant had an extensive menu and CNN on the tube.
Although Namche and surrounding communities have had hydroelectric power for about 15 years, satellite dishes and television reception arrived only seven months ago. Already, we were told, half the houses in Namche have TV sets.
Forty-five percent of Nepal’s 43 million people still live on less than a dollar a day. Before mountain tourism, the Sherpas of northeastern Nepal, who had migrated from Tibet, were mainly subsistence farmers, yak herders and traders, and were among the poorest people in the country. Because of Everest, the cash cow of the Khumbu, the approximately 10,000 Sherpas here have become one of the kingdom’s most affluent ethnic groups. Namche symbolizes it all.
Kancha Sherpa, a spry 71, lives in a trim house with a million-dollar view in upper Namche. One of the climbing Sherpas who worked on the 1953 expedition, Kancha has lived in Namche all his life. As we shared tea one morning, stonemasons outside the window were madly chipping away, crafting stone blocks for yet another hotel. Bright blue tin roofs, the new symbol of wealth in the Khumbu, covered a third of the houses below. Kancha shook his head with a grin. “If you collected all the money Everest has earned since 1953,” he said, “it would make a mountain bigger than Everest itself.”
Namche is the gateway to Sagarmatha (the Nepalese name for Everest) National Park, 425 square miles of the central Everest region set aside and protected in 1976. Still, the 1970s and ’80s were dark decades: Deforestation became a much-publicized issue as trees were cut for firewood and the construction of lodges. Trekker trash accumulated along the main trail until it was dubbed “the garbage trail.” So many expeditions left cast-off gear and used oxygen cylinders behind that Edmund Hillary himself referred to Everest as “the world’s highest junkyard.”
In 1979, tree cutting was outlawed and vigorous reforestation programs begun. Since 1992, cleanup campaigns have successfully dealt with the trash problem, both on the trail and on the mountain. Beer bottles have been banned. The Sherpa-run Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, aided by money from the World Wildlife Fund and a percentage of expedition fees, oversees park cleanup.
For more than a decade, climbing teams have had to pay a $4,000 cleanup deposit before tackling Everest (lesser amounts for lesser peaks) and $2,000 for oxygen bottles. Deposits are returned only after an inspection shows that the team has cleaned up its base camp and taken out the same number of oxygen bottles it brought in. Every year, dedicated environmental expeditions comb the slopes and bring back any leftover debris. Everest, after suffering some bad years, has cleaned up its act.
Six days after Namche, including a rest day in Pheriche, we reached Base Camp. Everest’s signature plume was streaming like a war banner in the bright May morning sunlight. At 17,600 feet, it was the end of the journey for most of us, but just the beginning for the climbers. Most were down in camp, waiting out high winds aloft. Up on the glaring white Khumbu Icefall, a line of antlike climbers was still descending.
Normally, we had been told, 100 tents is a busy season. But Base Camp was packed for the 2003 Jubilee: 32 teams, 700 tents and maybe 2,000 people, including some 200 climbers. Long streamers of prayer flags fluttered overhead, stretched from the tops of stone chortens (shrines) traditionally set up by the Sherpas.
Despite the thin, cold air, Base Camp was a pleasure to stroll through, a bustling tent city full of camaraderie and a warm welcome for trekkers like us. We could hardly pass a dining tent without being invited in for hot tea or warm fruit juice. Some of these tents were snugly walled in stone, with long dining tables, TVs, VCRs and stereo systems. Most of the teams had been here for a full month, but in our four-hour stay,
I never saw a stray PowerBar wrapper or passed a stinky outhouse (narrow tents set up over “expedition barrels” that are portered out when full). Maybe my senses had glazed over from the pounding high-altitude sunlight, but this was the cleanest camp I’d ever seen.
Powered by solar cells and housed under a blue awning, the Base Camp’s Internet cafe was doing a brisk business. I was tempted – just for bragging rights – but we were eager to get out of the thin air and back to the comforts of the trail. I pocketed a small stone as a memento of our visit to the Big E, then we headed back.
What had taken more than two weeks going up would take just three days going down, and every step would take us into thicker, warmer air. We felt giddy and light on our feet. I remembered the smile on that woman’s face on the ridge below Tengboche.
No doubt we were beaming, too. ————————————————————————
IF YOU GO
— WHEN TO GO
There are two trekking seasons, spring (March-May), before summer monsoons begin in June, and autumn (September-November). Autumn is warmer and often clearer but nearly twice as crowded.
— GETTING THERE
The main gateways from the West Coast to Kathmandu are Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore, served by Thai International and Singapore Airlines. You’ll need a passport, two passport photos and $30 for the visa, available at the Kathmandu airport. Prepaid taxis into town cost 250 rupees (about $3.25).
— TREKKING
All-inclusive treks: Porters, guide, cook, food and camping gear are included; you “camp” in the courtyards of lodges along the way. $25 to $100 per person per day.
Teahouse treks: You sleep in rooms every night and eat at teahouses along the way. Most average about $20 (1,500 Nepal rupees) per day, including meals.
Porters: You can walk with or without a guide or porter. Porters hired in Kathmandu cost $7-$12 a day and a guide about $5 more. Most prefer duffel bags.
If you have more than about 45 pounds, hire two porters, even if yours is willing to try to carry more.
Agencies: If you hire through an agency, they take care of the porters’ and guide’s expenses, arrange transportation to and from the trailhead and keep close contact with emergency crews (evacuation helicopters). We used Gurkha Encounters (Ganeshman Street, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal; phone, 011-977-1-426- 6388; fax, 011-977-1-426-6355; (www.gurka-trekking.com and easily arranged everything by e-mail. In the heart of Thamel, just 100 yards from the Kathmandu Guesthouse; about 20 English-speaking guides. Porters, $12 a day; guides, $15. Many other agencies can be found on the Internet.
— WHAT TO TAKE
All you really need are warm- and cold-weather hiking clothes, broken-in hiking boots or running shoes and a sleeping bag (lodges will have thin blankets at most, and rooms are unheated).
— TRAILHEADS
Jiri: The end of the paved road from Kathmandu, 120 miles east of the capital. About eight hours by bus ($4); five hours by Landcruiser ($120 for as many as five people). About 14 days to Everest Base Camp.
Lukla: A 35-minute, $93 flight from Kathmandu. From here it’s a two-day trek to Namche. Above 9,000 feet, it’s a quick jump into high-altitude hiking. Nearly everyone flies back from Lukla, regardless of starting point.
— STAYING IN TOUCH
Namche has phone and Internet service; satellite phones ($5 a minute) are available at Tengboche Monastery and at the Himalayan Rescue Association Clinic at Pheriche. Base Camp has an Internet cafe ($1 a minute; proceeds go to the pollution control committee).
— WHERE TO STAY
Kathmandu has a wide range of hotels and guesthouses from less than $2 a day to more than $200. Many can now be booked through the Internet (for example, see www.kathmandu-hotels.com). For trekkers, the most convenient location is Thamel, where the majority of trekking agencies, travel agents and gear shops are.
Kathmandu Guesthouse, P.O. Box 21218, Thamel, Kathmandu; 011-977-1-441-36 32; fax, 011-977-1-441-71 33; (www.kghhotels.com115 rooms, $2 (common bath) to $60 (a/c garden deluxe double). Thamel’s first hotel (opened in 1968), in a historic Rana palace, is still our choice after dozens of visits. Restaurant, full banking services, Internet, cable TV, even a new movie theater. Free airport pickup.
— FOR MORE INFORMATION
Everest: (www.mountainzone.com. Near-daily dispatches from the mountain, photo archive.
Sagarmatha National Park: whc.unesco.org/sites/120.htm. Also has informative links.
Everest anniversary: (www.everestanniversary .com Includes links to Everest trek itinerary descriptions.
The Khumbu: (www.sherpa.nepalresearch.org Culture, history of the Khumbu Sherpas.