Trekking in the Solukhumbu - Day 1: In the Footsteps of Hillary

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The Lower Solukhumbu (On the Trail Between Lukla and Phakding)

Dateline: March 27th, 2010

There is a café / bar right next to the Khangsar Guest House, with a house band that provides what I suppose passes for in-house entertainment in Thamel. By that I mean they played very loud and mediocre renditions of 60s pop hits. At 2300, the music was clearly audible – through my earplugs – all the way up in my room on the fifth floor. I don't know if this is an everyday occurrence, but they were certainly kicking up a storm last night. This was not exactly how I wanted to spend the night before a day in which I had a 0500 wake up call.

The band finally packed it in around 2315. With my earplugs nicely muting the barking dogs and all the rest of the ambient Kathmandu cacophony, I quickly fell into a deep sleep. Of course, between the earplugs and my depth of sleep, I missed my 0500 alarm. Thank God my usual paranoia mind set a secondary alarm for 0515. It was a good thing I was already packed; it took me a full fifteen minutes just to shake off the drowsiness, get dressed, double-check everything and be downstairs by 0530 to meet up with my guide, Santosh. A short cab ride to the Kathmandu airport, and we were at the domestic terminal with forty-five minutes to spare before our scheduled take-off.

That domestic terminal was like no airport I've ever seen. The check-in counters consisted of stand-alone wooden booths – akin to lemonade stands, or Lucy's psychiatry booth in The Peanuts – set up next to giant weigh stations suitable for whatever manner of gear that people were flying around. Even at this early hour – we were booked on one of the first departures out to Lukla – there were throngs of people milling around, looking to get checked onto a plane into the Himalaya. (First thing I learned in Nepal: there is no such thing as the "Himalayas". Himalaya is already plural.) It was a mad house.

There were plenty of smaller trekking groups, and not an insignificant number of solo trekkers like me. I'd pushed through a giant tour group full of middle-aged to elderly Japanese specimens just to get into the terminal. I don't know if there were any climbers around, but there was certainly a tonne (literally at least a tonne) of climbing and expedition supplies destined for Everest Base Camp, just sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. It was a good thing I had Santosh, because this wasn't the type airport where orderly queuing leads to efficient check-in procedures. He wormed his way through the crowds and took care of the airport tax and flight paperwork. I just hung back, taking in all the goings-on.

Security was tighter that I'd expected, with multiple pat-downs before I was allowed to board the small minibus taking us out onto the airplane parking spots. Nine trekkers (four Germans, four Brits and me), three guides, one stewardess and two pilots gave us a full load of fifteen on that small prop plane. We were strapped in by 0620, all set for a 0630 departure.

0630 came and went. I sat in my seat, working on Sudoku puzzles trying to keep my mind occupied and avoid dwelling on just how nervous I was about the flight. The Lukla airport has a tremendous safety record given the trickiness of flying into a short airstrip in the mountains. Delays to and from Lukla are notorious – part of maintaining that good safety rating is that planes don't fly when the weather gets even remotely finicky. Having wind pick up or gusting in the wrong direction leads to delays that can stretch into hours. Throw in bad cloud cover and flight postponements can stretch into days. The margin for error is tiny. In 2008, an Yeti Airlines flight smashed into rocks just five vertical metres short of the runway, killing eighteen trekkers and air crew.

Lukla Airport: Runway Easy Death¹ (No Kidding.)

At 0700, one of the pilots turned around – the flight deck was wide open to the passengers – and told us that it was looking like another twenty-minutes until we could take off. He gave a reason for the delay, but it was mumbled enough that I couldn't quite catch whether he said it was due to "weather" or "traffic". I was praying it was "traffic". Santosh, who was sitting one seat closer to the pilot, turned around and told me it was "weather". I went right back to those Sudoku puzzles.

At 0730, the engines finally roared to life and the propellers started turning. I guess the winds had died down enough that the pilots were willing to at least fly into Lukla airspace – taking off was no guarantee that we'd be able to land. The noise levels in the plane were intense. The stewardess' only job on the plane – after closing the door – was to walk up and down the aisle once, handing out cotton for passengers to stuff in our ears.

The scenery during the thirty-minute flight was spectacular – my only complaint being that I was sitting on the wrong side of the plane (the right-hand side on the flight out to Lukla) to see the peaks out of my own window. There was little cloud or haze that early in the morning, and flying past all the mountains made me momentarily forget that I was sitting in a flying death-trap.

As the plane made the turn to line up with the Lukla airstrip, I craned my neck upwards in order to look out the cockpit windows. What I saw was not confidence inspiring. When viewed straight on, the four-hundred-odd metre runway looks even shorter than it seems possible. A sloped airstrip carved into a mountain steppe, it's like something out of a James Bond movie. The landing felt more like a controlled crash, something I imagine was akin to landing on an aircraft carrier. One second we were a hundred metres or so above the tarmac; the next thing we knew, the plane dropped out of the air, hitting the runway hard. I nearly had a heart attack. The pilot quickly reversed engines, and swung the plane off the runway onto a parking deck – from landing to shutting down the engines, less than sixty seconds elapsed.

On exiting the plane, I seriously wanted to kiss the ground. And I would have if decorum, and the knowledge that I'd have to fly back out of Lukla, hadn't took over.

Over the Threshold, Towards Everest

Santosh and I met up with Arun – my porter for the trek – and we all headed to one of the lodges overlooking the airstrip to have breakfast before setting out on the trail. I wasn't ridiculously hungry, but I put down a decent portion of eggs, potatos, toast and honey in anticipation of the day's trekking. After fuelling up, we hiked through the village and were on the trail by 0930.

While the temperature was a relatively cool 16°C, I heated up quickly once we started hiking – it was a clear morning and the sun was just beating down from above. The trail started in Lukla at approximately 2,800 metres above sea level. There was no danger of altitude sickness here, but I was high enough to feel the lack of oxygen, particularly while climbing. As it was, we didn't have to worry so much about that on the first day. The trek started off with an annoyingly steep descent. I characterise it as annoying because I jogged down those steps fully aware that we'd have to painfully make up that altitude later.

It turned out to be an easy first day. Santosh set a brisk pace with which I had no issues keeping up, and after a relatively level trek, we hiked into the town of Phakding – the traditional stop on the first night up to Base Camp – around 1200.

Things weren't quite as busy as I'd expected. We passed a few trekking groups on the trail, and manoeuvred around some porter and yak trains ferrying goods to the towns around the Solukhumbu. Over this starting stretch, we were never more than ten minutes away from a tea- or guesthouse. With such a wide choice of lodging and rest stops, I wasn't particularly surprised to find we had an entire guesthouse – the Shangri-La Guesthouse – to ourselves this evening. Other trekkers are around – they're just scattered throughout other places in Phakding.

I went for a walk around the village before discovering there wasn't much here. I could have made a two hour round-trip to a Buddhist monastery on an adjacent hillside, but that seemed like a lot of work given we will be passing by plenty of other monasteries on the way up. So, there was nothing to do but sit around, chat with Santosh and Arun, study the trail guides, scarf down plenty of daal bhat for lunch and dinner, and rest up.

Given the tough climb up to Namche Bazaar tomorrow, a little laziness today might not have been a bad thing.

Altitude Stats:

• Starting Altitude: 2,785m
• Ending Altitude: 2,605m
• Maximum Altitude: 2,785m
• Minimum Altitude: 2,495m
• Total Ascent: 295m
• Total Descent: 470m

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Related Entries:
1. Fast Forward to the Himalaya
2. The Blogger is: Out
3. Out of the Solukhumbu

¹ In the Chinese languages, "two four" is a virtual homonym for "easy death".