The Himalayan Haze
(The snow-covered peak of Nuptse is just visible on the left side of the panorama. Everest is to the left that, but is covered by clouds.)
(The snow-covered peak of Nuptse is just visible on the left side of the panorama. Everest is to the left that, but is covered by clouds.)
Dateline: March 29th, 2010
I turned in last night at 2230. Given my fatigue levels, I easily could have been asleep sooner. Between the card games and socialising at the guesthouse, I was up far later than I'd intended. No harm was done since I stayed in bed until 0800 this morning. Today is the first of our two scheduled acclimatisation days, and there was no need to be up early to head out on the trail.
Last night was uncomfortably cold. The blanket I was provided was nowhere was thick as the one I'd had in Phakding, and I spent much of the night curled up in the fetal position trying to keep my hands and feet warm. I suppose the sensible thing would have been to get up and put on a layer of clothing or two, but I couldn't bring myself to make that much effort during the night. I wasn't exactly freezing to death, but sleep wasn't as easy as it might have been. I slept in two-hour stretches, punctuated by brief bursts of wakefulness.
After breakfast, the plan was to spend our off day hiking up to the ridge three-hundred vertical metres above Namche Bazaar. There we could tour the Sherpa villages of Khunde and Khumjung. Also on the ridge was the Everest View Hotel, where I could get my first views of… well… Mount Everest. I had visions of relaxing on the hotel terrace, with a large pot of milk tea; just sitting there and taking in eyefuls of the high Himalaya. It was a good plan.
It didn't quite work out.
The Buddha Lodge is located in the some of the lowest reaches of Namche Bazaar – the settlement is spread out over a hundred vertical metres, built on a naturally-occurring mountain amphitheatre. Thusly, our first task was to climb to the upper reaches of the village. At sea level, this would have been nothing more than a light, five-minute uphill jog. At 3,400m, it was a slow, twenty-minute slog – all the more discouraging given I was only carrying my camera and my water bottle. The skies were perfectly clear when I woke up at 0800. By 0930, we had reached the steppe overlooking Namche, and the clouds had rolled in. To the west, the upper reaches of Kongde Ri (a 6,187m trekking peak four kilometres from Namche) were completely obscured. The afternoon clouds rolled in early today.
Namche Bazaar
Given the cloud cover – and with no indication that it was going to clear up any time soon – Santosh, Arun and I decided to table the climb. The general consensus was: why climb if we weren't going to see anything? Instead, we made our way out along a level track to a little museum located next to the local Army barracks. Once at the museum, we spent about an hour killing time, checking out the exhibits and photos on the Everest region.
In hiking out to the museum, we had gotten past the mountain ridge blocking views of Everest from Namche. It was there I was able to get my first, incredibly cloud-obscured glimpses of the Everest range. From our vantage point at 3,480m, Everest seemed strangely insignificant – the 8,850m peak looked dwarfed by Nuptse (7,861m), Lohtse (8,501m) and even Ama Dablam (6,856). Afterwards, we descended back to the Buddha Lodge, well in time for lunch.
Truth be known, I wasn't too disappointed by the failed attempt to hike to the top of the ridge. Given my fitful night of sleep, and the fact that I'd awoken with a headache, I was starting to worry about altitude sickness. Not helping was the story Santosh told me over breakfast, telling me with gusto about the trekker he'd met in town the previous day – a trekker who, on only the third day of his trek, had succumb to extreme nausea during his climb to the Everest View Hotel. He had decided to turn back to Lukla. Done after 3,800m. With all of this in mind, a true rest day – with no risk of physical over-exertion – seemed like a Godsend.
The Streets of Namche Bazaar
During the afternoon, while wandering through the village, I met a British fellow, on his way down from Everest Base Camp and the Gokyo Valley. We got to talking. I was particularly interested in his experiences given that he'd just covered the exact route we were planning to take – including the climb over the mountain pass at Cho La, between the Khumbu and Ngozumpa valleys. The group he was trekking with was carrying a full medical emergency kit – including blood oxygen monitors. Those monitors helped to catch his dangerously low blood oxygen levels at Namche Bazaar, even before the symptoms of altitude sickness kicked in. He told be that once he went on a course of Diamox, everything was fine.
My own previous experience with Diamox – taken because I flew directly, from sea level, into Cusco, Peru (at 3,310m) back in 2006 – was good. But I came to Nepal hoping to do without the drugs – hoping that a slow ascent would see me naturally acclimatise. Now that I'm in the Himalaya, I don't want to leave anything to mere hope. My first act after finishing up that conversation was to head over to one of the local shops and pick up some Diamox – selling over the counter here for far less than I paid when I filled a prescription back in Canada. I'm not prepared to take it now – the morning headache cleared up after lunch – but merely having it affords a little peace of mind.
I pigged out over lunch and dinner – having learned my lesson during the climb up to Namche. I dined on pasta and buffalo Bolognese over lunch, and put down two large servings of daal bhat for dinner – a meal ordered precisely because daal bhat is (practically) all-you-can-eat in the guesthouses on the trek to and from Base Camp. Knowing that a high-carbohydrate, high-calorie diet supposedly aids acclimatisation makes the decision to keep shovelling down the rice easy, even after I was well past the point of food satiation. My appetite is comforting, since a loss of appetite is a major indication of increasing altitude sickness.
Mani Rock (The inscriptions read repeatedly Om Mani Padme Hum' or 'Hail the Jewel in the Lotus')
In what I'm sure will be a frequent refrain, a lot of my down time was spent playing cards. We played plenty of duam bol, and I added kheety to my repertoire. As reciprocation for the Nepali card games, a few other trekkers and I spent some time teaching "shithead" to our guides and porters. The Nepalese on the trail take their card games pretty seriously – cheating is roundly tolerated as long as you don't get caught.
Mental note: Never play a Nepali at cards for money.
Related Entries:
1. Trekking in the Solukhumbu - Day 2: This Trek's Getting Real
2. Trekking in the Solukhumbu - Day 1: In the Footsteps of Hillary
3. Fast Forward to the Himalaya
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