30.5

As one can figure out from the date this is written, it has been a while since I wrote last time. We’ve been in Nepal for a while now. We flew from Lhasa to Kathmandu, pretty cool flight as you could see the Himalayas from the plane. Only annoyance was that you could not see them from both sides of the plane, but only from the side where I happened to sit. So what happened was that everyone one the other side of the plane crowded over to my side to gaze out the window and disturb my reading.

We spent a few days first in Kathmandu arranging plane tickets, permits, gear etc. necessary to conquer Mt. Everest. Our first attempt on Everest was short lived. The plane that flew us to Lukla, the place from where the trek began, had to turn around 7 minutes out due to bad weather. But the next day the weather cleared and we reached our destination. It was quite an experience landing at Lukla airport. The landing strip is on the edge of a cliff, and its not flat as landing strips normally are. When landing, the plane hits uphill and when taking off, its downhill.

Even though its like a week ago since our first trekking day I remember we were quite exhausted when we reached our lodge for the night, not least due to that the both of us were starving. But, what we didn’t know then was that the next day was going to be even worse.

The next day we climbed up to this small town called Namche. Right before the town  there is a decent of like 600m, which is a lot I can tell you. Especially when you are carrying not only your own gear but Annika’s as well, plus some of her photo equipment.

Not much to report about the hike until we reached a place called Thengboche, also a small town. It’s at an altitude of approximately 3800m. Once we arrived there we had lunch and then unpacked. To our horror(mostly my horror) I’ve forgot the warmest piece of clothing I have with me, at the place where we stayed the night before, and there’s meters of snow up on base camp. So unless I go and get it, we will have to cancel our expedition. There was no place  to buy new clothing in thengboche either. Worst of all, the trek that day had been the worst so far. We started at 3550m, and then descended in to a valley at an altitude of 3200m, and from there we then began our ascent to thengboche which was at over 3800m. So what I would have to do is run all the way back, first down to 3250, up to 3550, down to 3250 and then up to over 3800.

It took me and Annika three hours to reach Thengboche from Sanasa. I did the round-trip from Thengboche to Sanasa and back to Thengboch in 3h.

Thengboche was the highest Annika and me made it, I got insanely sick that night. We suspect that I had actually been a bit sick before as well, and the pain I endured that day drove me over the edge. We turned around the next day. I was so weak that we even had to hire a porter to carry my load down to Namche and then onwards to Lukla from where we flew to Kathmandu.

Now that I’m writing this the time is 7am, and I’ve been awake for a while already. I had a high fever last night as well, so I guess we did the right decision to abandon our quest for Mt. Everest.

MT Everest from the airplane

This is how close we got to MT everest...