Relative Something

The only way I have been able to identify what day it is, is by looking at what I wrote the day before. It must now be Saturday, 18 April. The morning appears clear and sunny at 6 a.m., but what we need is for that to be the case in 3 hours. But it’s a good start. Our wake-up call is scheduled for 7 a.m. and Gary is sleeping all of it, while I am up, dressed, packed, and ready to go. I think I am really wanting this to happen.

Last night I was coughing so hard that I gave myself an intense headache. This morning it is a little less persistent. I wonder if it can possibly be gone before I get home. I dread coughing the whole way on the long flight. My lungs still have a bit of rattle when I exhale.

At 6:45, tea is offered at our door! The sound of an airplane suddenly fills the air. It dominates and makes the area seem really small, as if it is right outside our room. We head down to breakfast where Lhakpa (#1) honors each one of us with a ceremonial end-of-trek scarf. Then we are ushered out and walked around the runway to the departures building. Jim has agreed to be a guide for a child (of a friend of our cook, Gyalzen) who is on our flight, which adds a little excitement/confusion to the process. No line for men through security, but a long line for the women. The security check was entirely superficial. Then, two twin turboprop flights later, we are allowed outside and our Agni Air plane is waiting. They throw in the bags, we hop in, the door is shut and we are off! It is a rush like an amusement park ride to move off the flat at the top and drop down that runway. Passengers toward the back put their hands up in the air in fun, but are really hoping and hoping that it will be airborne before we reach the cliff that drops off at the end of that runway.

The flight was in the air 15 minutes earlier than we were told it would be and only lasted about 30 minutes. It is mind boggling and in shockingly fast fashion we are torn from where we were just having breakfast to now be in Kathmandu again. My mind can hardly keep up. It feels strange to have left the remoteness of the Khumbu Valley, yet still be in the relative limbo of a place where it is suggested we don’t drink the tap water and streets are often nothing more that rutted dirt trails. Five hours after I was greeted for morning tea at the door of our room in the lodge, I am showered and lounging on a bed in the Yak & Yeti Hotel. I find myself compelled to immediately find the iPod I had stashed in the bag I left at the hotel while we trekked, and cue up the tunes that were most prominently stuck in my head the previous two weeks. One way to clear ’em is to hear ’em.

In the afternoon, Gary and I do some cruising and shopping with Bonnie and Pam. We stop for dinner and end up walking back in darkness. I seem to have developed the most confidence in taking the risks of crossing traffic. It is a system that seems to work best when you just do it. Make your decision and go. Don’t hesitate or stutter-step, as that creates indecision in the drivers and leads to trouble. But you do need to be willing to endure incredibly close proximity of moving vehicles.

By about 8 p.m. we are crashed in our rooms. I find some Premier League Soccer on ESPN. It doesn’t keep me awake long.

In this retelling of the days of the trek, I am now up to Friday, 17 April, but the journal entry for this day starts back at the night before. Just about the time we turned off the flashlights in the tent, it started to rain. It then got harder and harder and harder until it sounded like quite a downpour. Except for a moment of mild initial concern, when I turn my light back on to check for any obvious leaks, it was a great sound to fall asleep to. By morning, the sky was clear blue, and we survived the night pretty much leak-free. We are back to the old routine and are offered tea and washing water at our tent.

Breakfast on this morning deserves honorable mention for its non-breakfast-like offerings: after the oatmeal porridge came a pancake with tuna and onions, and cooked carrots on the plate. What little appetite that had returned to me a day or two ago, suddenly vanished again. After breakfast, we wandered over to where the Sherpas and porters were gathered to present them with cash as a tip for their services. Jim had an envelope for each person and would read a name and as they came to him to receive it, we whooped, hollered, and applauded. After he had handed out his last envelope, one porter stepped forward to report he didn’t get called. Jim assured him we would take care of it. I let Jim know that I had enough to give him right away, but he said he wanted to do it later after he figured out what the correct amount should be. There was a sliding scale and he had taken care of it all himself, but he needed to check his records. Later, Jim told us that he decided to just give him what he thought was the amount he gave the others, but then subsequently found the missing envelope and discovered he gave him too much. I offered that it served as compensation for his embarrassment over having to step forward and say he didn’t receive anything. Maybe in the future they will all be hoping they get missed the first time in hopes of getting a bigger tip.

Then we are off and it is a mostly uneventful trudge to Lukla. It is a long shift of hiking until lunch, which ends up being served around 1:30. We encounter just enough rain sprinkles to cause most of us to put on a jacket and some to cover their packs, and then it stops raining. The lunch stop is in a small, dark tea house where there was a rather large group of Japanese trekkers crashed out in various levels of rest. They slowly move out as we find seats at our place settings and food begins to arrive.

My cough is still bad. The afternoon kind of drags, but the views never end. It is all way beyond my ability to satisfactorily capture on camera. At one point, Jim turns and calls to the older Lhakpa, the Sirdar (Sherpa leader), and asks him to come forward, to walk the last stretch of the trail to Lukla, side by side. It is a poignant moment and reveals, I think, Jim is feeling added sentiment for the possibility this type of adventure may not happen for him again.

When we reach Lukla, the walk through town seems longer than any of us remember. We are done tenting and are given rooms at the lodge where we had tea that first day we arrived. The rooms are awesome and include a bathroom with a toilet. After our tea and snack, we collect the things we intend to donate to our service providers. Like several of the others in our group, I leave them my hiking boots, and then also fleece jacket, a dri fit t-shirt, some socks, solar calculator, some soaps, a pair of sunglasses, a nice ink pen, and left-over candy. It just gets turned over with nothing in the way of ceremony.

As I turned out the lights to sleep, I hear voices and activity outside and I peek out the window to find Lhakpa and the Sherpas sorting through the donated items. I have no way of telling whether our tips and donations were perceived by the staff as having our intended value. There were hints of evidence that the younger guys had a fresh spring in their step and smiles on their faces. I heard from others in our group that some of the guys had already done some shopping in town as soon as they arrived.

The entry in my journal for Thursday, 16 April, has the same information as all the others: how I slept and what I ate for breakfast. But the only thing that is on my mind this day is that it is the one when my group gets back together again. I spent a fair amount of time on the days off contemplating the group dynamic and my affection for my group. It was a real shock to be suddenly removed from the camaraderie of cohorts. For some reason –one that probably isn’t hard to understand– I found myself subsequently in a very isolationist mindset. When trekking groups stopped at the lodge in Monjo where Gary and I were staying, I observed their interactions from more than just a physical distance. With Gary spending much of his time resting in the tent, I was often alone, and as the groups arrived with all their combined energy and excitement, I noticed, even more, my strong feeling of so not being with a group. I became a silent observer. Even though I was on a similar trek to theirs, it was as if I had no connection to make.

From that perspective, I would recognize the interactions, some rather annoying from the outside, that I had been a participant in just days ago. It created a bit of a dual desire in me because I am very comfortable not being part of a group and in many ways prefer it, but I also very much wanted to be back together with the travel companions for whom I had very quickly developed an intense affection. Most of the morning was spent in a mindset looking forward to the time when Lhakpa and I could head up the trail to meet the gang coming down. Gary was doing ok, certainly not appearing to continue to get worse, but he wasn’t up to wanting to do the hiking I was planning. Lhakpa said we could head out about 1 p.m.

It had been a couple of days since I did any real hiking and I was chomping at the bit to go. I was also looking forward to not needing to wear my daypack and felt a little smugness over being able to hike with Lhakpa as opposed to the more common looking tourist, with pack and trekking poles, following behind their Sherpa. For the first time in the whole trek, I was able to take off at my more natural pace as Lhakpa sensed my ability and we moved along at a pretty good clip, deftly picking our steps up the rocks on which I had plodded just over a week ago, the first time up. It took on a whole new slant for me, adding a richness to my experience; certainly one I wouldn’t have had if I’d not suffered the limitations of my lung condition. I did try to be careful to not over do it with my pretending to be as able as Lhakpa to climb, as I still had the residual cough and heavy breathing would do nothing good for me. The art of guiding, that the lead Sherpa employs, is in their ability to continually check and gauge the status of those they are leading, and adjust the pace accordingly. All I needed to do was slow down, myself, and then his pace would slow in front of me.

I balanced some rocks while waiting

We reached a spot that I remembered well, where we could see one of the footbridges high in the distance and where the real climbing of the next section begins. While waiting there we played a game I started, based on one Lhakpa had told me about being commonly played by kids. They would make a hole and try to toss coins in. The one who hits the hole gets all the coins that have been tossed. I noticed a plastic bottle cap lying nearby and set it on a rock a little ways away and we took turns trying to hit it with small stones. It drew the attention of one young guy that appeared to be wandering the trail with no agenda. He seemed thoroughly entertained to just stand and watch for quite some time. Lhakpa beat me repeatedly with his superior accuracy.

Lhakpa would exchange greetings with porters and guides passing us, and then one guy sat against a rock facing us and talked for a long time. After he left, Lhakpa said, “That was my brother-in-law.” He hadn’t seen him in quite a while and they did a lot of catching up. The guy had done some guiding of climbing expeditions recently. Suddenly there were excited greetings exchanged and I recognized that some of our porters had reached us. It was a treat to see them again and they seemed very happy to see us. That got my energy up, but it would still be quite a wait before the trekkers would arrive. Several more porters for our group came by and then our cook, Gyalzen and his wife, Yashi, herding our zopcuks. Lhakpa seemed to know that our group would be well-behind them, but I was feeling it was getting close now.

When this next portion of waiting started feeling long, Lhakpa asked me if I was interested in going higher to meet them. I was all in. As we climbed, there were still plenty of opportunities to view the trail snaking down the steep rise across the river from us and we kept an eye out for our group. Before we reached the footbridge, Lhakpa spotted them on the trail. We made it up to the bridge before they got there and took up positions on the far side to wait. I stepped out into the open on a large flat boulder overlooking the bridge and river below, trying to make myself as big and visible as possible. When they reached the bridge I put my hands in the air and watched to see if any of them would look up and across before they stepped on. The lead Sherpa didn’t. Jim didn’t. But then, I think it was Carol, …I see her head look up and then the body language of recognition, and as she shares the sighting with the others, I feel a surge of joy over connecting with them again.

My view of hiking with the goup again

We created a bottleneck at our side of the bridge as I met each one with a hug and everyone wanted to talk at once. Jim’s first question was for news on how Gary was doing. I think that when they didn’t find us waiting for them at the village above on the night before, their minds considered worst scenarios. I relished the hike back to Monjo with them. Pam’s knee was still bothering her and I was able to offer to carry her pack. I was part of a trekking group again. I had no problem with that. And, when we got back to the tents, there was tea served and a popcorn snack and we got washing water again! It’s hard to describe how precious that was.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there!

Got behind in writing, so here’s some pics I just got from my fellow trekkers. We had a little reunion on Friday. It was really great to see everyone again.

David took this shot of me overlooking Namche Bazaar

Carol caught me lounging

A group shot with our two Lhakpas, minus Pam because she took the picture

Wednesday, 15 April, is an off day for me. We are not going to hike today, so I get to just relax and see what comes my way. I got a pretty good night’s sleep despite the couple/three coughing fits I experienced and also despite the banging door to the toilet, just outside our tent, that received plenty of activity, both at the beginning and end of the night. The weather is warm and sunny with some high puffy clouds. Gary reports a possibility of feeling improvement, but the only hint of it is a brief glimpse of conversation from him during breakfast. I have fried eggs and toast. Their toast reminds me a lot of great toasting bread from home. The eggs are just the way I like them. And it is served on a fancy patterned plate that seems rather out of place here.

Gary returned to the tent after breakfast for a nap and I have plenty of time to write in my journal about some of my impressions… Cell phones very common. Along comes a porter in the middle of very desolate part of a trail with phone to his ear, talking away. Other times it appears to be texting as a person stares at the phone, clicking away while navigating the uneven terrain without a glance. In general, local people appear less social or engaging than I was led to believe. The greetings on the trail tend to come from passing tourists. Sherpas & porters barely give you a glance and almost never speak unless spoken to. Certainly no different than I would expect to find anyplace.

There is more electricity here than I anticipated. Plenty of small hydroelectric sources & where nothing else, they have solar. Plenty of it is buried, but occasionally an overhead line distorts the view. However, more often than not, local people disappear through a door into a dark space where much behind the scenes activity –in large part, kitchen– takes place. Many times these dark doorways, covered by a cloth drape that blows open in the wind, are access to their living space, right on the trail through the village.

Yak herding –or zopcuk, [a cross-breed more comfortable at elevations below Namche]– is a little hard to describe. Unable to decipher their shouts and calls. Mostly there seem to be grunts and whistling and the animal just plods along, picking its own path. When the beasts notice an opening and take a hard left into a courtyard there is much shouting and arm waving to get them back on trail. Occasionally there are swats on the rump to keep progress from coming to a complete halt. For the most part, they always have the right of way. Generally the animals seem to do what they have been bred to do, and just follow the one in front of him/her. Last night, Gary reminded me of when we saw a very young boy of 7 or 8, carrying something on his back that was large enough to keep him bent over, and herding 4 zopcuks in front of him. A bizarre sight, as it usually requires a larger person, and one who can stand upright to manage situations that arise. This little guy was shouting at them and picking up stones (easy reach from his bent-over position) and throwing them (not easy to do from a bent-over position) at the animal’s rumps to inspire them to keep moving.

Today, sitting by the trail in the middle of the day, I get the waves of activity of trekking groups coming and going. Some stop here for their lunch and I get to see the group dynamic and Sherpa-care from the outside and it gives added perspective to my group experience. Then come gaps with few travelers and I get to see the local people going about their activities. I feel lucky to be here, but very far from home.

I asked Lhakpa to take me down to the nearby river to explore and play among the rocks. It is a pleasure to have this extra time for more fully experiencing the place I am in, as opposed to needing to keep moving in order to accomplish the day’s destination. I balance rocks, collect stones, and wash my hands in the icy water. I just sit and look and listen to the roar of the river. I am immensely happy. My clothes are now completely tinted with the color of the dusty earth here.

I have a wonderful time visiting with Lhakpa in the afternoon. He is very talkative and I hear much about the details of farming potatoes, collecting firewood, guiding tourists, and even some local gossip about who drinks too much and has been prone to beating his wife. It is fun to see how some passersby will greet him casually and some more formally and how it sometimes breaks into conversation. Often, he shares what they talk about. Sometimes it is him, answering their queries about what he is doing there, other times it is them, providing him the latest news. Many times Lhakpa checked his cell phone, but kept finding it out of service. We were hoping to learn how our group was doing and to tell them where we ended up. I asked what we will do if he doesn’t get cell service. He revealed that in some of his conversations with people along the trail he has been sending messages up and checking for messages coming back down. Not as instant as the newfangled cell phones, but certainly more reliable, and obviously the way things have been done for ages before the cell phone.

Gary eventually joins us sitting out on the edge of the trail and after it cools a bit, we move in to the lodge where we have dinner. He musters the energy for conversation and I enjoy the opportunity to connect more deeply with him on heartfelt issues. He somewhat arbitrarily sets a goal of staying up until 8 p.m. and accomplishing that feat, we head to the tent for the night. They have relocated it now, after all the trekking groups moved on in the morning. Lhakpa is right there to guide us and make sure all is well. I have had another wonderful, precious day. …(Cough.) It continues to amaze me how much fun I can have even while suffering with this miserable cough.

Tuesday morning, 14 April, I reported a pretty rough night again with my breathing & coughing. Gary’s assessment was that he was feeling no improvement. We made quite a pair. Lhakpa eventually shared a story with me that was telling for how we appeared to others. At one of the lodges where we stayed he said that the woman who owned it told him she was uncomfortable having us overnight. She said that there was a Japanese man who was ill and came down to recover at her lodge. He disappeared for a time and they finally tracked him down in the toilet. He had died there. Now she was concerned it might happen again. Lhakpa said he assured her that neither of us would die there. I appreciated his confidence.

It’s funny, much of the route this day was back-tracking on trails we hiked a week ago, but most of it was completely new to me from this direction. There were some great views, including our last peek at Everest. I spotted a couple of eagles soaring on a thermal; not that rare to see, except that I was watching it from above as they played in the high mountain air below me. The weather was constantly changing, from clouds over the peaks to clear, from comfortable temperatures to too hot and then suddenly cool. By the time we reached Namche Bazaar it was sunny and beautiful and the colors seemed incredibly brilliant compared to the snowy white covering last time we were here.

We had a great lunch break at a restaurant in Namche, of which I didn’t get the name. Lhakpa picked a door that seemed entirely inconspicuous to me and we climbed stairs that looked like they could lead to apartments. Then we step into a place that is bright, colorful and looks like it has some history. Lhakpa says it is one of the original places in town. I order a Chapati with cheese just to pick something that I don’t recognize and it turns out to be just like cheese tortillas I love at home. Lhakpa orders pizza and shares. I’m very happy to have my appetite back.

The rest of the afternoon seems to drag and pushes Gary to his limits. Some of the highlights are the high bridges and the relatively light traffic on the trail. When we get to our destination in Monju, I think I hear Lhakpa curse (in English) and then notice the circus atmosphere and a lot of tents. A lot! It turns out there was another delay of a few day’s flights to Lukla and when the weather finally cleared, everybody seemed to arrive at once. There appeared to be five different trekking groups all trying to camp in the same place; the very place Lhakpa planned for us to use.

The porters had arrived long before and were told there was no room for us. They just waited for Lhakpa to arrive and tell them what to do next. He asked them if they talked with the woman who owned this lodge or the daughter. It was the daughter. Lhakpa went to the top and worked his charm. He came to me and asked me to come look at a space he had just negotiated with the mother for. I told him it was perfect. Since it was only one tent, she offered the small patch of grass that appeared to be their back yard, pretty much just enough space for the footprint of our tent.

Gary still was feeling pretty bad and Lhakpa came to me to see what I thought we should do next and whether we needed to get all the way down to Lukla as soon as possible. I pointed out that we had made Gary work really hard the last two days at a time when he was feeling at his worst. If we stay put for a couple of days and give him time to rest without needing to hike, it might give him a chance to feel some improvement. My spirit and energy are much better, but my lungs seem to have gotten worse from heavy breathing of the day’s efforts. I’ve got that rattle again on exhale and the cough has become annoyingly constant.

Tomorrow, I get to sleep in and then I have a whole day to kill. I will come to really appreciate my time in Monju.

I don’t actually remember it, but my journal indicates that I got a pretty good night’s sleep. Lhakpa came to check on us about 6 a.m. on Monday, 13 April. We packed our duffel bags for departure and head into the lodge where Gary orders their porridge for breakfast and I choose to snack on some granola cereal that I brought from home. I think Gary did a lot better job of eating than I did, despite our shared lack of appetite.

Then came a day of trekking that no one who felt ill would ever imagine being able to accomplish. The descent in the direction we were headed involved climbing up and over a high point that was above the elevation of Phortse, the place where Gary and I felt the necessity to break from the group. The fact that Gary was able to gut out the effort of this day is nothing short of heroic. It was strange for me to be having so much fun amidst so much misery. I was in a constant battle to watch where to place each step while also taking in the views of the snow-capped high peaks, wild goats, eagles, the ridges straight up overhead, and the clouds hanging right at eye level. Pictures just can’t do it justice, but I took some anyway. It was mind bogglingly beautiful.

At the high point of the day’s hike, it struck me that this would probably be the highest I would get from that point on and I had intended to leave a handkerchief of my mother’s to blow in the wind of the Himalayan Mountains. In what turned out to be an entirely unceremonious moment, which actually suits Mom’s nature in a lot of ways, I took advantage of a bend in the trail and tied up her kerchief in a branch of a bush looking out at, among others, the picturesque peak of Ama Dablam.

By about 1 p.m. we reach Kyang Juma and Lhakpa gives us an option of hiking another 3 hours down to Namche. Gary says he can’t do any more hiking and asks for the tent with the intention of taking a 1-hour nap. I didn’t hold him to that hour. Later, Lhakpa suggests food and I discover that I am getting my appetite back. I order egg fried rice from the lodge where we are staying and it tastes fantastic to me. We haven’t missed out on any amazing views this afternoon by stopping early, because the clouds have descended to just overhead and everything looks simply gray. I hoped that the rest of our group was getting clear skies at their elevation, especially when they get to the high point at Gokyo Ri, for the best views of Everest.

I start getting ready for sleep shortly after dark. I’ve had a wonderful day, despite the fact that my cough is still annoyingly with me.

Sunday, 12 April, turned out to be a milestone day for me. In the middle of the night of sleeping in Lhakpa’s lodge, I woke to find my nose stuffed up and as I lay, trying to fall back asleep breathing through my mouth, I realized I was short of breath even while resting. My cough was still persisting and then I became aware of a rattling in my lungs when I exhaled. I laughed to myself over having just reread a brochure from Mountain Travel on Acute Mountain Sickness before we went to sleep. I was reviewing the recommended procedures to help Gary make a decision related to how poorly he was feeling. Suddenly, the words all spoke to me.

“…extreme fatigue, and loss of appetite. Some people become breathless at rest… Never ascend with any symptoms of AMS !”

I’m afraid my mind paid a little too much attention to what I was reading to him. The recommended procedure when symptoms occur is to stay at that altitude until you feel better. A lot of thoughts went through my mind that night. We had already used one contingency day right away at the beginning of the trip because it took two days to get our flight to Lukla. Gary was wanting to descend to see if he would feel better. If I ignore my symptoms and go up, I risk needing helicopter evacuation. I calmed myself, made a decision to talk with Jim in the morning and was able to get back to sleep.

When I woke again at dawn, I discovered that smoke from the wood stove in the lodge was hanging pretty thick in the indoor air. I really needed to get outside. I also noticed, my shortness of breath did not go away. Gary stated, right away when he awoke, that he would not continue going up with the group. It helped me identify what I would do. As emotional a decision I was about to make, it was an easy one for the logical reasons I knew. When I checked with Jim, it was comforting to have him recognize signs and quickly agree with my plan to not go higher and thus accompany Gary in a descent. We would be splitting from the group this day and heading down in elevation as they continue going up. Separating from them was the hardest part of the whole decision.

We were assigned the younger Lhakpa as our Sherpa guide and two porters to carry gear. We hiked for a short amount of time down to a lodge at Phortse Thanga where they had a room for us but we both preferred the tent. As soon as it was up we both crashed and slept most of the day. Around 5 p.m. Lhakpa checked on us and we agreed to go in to the lodge for some soup. I forced down some tomato noodle. We will need to buy our food and water while separated from the group and I make a point to be careful about my hydration since I am eating so little and water is not as available as when the Sherpas were filling our bottles morning and night.

Even though my persistent cough was an ongoing annoyance, my breathing struggles relaxed and I was feeling well enough, especially after the long nap, to be able to completely enjoy myself again. Unfortunately, Gary wasn’t experiencing anything resembling improvement.

We would continue our descent the following day.