Everest Base Camp part II.
Everest Base Camp Trek - GOING DOWN. Return to Lukla in 3 days and pretty complicated "evacuation" from Lukla back to Kathmandu
…CONTINUED FROM THE PREVIOUS POST.
On our way down we played it tough, and made it from Gorak Shep to Lukla in 3 looooong days, most of the time hiking in fog, sometimes in snow and the last day in day-long light rain. Surprisingly my knees survived this whole thing without any problem. God bless the trekking poles.
At the end I made it from Lukla to Lukla in 11 days, while suggested schedule of Lonely Planet is 16 days. But this was mostly due to no problem with the altitude thanks to my previous acclimatization in Langtang.
And just to make the picture complete, during the trek, when we were not trekking, taking photographs or freezing in our sleeping bags, we were either eating (yak cheese, yummy, apple pies, yummy, fried noodle, please no more, fried rice, not again!, …) or playing “American joker”. My days were additionally filled with frequent visits of toilet, as I didn’t obey good advice of not eating meat above Namche because the meat is carried by porters and can be spoilt, ate few yak steaks and ended vomiting and shitting all the way to Everest Base Camp.
These were the days of our lives :-)
Unlike Langtang, EBC Trek is relatively crowded (but by far less crowded than I was afraid it would be, so this time no uplifting all-alone-in-Himalaya experience, but instead I was blessed with trekking-with-someone-to-talk-to experience :-) Sometimes I was blessed with little bit too much conversation, as Viktor and Hanka soon reached “harmony” level of marriage after 20 years, not to mention that Hanka, who works for firefighters, could with the strength of her voice double as fire siren in Bratislava :-) It was great experience and I’m very glad that they came over to this part of the world and I could be with them!
Thanks Viktor and Hanka (especially Hanka, as it was mostly here idea) for “forcing” me to come to EBC Trek!
By the way, I was deeply disappointed by how few people carried their own backpacks. I fully understand that those few people over 50 or 60 had their bags carried, it’s anyway achievement that they made it here, but all those young and strong people who hired their personal slaves to carry their stuff, that was disappointing to see. Where’s the trekker’s proud? We, who loaded our own backs were like US Marine Corps: “The few, the proud, the Marines”, ehm I mean The Real Trekkers :-)
When we were having a dinner in a guesthouse in Namche, on our way down, two Americans sat next to us and they asked were we had been and how we liked it, so we asked where they were going and they said that they were going first to EBC, so we gave them some very knowledgeable advice about the trek and then they said that from EBC they wanted to continue “as far as we can”, upon which I asked them if they had equipment for trekking on a glacier and they said “Yes” and soon it turned out that these guys were going to the summit of Mt. Everest! They were joining American expedition which was already present in the Base Camp. Heh, in Namche someone just sits next to you and they turn out to be potential Everest summiteers. Nice. It’s good that we gave them our knowledgeable advice about the trek, without us they surely couldn’t make it :-)
Since I had a spare muesli bar (Jirka brought it from Slovakia and gave it to me when I left), which I was originally saving for Cho La Pass and since muesli bars are rarity here, you can only by Mars and Snickers here, I gave this muesli bar to them. As I told them, it’s not every day that I can SPONSOR Mt. Everest expedition :-) Well, in reality Jirka sponsored the expedition. I wish Dave and Craig al the best, they were very sympathetic and easygoing guys!
And now a very special Everest bonus:
In Pheriche there was a memorial for all those who died on Mt. Everest. I scanned the table with names and citizenship of the unfortunate climbers and after finding 5 Slovakians I already got the clue, which later proved to be right by calculating precise statistics:
SLOVAKIA HAS HIGHEST MT. EVEREST DEATH TOLL PER CAPITA.
If not counting Nepali and Indian sherpas, who obviously dominate this sad chart, in absolute terms we occupy 11-12th place (absolute fatality leaders are British, Americans, Japanese and South Koreans), together with Australia, which is quite “impressive” for such a small country as Slovakia, but in relative terms, with 5 deaths with just 5 million people, we are world’s number one in dying on Everest with 1 death per 1 million citizens. Second place goes to New Zealand with same population as Slovakia and 3 deaths.
I guess that this “success” of Slovakia is caused by the fact that we do have mountains, so there is sufficient number of people who get the idea of climbing Mt. Everest, but our mountains peaking at 2500m are obviously no match for the Himalaya and so quite a few overestimated their skills and experience.
For a moment we thought that if we would continue to go further from EBC we would surely die within 2 days and it might count as Everest attempt and thus we would push Slovakia’s fatalities to 8 out of 5 million citizens, making Slovakia impossible to beat for many years to come, but finally we gave up the idea of this fast road to glory.
Since we originally planned that the hike would take longer and we would go via Cho La Pass and Gokyo sideway we ended up in Lukla 5 days earlier than what we thought before the trek, and so we had to change our tickets to Kathmandu. This is nothing unusual, almost everybody changes their tickets because it’s always difficult to predict when you come back. We managed to change our tickets from 26-Apr to 21-Apr, but due to this change we were not signed up for the early morning flight when the weather is best. As on the day when we arrived back to Lukla was raining the whole day and the fog was very thick we were in serious doubts that we would fly the next day as scheduled. When we woke up the sound of the airplanes landing and taking off turned us into optimism, we got the airport, checked our luggage, got the “boarding ticket” and went to the “departure hall”, i.e. small room at around 8:00am. Check the photos to see how precisely formal and complete boarding tickets we got. Also the security process was cool and super secure:
Officer: “Do you have scissors or matches?”
Me: “No”
Officer: “OK, go”
The baggage we checked-in was also controlled. In traditional Nepalese way: the security officer open the backpack, touched the first thing that he saw, and then decided that the scanning was complete and gave it up, so luckily we did not have to unpack and repack our bags.
