Flights to Lukla, Nepal

All aboard! The planes flying into the village of Lukla, the popular starting point for the fourteen day trek to Mt Everests' base camp, are in great numbers today! They typically begin their flight pattern around 9a. It took me 29 hours to reach Cchulemu! The first 21 hours in a jeep, stuffed full of Sherpa travelers, on a dirt road torn and scared from the recent monsoons. Then an eight hour hike through the thick jungle and I am still a two days walk from the airstrip!  The trekkers above my head left Kathmandu about a half hour ago.

High trekking season has begun in earnest! Today the first plane disrupted tea, before eight in the morning. As I sit in the sun, above the courtyard I see the planes, in secession, only a few minutes apart. They come from behind me, zoom right over the village, over the river canyon and pop up just in time to make it over the hill above the next hill. There is a brief break in the movement north, then the train begins in the other direction, taking weary trekkers back to city life in Kathmandu.

A fast moving, red helicopter joins their ranks. Up high on the mountain someone is injured or sick. Unfortunately, I see the red heli's everyday!  

I am leaving Cchulemu for Lukla myself in a few days, to trek to Everest base camp. I tell myself it just a trek, it's only two weeks and there is a hospital at 15,000 feet in the village of Tongbuche.  

But the reality is that the Khumbu, the collective mountains and villages just below Mt Everest, is very remote, extremely rugged, and no one can fully control how their body will respond to the high altitude. You can physically train, eat healthy, approach slowly, get enough sleep and yet still be uneventfully forced back down the mountain by nausea and intense headaches. Maybe your karma isn't clean?  Is it because your merit is low? Did you get the proper blessing from the Lama before you headed out? Om mani padme hum!  

There is a large reliance on religion and superstition here in the Khumbu and it seems justifiable. Sherpa's, fit as any Ironman, who have summited Everest on a number of occasions suddenly perish from Acute High Altitude Sickness, a condition where fluids accumulate in the lungs (pulmonary edema) or head (cerebral edema).  Or someone slips and disappears forever, off the side of the mountain after breaking a world record and spending 21 hours without oxygen, at 29,000 feet. Or while innocently setting ropes for foreign clients in the middle of the night, sixteen Sherpa mountaineers get swept away by thousands of pounds of snow and ice. Its a place filled with the dangourously unexpected. 

The Sherpa people that I have met talk solemnly about the casualties they have witnessed, near misses they have encountered, and friends they have lost. They also tell me that there is some friendly competition in the mountains. "I can set the ropes faster than you! I can carry four tourists packs up to camp! I made it to Camp 2 first!" Banter and joking, rightfully have there place in times of fear and stress and Sherpa people have a great sense of humor! 

We come to hike in the mountains because we are in love with them, and just as with all kinds of love, it is the way the object of our affection makes us feel that keeps us coming back for more.  Although we can get hurt, the good times makes it all worth while.

Ah, I hear the blades of yet another heli! I look up into the clear blue skies above the Himalaya. The chopper is moving slowly. It is white! Just tourists going sight-seeing! They are making there way up to the Khumbu for their love of the mountains and the experience of a lifetime!