Thither & Yon

Finishing an adventure is so much less fun than starting one. All the things that motivated you through the hard parts are behind you, you’re tired from all those hard parts, and you still have three days of hiking to finish.

I knew that with a three-day hike-out, I’d be likely to get a little gloomy at the end of this adventure, so I’d intentionally set myself the task of being extra aware of my beautiful surroundings, of the fascinating people, and of how my body now felt in this land of bountiful oxygen. These last three days could still be so pleasant and full of wonder.

But I woke up in Thame with a cough.

The Khumbu Cough is a well-known and much-despised phenomenon in these areas, where trekkers go to the high, dry, cold places and that high, dry, cold air gets into their lungs and irritates a cough out of them.

We’d joked about it when we’d been, y’know, on the Khumbu Glacier, or looking at the Khumbu Glacier, or, y’know, in any kind of elevations having to do with the Khumbu Glacier. Got a little tickle? Haha, Khumbu cough. Cleared your throat one too many times in the past two minutes? Haha, Khumbu cough.

But there were trees growing in Thame. There was so much oxygen here, you could practically swim in it. The tickle that had moved into the deep parts of my lungs was obviously not the Khumbu cough. I’d somehow caught a cold. Maybe from a yak?

I grumbled, fished out the three cough drops I keep in my first aid kit, loaded them into my hip pocket, and we set off for Namche.

The sun was out and the morning was beautiful as we left Thame. We could see peaks we’d never seen before, since it had been cloudy the night before, and cloudy when we’d come through this area going the other way.

I tried to admire them. I really tried. But the trail between Thame and Namche is “Nepal flat,” an up-down-up-down trail that netted us a total loss of about 800 feet.

I was swimming in oxygen. My 18,000-feet-trained lungs should basically have been supercharged, but here I was, gasping my way up tiny little hills at 12,000 feet. It was very nearly as much effort as uphill had been around 17,000 feet and I felt so pathetic.

Surya kept getting way ahead of us. (Dustin could have too, but he stops to take lots of photos, which is always helpful to my pace.) I finally said, as we drew up to where Surya was resting and I was feeling particularly pitiful, “I think I’m a little bit sick.”

There was nothing to do about it except what we were already doing, of course: keep going down. Not even a donkey would take enough pity on me to help me out at this point.

“About three hours,” Surya had said, as we departed Thame. I’d decided to assume this meant a 7.5-mile hike, based on experiences from the previous day and the fact that about 90% of all our hiking days have been 7.5 miles.

Namche came into view at 6 miles exactly, and I was so glad to see it. There have been very few days on this trek where I have obsessively tracked the passage of distance or elevation (normally a bad habit of mine), but today was an exception. I kept checking my watch. Only a quarter mile passed? Surely that last hill had been bigger than that.

I really like Namche. It is such an improbable town, to be as big and busy as it is, so very far from any kind of motorized transportation. And to be as vertical as it is!

After weeks in the high mountains, it also felt like coming back to civilization. I still had to bring my own toilet paper to the bathroom, but the toilet had an actual flush rather than a pitcher of water meant to be poured in after use. Hotels had frivolous decorations hanging on the walls and fresh fruit for sale. Friendly cows wandered loose in the streets. Yak hats and cough drops for sale on every corner. So many comforts!

We settled into our super plush hotel (“NO SHOES!!!” read signs on the outsides of all the bedroom doors, meant to protect the actual carpets inside the rooms), then headed out to buy more cough drops and see what was interesting.

After interviewing the offerings (culinary and film) at four different bars, we found ourselves back at the Liquid Bar with another plate of masala peanuts and the 2015 movie Everest, based on the events of the 1996 disaster also written about in(but not based on) Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. The first twenty minutes of the movie showed beautiful footage of a bunch of the places we’ve just been, which was very cool to see.

I didn’t officially decide it was the Khumbu cough until 24 hours had passed and absolutely no other symptoms had materialized. I had no head congestion or inexplicable aches. I didn’t feel unwell, except when puffing up bunny slopes made me feel grouchy at the world in general.

“Cough drops,” Surya prescribed after two days of keeping down with my dumb new hiking pace. “And no more milk tea. No more hot chocolate. Lemon ginger honey, huh? Good for the throat.”

“Lemon ginger honey” is a hot drink that seems to be made from the Nepali equivalent of Country Time lemonade, honey, and big chunks of fresh-chopped ginger. Definitely a solid throat remedy.

“I’ll replace the milk tea,” I muttered, “but don’t go messing with my hot chocolate.” I’ve had a mug of hot chocolate every night after dinner on this trek. There is nothing more comforting to my tired body and mind.

The hike from Namche to Phakding the next morning was quite and beautiful, draped with prayer flags and sprinkled with locals doing all the things that need doing way up in the mountains.

“I expected to see more hikers by now,” I noted after crossing a long bridge that had required absolutely no nervous side-stepping to pass anyone going the other way.

“The airport is closed again, since yesterday,” Surya said. No new hikers had been arriving to fill this part of the trail.

We glanced uneasily down the mountains, where – sure enough – clouds gathered in the lower elevations. Having the trail to ourselves was spectacular, but when we got to Lukla, I really wanted to be able to leave.

The trail to Phakding hosts the last glimpse of Everest. It had been too cloudy to see coming the other direction, but the weather in the high elevations was perfect today, and I couldn’t help lingering.

Like the trail, the Hillary bridge was empty. Somehow, this felt vaguely shocking, like something ominous was wrong.

As we got closer to Phakding, though, we started to hear the helicopters. The weather was just good enough that stranded hikers with money to spare could do what had to be done to get their treks back on track.

We settled into the deserted dining room of our guest house. I ordered an entire pot of lemon ginger honey and began to sip my way through it with grim determination while we pulled up a weather report.

“The weather is supposed to be good all day tomorrow,” Dustin said, “and probably in the morning on Tuesday, but after that it clouds up again.”

Tuesday was our scheduled fly-out day.

“Can we leave here early tomorrow and try to catch an afternoon flight?” we asked Surya.

He shrugged in his easygoing way. “Why not?”

At dinner time, all those helicopter-borne souls who had landed in Lukla that afternoon began arriving. The dining room got louder and louder as people congratulated each other on nabbing helicopters and completing their first five-mile hikes. I finished my non-optional hot chocolate a little more quickly than usual and left in favor of my chillier but quieter room.

If we got stuck in Lukla for a few days, I reflected, that was not such a bad price to pay for all the peaceful days we’d gotten to have while thousands of other would-be hikers had waited, gnashing their teeth, for flights to Lukla.

We got on the trail by 7 the next morning.

“By myself?” Surya said. “I do this trail in 2.5 hours. But with your…” he spun his fingers in the direction of my cough. “Three and a half? Maybe four hours.”

I sighed and pulled on my pack, patting my pockets to make sure my cough drops were handy. I knew today’s hike was only five miles, but I also knew it would be a lot more up than down.

Tally-ho!

“Bistari, bistari!” Surya scolded me a little later as I thumped determinedly down a slope.

“My legs are fine!” I protested. “The problem is going up.” Figured I might as well try to make up some time on the downhill bits.

And just like that, we were in Lukla and it wasn’t even 11:00 yet. Take that, stupid lungs.

We plopped our bags down on the patio of a guest house and ordered more lemon ginger honeys.

“Your rooms aren’t ready yet,” Surya shouted over the roar of a plane that was landing right behind us.

Dustin and I looked at the plane and then anxiously at the sky. It was more overcast than expected, but planes had been landing like clockwork.

“What about flying out today? Is there any chance?” we asked. As far as I could tell, flights to and from Lukla worked more like buses than planes. You get a ticket and get in line for the next available vehicle.

“I’ll check, I’ll check,” Surya assured us. “But…” he waggled his hand and glanced at the sky, then handed us lunch menus. I interpreted this to mean “don’t get your hopes up.”

We ordered lunch and settled back to watch the planes come and go.

Another guide we’d met along the trail sat down and chatted with us about how our trek had been. The guides all have this magnificent way of making a person feel like they’ve really accomplished something great by doing these treks, and this guide was laying it on pleasingly thick.

“And how amazing that you get to fly back to Kathmandu today!” he concluded. “That is so, so lucky.”

“I’m sorry, we get to what?”

“Surya said. He was talking to the airline. There’s a flight going today to Kathmandu.”

“What? How?” This didn’t make sense. Flights don’t go from Lukla to Kathmandu after October 1. Instead, you have to fly from Lukla to Ramechhap and then take a bus for 6 hours back to Kathmandu. Also, why were we hearing this from another guide? Where was Surya?

“Let’s go!” Surya said, appearing on cue. “Get your bags!”

“What? Now? Okay. No lunch?” but Surya already had our yellow duffles and we were tripping over chairs trying to grab our packs and follow him out. We were up around the runway into the teeny weenie terminal in less than five minutes, without even getting a chance to tell Parash goodbye-and-holy-crap-we-couldn’t-have-done-it-without-you-THANK-YOU. The security agents lightly rummaged our bags to make sure we weren’t smuggling out any flora or fauna (thankfully, they don’t care about rocks), and ten minutes after we hadn’t quite finished our lemon ginger honeys, we were getting into a plane.

“We are so lucky,” Surya kept saying. The plane we climbed into wasn’t even full. I still couldn’t quite figure out how we could possibly be flying to Kathmandu, but you know what they say about looking gift yaks in the mouth. (Our best guess from later information is that the spare pilot who was flying as a passenger on our flight had to get to Kathmandu, and we just happened to be the lucky schmucks who asked at exactly the right moment to get to join him.)

And then we were airborne in a plane that wasn’t flying even as high as we’d been hiking, four days ago. All the peaks I could see out my window, between the scattered clouds, glowed with a new significance, something personal, like they belonged to me a little more now than they did before.

Back to reality, then. Back to a world that doesn’t move bistari bistari, and where you don’t put everything on hold for the passage of a yak train. Back to a world where no one casually asks how high you hiked this week, or whether you got to see Mount Everest yesterday. Back to real choices about dinner and the expectation that you’ll actually reply to emails.

Back, too, to people and kitties I miss, and the final days of my favorite month of the year.