

H gets comfy in BKK while we wait for the 6pm Royal Nepali Airways bound for Kathmandu.

On the trail to Phakding.




Mt Everest as seen on our way to Pangboche.
Thamel district, Kathmandu at night.
Arrival. My friend H and I were the last to arrive in Kathmandu at 11 pm on April 18. Pinoy summiteer Leo Oracion met us at the Kathmandu airport together with our Nepali travel agent, Henry Pariyar. We drove to the Sherpa guesthouse on Thamel where we met veteran mountaineer Fred Jamili from Bacolod who welcomed us warmly. The following night, we repacked out stuff and made sure that we would only carry the essentials: cold weather clothes, medicine, trail food, trekking poles ( which I had never used before ),one pair of trekking clothes, and our sleepwear. We already knew it would take 16 days for us to go up to the Everest Base Camp and then back down to Lukla, where we would begin and end our trek.

Dalbat, the staple Nepali food.
Next day,we boarded a small plane for Lukla , a trip that took 45 minutes. We traveled with a big group of Americans and their guide, Marie. We flew above the Kathmandu valley , past low lying villages. In Lukla, the assembled porters and guides looked at our all-women group with curiosity. They all stood at attention outside the airport gates—most of them looking for work. We proceeded to the nearest guesthouse with our guide Ang Dawa , who we immediately called TL or team leader. A member of the Rai people, TL had Mongol features and fair skin. He had also previously guided the media crew of Abner Mercado last year who had covered the first ascent of Leo Oracion and Pastor Emata.

Ang Dawa or TL with Britney.
Lukla to Phakding (2610 m). This was a 3-hour trek through mountain trails that followed the Dudh Koshi (“like milk” in Nepali ) river. We walked past stone houses, traversed long footbridges made of steel , and were introduced to the hardy Jopke animals that carried the baggage of many trekkers. The Jopke are related to the more popular Yaks. We slept at Sunrise Lodge, a teahouse where the bed was soft. Our meal that night was fried mixed vegetable rice- the first of many such meals.

Chilean climbers we met at Namche Bazar.
Phakding to Namche Bazar (3440 m). We got up at 6am after a good rest and were served our meal at 7am.The night before, we had already placed our order for breakfast since it usually takes at least an hour for guests’ meals to be prepared. It would be a pattern we would follow throughout the time we were in the Khumbu region.

Apa Sherpa of Nepal summited Everest 17 times.
The trail to Namche was pleasant and reminded me of Sagada, Ugu and Pulag. The pinetrees and the clean crisp air were a welcome change from the dust and grime of Kathmandu. In Namche, the view of Thamserku was an awesome scenery. At last, a Himalayan mountain covered with snow! What did we girls from a tropical country know of mountains like Thamserku? Yes, we were finally in the Himalayas!

French grunge climbers, Gorak shep.
That night, I had a slight headache. Another one in our group, J ,experienced loss of appetite. We realized from our readings on altitude sickness that we were now being introduced to AMS or altitude mountain sickness. We needed to get as much liquids into our system as well as be able to breathe deeply. J told me that at the altitude we were at, we were probably getting only 70% of oxygen than was normal.

H in her TNF cocoon gear. Lobuche
Next day, we slept till 7am and at breakfast, attacked our pancakes with enthusiasm. We then started trekking to the higher elevation overlooking Namche. We needed to further acclimatize and so we slept another night at Namche. We went as far as the Everest View Hotel on top of the mountain which gave a good glimpse of Everest on a clear day. Alas, it was a cloudy day when we reached the hotel which was built by the Japanese. Tea was definitely expensive at that elevation. Next, we went down to the Khum Jung valley and saw the Hillary School.
Shomare. Next morning, the slight throbbing in my head was still there but I started drinking my supply of“tatopani” (Nepali for hot water) and I soon felt better as we started our trek up to Shomare. TL decided we should sleep in Shomare. During breakfast,I was about to reach for a Maple syrup bottle on top of the table across us when J and the rest of my group said it wasn’t a supply from the teahouse. We then saw a group of Americans coming in to the teahouse. They had yellow tents outside and were just coming in for their meal. They had chosen a fully blown “safari style” way of doing the Everest base Camp trek. We saw that they had hot water too for washing their hands in the morning. They had a Nepali cook and other staff who were busy preparing for the group’s meal. Pwede pala ang ganun? Yes, if you had the budget.
Again, I had a slight headache in Shomare. And at the next table,I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation of the American group at the next table—some who were experiencing the signs of AMS had already been drinking their anti-AMS medicine, Diamox. We decided to hold off and see how far our bodies could go. Later, J would pop half a Diamox at the Lobuche lodge when she could no longer eat her meals. During the rest of the trek, three of us decided not to drink our Diamox tablets.

Group gets down from EBC to Gorak Shep and warm food.
Tengboche (3860 m) . This part of the trek to EBC was hard because it was cold, and we were more exhausted because of the higher altitude. We slept in stall-like rooms that were freezing. Without our borrowed goosedown sleeping bags, we would have frozen to death, I think. In the dining room of the Tengboche lodge, many of the guests huddled close to the stove. A CD of the Direstraits was playing again and again in the background. In the morning, we were excited to see a glimpse of Everest ( Sagarmatha as the Nepalis call it), the beautiful Ama Dablam,Tawche, Lhotse, and Nuptse. These Himalayan mountains more than made up for yesterday’s difficulty during the trek.
The 400-year old Tengboche Monastery was a charming presence on that mountain and the monk who was in charge welcomed us with enthusiasm. Inside the monastery were beautiful paintings and a large Buddha.
We then took a trail lined with lavender flowers while we looked down on the Dudh Koshi river. We traversed a steel bridge with the mighty Ama Dablam looming large on our right. Prayer flags fluttered in the breeze as we looked at the mountain which most of us had only read about. A Nepali guide who was at the Namche museum (which is a must for all interested in Himalayan culture) mentioned to his group that Ama Dablam was the most technical mountain to climb in the Himalayan range. During that entire trip, we met only one couple that was going to climb Ama Dablam with their Nepali guide.The rest of the trekking groups were bound for the Everest base camp.
Dingboche (4410m). We stayed at the Imza Valley lodge where we met our Sherpa cook and the Sherpa couple who owned the lodge. They seemed curious about us Filipino girls. They served our food in no time and came out and asked if it was to our liking. Didi (Nepali for older sister), one of the owners had been to the Everest base camp several times as a porter. She was very friendly to us. Next morning, I caught her outside drinking black tea. I took her portrait with the big Tawche mountain behind her.
Thokla (4620m). At 8:30 the next day, we left for Thokla despite the strong winds. Ama Dablam was our constant view even as it played hide and seek with the clouds. The sun came out but the wind was vicious on our skin. I imagined the harshness of winter and could only think how much more barren the land around Thokla would be during that season. It would most likely be unbearable. As we entered the Thokla teahouse, we felt the cold lessen because of the lit stove in the middle of the dining room. I remembered the bar in the Tolkien movie Lord of the Rings where many characters were lounging about in various costumes. Inside, a serious-looking mountaineer arranged his backpack laden with an iceaxe and ropes on the floor. That night, we stayed up a bit later than usual at the dining room while he talked about being a mountain guide on Tibet and on Everest. Turned out that he was a British military man who did guiding and also sold oxygen supplies to mountaineers. A Tibetan with his torquoise earrings tied up his sack of goods that could possibly contain China-made Nikes,TNF and Mountain Hardwear jackets and other goods. Three Americans working in an NGO in Chiang Mai, Thailand were also huddled close to the stove. A 65-year old German professor and two young Israeli backpackers were talking about their itinerary. A goodlooking Sherpa guide who spoke with a British accent came to our table and said hello. He asked us where we were from. We were the only Filipino guests. It’s a question we were always asked on the trail. And we would usually get surprised looks. It seems few Filipinos had ever come to the trails of Everest. Leo Oracion and Pastor Emata’s Expedition team in 2006 may have started a tradition of adventurous Filipinos coming to trek Nepal.

Inside the Pangboche Teahouse.
We also trekked through the Thokla Pass—where various memorials for those climbers who had died on Everest were erected by those who wanted to remember them. I photographed the memorial of Scott Fischer, an American climber who died as he came down from the summit in 1996.That expedition was a controversial one,I think. There were also climbers from Korea, Japan, and the memorial of Baba Sherpa, a famous Sherpa climber who had died after summiting for the 11th time. He fell down a crevasse
Lobuche (4910m). Going to Lobuche was another hardship due to the higher altitude. Breathing was more difficult at night and that made it also harder to sleep. H and I shared a room in all the teahouses. As roommates, it was good to have a buddy for when we needed to go to the bathroom each night. But it was in Lobuche where we met a tall Welsh novelist,Terence Davies who mistook us for the Pinay Expedition team. He said that Herbert Wolf, a German high altitude climber was waiting for us so he could give us our high-alti certificates. We said we were not the Pinay team. He then suggested we play a game on Herbert and so we trekked in the snow to the pricier Ecolodge (USD12/night) nearby. When we entered their roomy dining room, Everest summiter American climber Lily Leonard and German climber Herbert Wolf were drinking tea by a window that had Nuptse in the background. Herbert had already met Carina, Noelle and Janet so he knew we were not the team. We all laughed and had our pictures taken with the famous climbers. The rest of the people in the room just looked at us and maybe wondered about how we suddenly had access to these celebrity climbers.
Gorak Shep (5140m.) We arrived in Snowland Lodge from Lobuche after four grueling hours of trekking through harsh land. It was very cold and we were wearing all we had brought with us-fleece and goosedown jackets. Last night in Lobuche,I found it hard to breathe again as I listened to the howling wind outside. In the morning,it felt good to taste Filipino food for breakfast –bagoong and rice! Three Welsh guys next to our table eyed our food in wonder. But no one complained of the smell.Thank God.

Pinoys have a small reunion,Pangboche.
The trek to Gorak Shep was not easy for me. I had to stop every now and then to breath deeply. Still, I didn’t think about drinking any diamox even after I felt a little nauseous. After a while, I felt better especially after doing some deep breathing. I was also hungry after only a couple of hours. We kept asking our Nepali porters, if we were near our lodge yet. Finally, when we saw a few buildings in the middle of nowhere, we knew it was Gorak Shep—which I later called Gorak Shit, we felt elated. Our lodge was at the valley just below Kala Patthar-where they said we would get our best view of Everest. But it was cold and we were tired so we didn’t look around anymore. We ordered teaand sat down and tried to absorb our surroundings. The huge dining room later accommodated two “safari style” teams –one German and one American. The rest were the Welsh and Russian teams and our group. Our rooms were at the second floor and it was bigger than any of the rooms we had in the various lodges before.
It was still hard to breathe that night but we managed to sleep a little. The next day was going to be our trip to the Everest base camp.We also met the famous Sherpa mountaineers Apa Sherpa and Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa at our Gorak Shep lodge.They had put together an all-Sherpa team that would summit Everest.

Super Sherpas Apa and Lakpa Sherpa,the girls, Jaya,Chondra and TL, Gorak Shep.
Apa Sherpa was summiting it for the 17th time and Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa was doing it for the 12th time. (Update: Apa Sherpa successfully climbed Everest for the 17th time in 2007 ) The all-Sherpa climbing team’s aim was to highlight the contribution of Sherpas in high altitude mountaineering and to promote Nepal and its people. We heard later, that they did summit successfully on the morning of May 16. Their recent feat was also documented and will later be part of a film on the Sherpa culture.

C enjoys some ice company at the base camp.
Everest base camp (5364m).This was the hardest section of the entire climb for me. Breathing was a difficult task. My head throbbed. The boulders,loose stones and soil leading to the base camp of Everest were not easy to traverse. The wind stinging our faces was equally harsh like the land it was traveling through. We arrived at the base camp after 4 hours and went straight inside the popular Base Camp (BC) bakery, We had heard about their excellent apple pie and hot chocolate from previous foreign climbers staying at our Gorak Shep lodge. We just sat and soaked in the warmth of the bakery with its bread smells. After befriending the Sherpa baker, we stepped out and took pictures of our group while we blew on our “torotot” while a Nepali guide watching us from the sidelights was asked to hold the Philippine flag up for all the world to see. There were tents everywhere and flags of various nations were flying high.There were 44 expeditions that were going on at that time. Previous to that, while still at Gorak Shep, we heard that 2 Sherpas had died in Camps 1 and 2. There was a lot of garbage too at the base camp. It wasn’t what I had imagined the Everest base camp to be but I vaguely recall reading the National Geographic issue that focused on the Everest garbage. At Shomare earlier, we met a Nepali man whose work is to bring down garbage from the base camp. He is paid by the government to do the task.

We asked the Nepalis at the base camp to join our Pinoy party!
We left the base camp at 3 in the afternoon as the wind blew hard again and the clouds turned grey.The trek back was not any easier except that we knew we would be going to get a warm meal and that was a great incentive to get down fast. We reached Gorak Shep as the light went out that day. I was the last to enter the lodge. I felt totally wasted as I sat and saw the blur of faces in front of me. Climber friends we had made at the lodge waved and said hello but I didn’t see or hear them. I went up slowly to our room and ate a bar of candy. It made me feel better and then I went to sleep. I woke up later and had a bowl of soup.
Kala Patthar (5545m.)This was the best day of all. We trekked up to the mountain of black stones (which is what Kala Patthar means in Nepali) in three hours. We reached the top and saw that small white cloud over Everest. There was Lhotse,Nuptse, Ama Dablam,Pumori,Thamserku and all the other Himalayan mountains which names we kept forgetting. We just sat and surveyed the stunning beauty of the famous area. We were the only folks up there when we espied a trekker who was climbing to our spot. We waited and said hello. We saw him earlier sketching the mountains at a lower part of Kala Patthar. An American,he asked us to take a picture of his t-shirt which said Race for The Cure. His mother had died fifteen years ago from breast cancer and he was dedicating the climb to her.

We all sat quietly again and just felt the cold wind touch our faces while the sun just blessed us.It was a perfect day.

Kala Pattar
Meeting Pinoys on the trail down to Namche Bazaar. We left Gorak Shep after 3 nights at below zero degree temperatures. It was 7am when we trekked down and bid goodbye to the valley. Climbers were already trekking up to Kala Patthar at that hour.
We got down to Lobuche , next was Thokla and then we decided to take Pheriche since we had not used that route before. This time,instead of Dingboche, we made sure to have lunch in Pheriche, where we heard that a doctor with the Himalayan Rescue lectures on altitude sickness. We didn’t stay around for the lecture but hurried on down to our destination for the day – Pangboche. After passing thru Tengboche,our TL decided to ask around if Leo Oracion and the rest of his Filipino crew were there in one of the guesthouses. We stayed at the Tengboche Monastery entrance and waited. There was no Filipino team anywhere, according to TL. We left Tengboche and walked again for another hour and a half and then as we got down to Phortse Tenga, we saw the smiling faces of Fred Jamili and other Filipino climbers. Fred was an Ilongo veteran climber from Bacolod well known in the Philippine mountaineering community. Leo was inside the teahouse enjoying the traditional Nepali dalbat meal. Fred asked us to stay and have lunch with the group which turned out to be a happy occasion for all. There were also two other Filipino climbers from UP Baguio who had decided to trek up to the Everest base camp without porters or a guide. Filipino was loudly spoken as though we were back in a Manila café or in a QC suburb. Then Fred stood up and said he would go ahead and meet the rest of his group up in Tengboche. Leo and the rest of the Nepali porters and Nepali guide Buddyman followed soon after we took group pictures. We also got ready to trek down to our lodge in Pangboche. That was a happy lunch.
Going to Lukla. Going down to Namche was easier for us the next day. After 2.5 hours, we reached Phakding where we spent one night. Next was to Lukla and a nice dinner at the Sherpa Lodge where we began our trek sixteen days ago. That night, we had a farewell and thank you party for our 2 porters Jaya and Shondra and TL Ang Dawa at a German bakery next to our lodge. We drank hot chocolate and ate pastries. This was a real treat for all. The foreign friends we met along the trail were also there.

Goodbye Lukla. Off to Kathmandu.
The next day, we were disappointed to be the last to leave Lukla via a small Yeti Airlines plane because we were up so early ! We reached Kathmandu at lunchtime and immediately headed out to eat.

H and J with Amadablam guide Guru, Gorak Shep.
It was a heady experience, one not easy to forget in our lifetime. We had come so far and saw a place we had only dreamed of and read in books about. It was also a big cultural experience for us –seeing the Sherpa villages,meeting our Rai porters, and getting acquainted with a Chettri guide and someone from the Guru village, meeting the jopkes and the yaks on the trail, seeing the vastness of the Himalayas. Yes,we saw the sights that every tourist is shown in Nepal or what regular travelers may have read or seen in their Lonely Planet books. I went back to Kathmandu and began another series of explorations into the non-tourist side of my Nepal trip. I then realized later that Nepal is not just about Himalayan mountains. It is easy to be blinded by the beauty of the snow mountains. But that is for another essay.

High altitude climbers meet Pinay team.
On May 16, while I sat reading a book as I waited for my flight bound for Bangkok at the Kathmandu airport, H sent me a text message from Bangkok saying Noelle,Janet and Carina had reached the summit. It was news that I also got from our contacts in Kathmandu. I sighed and realized how far the girls had come. Even if I had not seen them in Nepal, I was happy for them and never once doubted their ability to get on that summit.
I left Kathmandu thinking about eating street food in Bangkok.Summer was over.