Life of Wry

Trip Day #20, Trek Day #14

Our last day in the high country started with tea brought to our room by both Pradip and Homnath. Nice touch, guys, much appreciated.  We packed our duffles for the last time and Pemba, Masaman and Rinche collected them and walked them over to the airport, a very short walk. And with that, their obligation to our five-person, most thankful group was complete. Many sadnesses this day.

After finishing out tea, we made our way up to the dining room (an evil flight of stairs if I ever saw one). Drank more tea and ate some mediocre cinnamon rolls. We got a final gander at the photos of Dian Feinstein [sic] and Bill Clinton hanging in the hall then headed to the Tenzing Hillary Airport, where we joined what looked like maybe a hundred other hopeful travelers.  You just never know with this crazy Himalayan weather… would we fly out or not?

We sat, wandered and waited with fingers crossed. Sort of… the prospect of hanging for another day in Lukla didn’t bother me at all. The idea of hiking out of these mountains–like some actually do–did, on the other hand, distress me greatly!

We ate lots of Pringles and gummies (not sure why) and watched planes come and go, and come and go, and come and go. It was thoroughly fascinating to watch the process. Each plane would drop off 20 folks (mostly trekkers), load 20 more on, and head out, without turning off the engine. Here’s a load of trekker duffles sitting on the runway, awaiting loading:

As I’m sure I mentioned in the Trek Day #1 post, the runway, the setting, and the altitude all make for one big adrenaline rush. Here is one plane taking off:

And, yeah, that’s about a 3000′ drop just off the end of that (very short) runway.

Many planes full of trekkers left Lukla before us, the source of consternation for some in our group, but eventually, after three hours, our turn came and off we went.  As the hours had worn on, it had gotten increasingly cloudy. We think we were the last flight of the day.

The flight out of the Himalayas was less thrilling than the flight into the Himalayas, for obvious reasons. It was hard not to think back on what was going through my mind two weeks prior, what I didn’t know then about what was to come, the excitement, anxiety… and what I now knew.  And for the millionth time, the thought that went through my head was, Wow, we did it. Again, I reflected on the long list of potential snafus. It so could have gone either way on any number of fronts. But nothing bad happened.

More significant, though, were the positives.. the challenges, the accomplishments, the experiences, the mountains, their scale, the views, the company, the introduction to a culture, Buddhism and a way of life I knew little about…  those will fill me up for years to come, a lifetime. 

Just wow. That’s what was going through my head.

Our flight into Kathmandu was uneventful (not the case for our Australian friends, however, who landed in a remote field on the way to Kat and sat for a few hours.. a story we heard about later).  In Kathmandu, we collected our bags at the baggage claim…

.. and took off driving through the bustling streets of the heavily populated capital city (look, CARS!)…

… and motorbikes, and people, and animals, and noise everywhere.

Then arrived back at the familiar and wonderful Hotel Shankar.

We checked into our rooms and the first thing Leslie and I did was make an appointment for a massage. We headed down the street to a nearby spa and had one of the more unusual massages I’d ever had.  First of all, it was a tandem massage, meaning we were lying next to each other on tables in the same room, each of us with our own massage therapist, doing, as far as I could tell, the same exact thing… mostly, my eyes were closed. Secondly, they massaged parts that are not usually massaged.  Not those parts, but parts like the stomach.  Weird, but interesting.

Fully, fully relaxed, we returned to our hotel and joined the others in the garden for some of these… amazing spiced peanuts, and beer. So, so good.

That evening, Homnath took the five of us to a restaurant in Thamel (the geographical center of central Kathmandu and a tourist mecca, full of shops, restaurants, bars, cheap hotels, street vendors, and people) called Rum Doodle, sort of a Kathmandu/Thamel, post-trek institution (the greatest place ever, or the worst, depending on which review you read).  We were joined by the managing director of Himalayan Glacier Trekking, Narayan Regmi, who was very interested in hearing all about our experiences. Speeches were made!  Narayan was very generous and kind and we ended up having a fun time and a wonderful dinner.

Afterward, Leslie, Rick and I headed out for an evening of Thamel nightlife.  We found our way to, I believe, the Shisha Terrace Cafe and Bar–live entertainment and hookahs. We met up with our German friend Reggy there and spent some time debriefing our respective treks and growing increasingly tired (me).  My notes say we also went to an Irish Pub, but I cannot remember that (I do not believe my lack of memory had anything to do with hookahs).  After walking around and dropping Reggy at her hotel, many tears were shed (Rick), and a taxi was flagged (our hotel was just on the outskirts of Thamel but finding our way out of the maze of streets, tired as we were, justified a taxi).

Back to the Hotel Shankar, to our nice rooms and linen-clad beds… clean, warm and tired. The perfect trifecta.