into the world: Nepal Sampler

Everest and Nuptse

Hi everyone,

We are back in the land of electricity and connectivity--kind of. In Kathmandu, the Internet connections are marginal and power outages frequent. But we are happy to be surrounded by good restaurants and not waking up to a layer of ice on our sleeping bags.

We have been in Nepal longer than any other country on our trip--just short of two months. 45 days were spent in the valleys surrounding Mt. Everest. Three weeks were spent at base camp of (or on) Ama Dablam, a mountain 20 or so km south of Everest. Many of you were checking the sat phone posts on the expedition site--I will post the whole story of the climb and pictures in the next week or so. Base camps are like soap opera's...there is always drama between this team and that team and someone is always making a little trouble--very entertaining stuff!

Since we left the mountain, a few teams have safely summitted and sadly three people have died. Needless to say I feel very lucky for both an outstanding experience and that our team all made it down without tragedy. No summit this time, but the mountain will be there next year--although from the looks of it much of its glaciers will not. The avalanches that came down from the glacier under the summit were the size of a five story office building. The pre avalanche photo's of Ama Dablam show a very different mountain than what it looks like now. If this is not testament to global warming, I don't know what is. More on the climb later.

Nepal simply an amazing place. Of course there are the Himalaya, but in each valley are dozens of villages full of gracious people, many of whom have next to nothing. We drank Chang (rice beer) with Sherpa's, shared the trail with kids on their way uphill to school, dodged yaks, hung prayer flags, were blessed by lama's and ate cheese with a monk in his home. Although there are very touristy areas, much of our trip was spent living among Nepali's. I think one of the greatest aspects of Nepal is that travellers get that glimpse of authentic life that is difficult to find in the great European capitols, game parks of Africa or elsewhere around the world. If you have are considering a trip here-consider no more. You will not be disappointed.

We have over one thousand pictures to sift through, but here are a hodge-podge of images from our time in the hills. We will post more pictures of our treks and of crazy Kathmandu and put up a post about the climb in the coming weeks.

We are headed south to India tomorrow morning. We spent a night in Delhi on our way here. In the 20 hours we were there, we had a run in with our hotel owner (our room rate magically doubled overnight), dodged dozens of cows in our taxi and Kori was nearly pooped on by a beggar's baby. The next 5 weeks should be interesting...

Thanks for checking in,

Brent

Porter on trail