Everest Region: to the Gokyo Lakes
Exactly ten years ago, during the January school break in Nepal, when I was working in Kathmandu University High School, we planned to do the Everest Base Camp trek.
Zen and the art of trekking
Sometimes the contrast between the real and painful effort made during the trek and the imaginative mental projection of finally crossing the highest pass, and the way we compensate in planning how to present this ´triumph´to others, makes one think that one purpose of trekking is to bleach out all pretence and vainglory, vanity and self-aggrandizement.
Take things as they come
Should we embrace a teleological view of the trek, that it only has meaning based on its purpose to complete its objective and arrive at the final point, or should we follow that impressive advice of Robert Louis Stevenson, ¨to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive¨?
Altibajos
We have to accept ups and downs, so nicely captured in the Spanish word altibajos. But it is difficult not to resent losing the height one has gained.
Toward the Unknown Region
This eloquent title belongs to a poem in Walt Whitman´s Leaves of Grass. It begins:
Darest thou now, O Soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow
Gokyo to Everest Base Camp (Part 1)
A gentle sense of achievement flushes the veins, as in the bright air we start to descend: there will be scalding soup at Gokyo, and in gradually waning afternoon light, views will open up besides frozen brooks.
Gokyo to Everest Base Camp (part 2)
Lower altitude permitted some sleep last night. It is snowing, and all views have disappeared, only the sense of the gulf down to the river.
Gokyo to Everest Base Cap: returning to Salleri
Amazingly this is Day 18. Coming down is all part of the experience, and allows a retrospective contemplation, but while most trekkers stop at Lukla, and then take a plane ride back to Kathmandu, with more time on our hands we have elected to walk out to Salleri, the way we had come in.