The Everest Politics Show

Wednesday, 9 April 2014 – Lobuche, Nepal

It’s another beautiful day. We take an early breakfast and leave Dingboche at 7.10 bound for Lobuche, a few hours up the main Khumbu Valley.

We climb slowly up to the pass we ascended yesterday morning. Beyond it, instead of heading up the ridge as we did on yesterday’s acclimatisation walk, we descend over the other side onto a long plateau.

Almost immediately, a small group of us drops behind the others. Phil is keen to reach Lobuche in good time to ensure we have rooms at the Mother Earth Lodge. All the Everest climbers, and Ian, keep close on his heels as best they can. By the time I reach the pass they are already some distance across the plateau.

Meanwhile, Margaret, Edita, Louis, Dia, Dorje and I linger at the back in our own little group. We are four fifths of the Lhotse ‘Dream Team’. While Louis may be walking more slowly to keep his wife Dia company, how do you explain the rest of us? Are the Everest climbers stronger than we are, or are they pushing themselves too hard? Does our greater number of 8,000m expeditions make us wiser, so that we are content to take it easy at this early stage?

For my part I want to enjoy this experience for as long as I can. I walk among truly breathtaking scenery – towering rock walls and shimmering horizons of ice – and I know we have only a short distance to travel to Lobuche. I am in no hurry to get there.

We are climbing out of the alpine zone now, into high-altitude desert. The plateau is dusty and brown, the only vegetation a few isolated patches of dwarf juniper. The trail drifts to the left of the plateau, and soon we are looking down into the Khumbu Valley and the village of Pheriche. This is the place we’ll return to at the end of the expedition to catch helicopters back to Kathmandu. From here it looks like a small farming community in a flat valley, surrounded by stone-walled fields.

Across the valley the two impossible peaks of Taboche and Cholatse rise in sheer walls of ice-crowned rock. They remain our companions for the next couple of hours. As we move north they change shape, but at no point do they become any less frightening. I can see no feasible routes up for any but the most talented, bold and committed climbers. I’m none of those things.

The path keeps to the edge of the plateau, looking down on the valley to our left. Gradually we descend to join it and cross a bridge beneath a community of teahouses known as Dughla.

Just before we reach the buildings Dia tells me she has lost her sunglasses. She thinks it happened when she stooped to tie her shoelaces. The peaks around us are snow-capped only in isolated places, but with such a bright sun I’m worried about snow-blindness. When she tells me she thinks she lost them on the short section before the bridge, I insist we return and look for them.

I drop my pack and we walk back for about ten minutes, but we don’t see them. Several porters and yakpas have passed us by. If any of them saw Dia’s glasses lying on the trail it’s likely they would have picked them up and pocketed them.

We return to the teahouses where Louis is waiting for us. I suggest to Dia she pulls her buff up over her face to form narrow eye slits. Though not as effective as sunglasses it will provide some measure of protection from the sun.

Margaret, Edita and Dorje have started a steep climb up to another pass, and are some distance ahead. They don’t know why we have been delayed, but when I set off after them they stop and wait a short distance above.

‘Are you OK?’ Dorje says when I arrive.

‘Dia has lost her sunglasses, so we went back to look for them.’

‘You find them?’

I shake my head.

We stop for water and I take out my trekking poles to help me on the steep ascent ahead. Within five minutes Dorje has stopped a porter coming the other way and negotiated a price of 2,000 rupees (about $20 USD) for his sunglasses. Well, I say negotiated, but Dorje is a determined man and not someone to mess with. Most likely he just said ‘you give me those for 2,000’ and the porter didn’t argue.

The sunglasses are a decent pair of Bollés, and Dia is happy again. We reach the pass, the Thok La, spanned by an archway of prayer flags. Passing underneath, we find ourselves in a memorial ground to climbers who have died on Everest (and other mountains). A bewildering number of stupas have been erected on a bank beside the trail. Stupas also line another short ridge 100m away.

Although I have never heard of most of the climbers, every so often I come across a name I recognise. Scott Fischer, who died during the Into Thin Air tragedy of 1996, has the biggest one. Pete Boardman has another, to go with the one he shares with Joe Tasker at Chinese Base Camp on the north side of Everest. Alex Lowe died in an avalanche on Shishapangma, but is remembered here too. Most poignant for me is the memorial to Shriya Shah-Klorfine. She was a desperately inexperienced Canadian climber who reached the top of Everest from the south side on 19 May 2012, but died of exhaustion on the descent. I ascended from the north side that day, and it’s conceivable that I stood beside her on the summit, a few hours before her final breath.

We pause for a few reflective moments before continuing. We have only half an hour to walk to Lobuche, but those few minutes will live long in the memory. The valley flattens out and bends to the right. The snow crown of Lobuche East is high overhead, and we see the yellow tents of the Himex expedition camped beneath it. To acclimatise for Everest, they will be climbing this 6,119m trekking peak instead of passing through the Khumbu Icefall.

Pumori rises up like a giant church bell at the head of the valley in front of us. It’s not quite perfectly symmetrical – it falls away in a gentler ridge to the right – but it still looks a very difficult climb. It has a reputation for being dangerously avalanche prone. Edita tells me she would like to climb it some day.

‘Don’t you think it’s a beautiful mountain?’ she says.

‘So is K2,’ I reply. ‘But it wouldn’t be my cup of tea.’

Pumori and Lingtren seen from near the Everest memorials

The valley opens out, with moraine ridges and glacial boulders on either side. At some point in the past the Khumbu Glacier must have extended all the way down here. Now we have just a few short sections of ice to cross. [Unbeknown to me the Khumbu Glacier does indeed extend this far down the valley. It is hidden behind the moraine ridge to my right.]

We reach Lobuche at 10.30. It’s an inhospitable location for a village, but a lovely setting for trekkers and climbers. The village consists of three large trekking lodges looking across the valley to the crinkled black fortress of Nuptse.

We have ascended to 4,900m, and the rooms of the Mother Earth Lodge are cold as hell, but the dining room is warm and insulated.

At dinner I have a conversation about waste management on Everest with Dia, Louis and Phil. Dia asks what arrangements have been made for disposing of rubbish. Phil explains that we’ll be packing everything out, including all food packaging and human waste. The human waste is taken to a place where it can be turned into fuel (biogas).

‘An awful lot of shit is produced. If you can imagine thirty Sherpas having two meals of dal bhat every day, you start to get the idea,’ he says, a little unnecessarily.

Louis leans across the table and says something to Dia in Afrikaans.

‘‘N ton se kak.’

Phil and I look at each other.

‘Did he just say “I don’t suck cock”?’ Phil says.

‘That’s what I heard,’ I reply.

‘‘N ton se kak,’ Louis says again, and we roar with laughter.

‘‘N ton se kak,’ Dia says. ‘It means “a ton of shit”.’

‘You means it’s an actual phrase in Afrikaans, and not just some joke sentence?’

Louis says it again, and this time everybody round the table starts laughing. He spends the rest of the evening teaching us rude words in Afrikaans, but I’ve forgotten them by the time we go to bed.