wevendering

i got tired of photo-adding so there are more from the beginning than the end, see my flickr page for more: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wevendy

from jiri to shivalaya: a woman grinding dried potatoes for soup:

leaving shivalaya in the morning:

school on the way from shivalaya to kinja:

kinja to lamjura pass:

friendly monk on the way from phakding to namche bazaar:

namche to tengboche:

monastery at tengboche:

yaks, mani stone, love the high alpine; debuche to dingboche:

late afternoon sun on ama dablam from dingboche:

heading up to chukkung from dingboche:

view from chukkung ri (5546m): makalu!

heading back to dingboche: ama dablam in the afternoon

then it snowed! on the way to tukla:

sundog around everest from kala pattar (5545m) at 6am:

cho la pass:

sorry, no digital photos (of mine) from gokyo, my camera battery died and it was very expensive to recharge... have to wait to develop my film :)

heading down from gokyo:

kumjung monastery:

hard to describe being back in kathmandu after 25 days out of civilization, trekking in the himalayas. feels like the jet lag that never hit me when i arrived in ktm from the us suddenly all flooded back in, things just moving too fast, too loud, all the chaos of kathmandu jouncing around in the jeep on the way back from the airport. 25 days without seeing a car, no internet (well, only once). i miss the austere stillness, the silence, only the low rushing of wind past my ears, cold numbing my cheeks. the heat of the sun, the smell of dust. i've felt for a long time that cultures that develop in harsh physical environments have some kind of reverence about them, and sherpa culture is a beautiful example. they have a gentleness, warmth, joviality about them, but also an inner fortitude (and outer, seeing porters hauling 120+pound loads, often in huge baskets, by a strap across their foreheads).

we trekked in from jiri to namche bazaar, up chukkung ri (5546m), over to everest base camp and up kala pattar (5545m), over cho la pass (5420m) to gokyo and dudh pokhari lake, up gokyo ri (5360m), and then down, back to namche and flew back to kathmandu from lukla. the way in from lukla is a haul, a lot of gain and loss almost every day, including one day of 1900m of gain, but when we got in past lukla (which is where most other tourists start their treks) i was so glad we'd done it. people on the way were incredibly friendly, happy and curious to have their pictures taken, whereas beyond lukla, it was harder to find people still excited about seeing tourists (apparently during high season, 700 people arrive every day in lukla... i can't really imagine it). walking in from jiri also helped ease in the acclimatization. it's crazy to be standing at the top of the "summits" we reached, which, while at over 18,000ft, are little brown rocky lumps compared with the high himalayas looming over. the sense of scale becomes completely distorted: plunging river valleys shooting up to towering black and white peaks, traversing along yak trails cut through steep hillsides where the corners seem to turn into clouds.

looking back at my pictures, i'm realizing how incredibly more diverse a place nepal is than i knew when i first arrived. walking in from jiri we apparently crossed through four different ethnic groups, and being back in kathmandu i'm realizing how different sherpa culture, even in terms of dress, from nepali culture. for women especially the different jewelry ornamentation between ethnic groups is incredibly distinctive. it was interesting to find the line where we could start to say hello to people in sherpa (tashidali) rather than nepali (namaste) and get responses. of course once past lukla it seemed like all our interactions also had to take into account the influence of outside tourism... dress style changed distinctively, most people were wearing puffy coats, running shoes, much less agriculture as it seemed most of the income came now from tea house tourism rather than subsistence farming. i'm not even sure how many of the towns in the high himalayas actually existed prior to the tourism boom as real functioning towns since many of them now seem to function purely on tourism. i found myself wishing that i could have been here 30 years ago, see what people were wearing, it seems like things have changed so much. still there are a lot of remnants: a yak herder with yak hair wrapped as a screen around his eyes to avoid snow blindness; traditional womens' clothing with striped apron, tunic vest, elaborate jewelry and colorfully printed scarves wrapped around their hair; a pregnant sherpa woman being carried to a hospital over lamjura pass (up around 10,000ft) in a porter basket (strap looped over her husband's forehead); baby carrier baskets, an awesome alternative to a cradle, where the baby is carried lying down in a basket on the woman's back by a strap over her forehead (in general, people carry everything with their heads).

as for the actual walking, it's amazing what you get used to as you hit the high himalayas: no running water, squat toilets with thick layers of ice around them, the canisters of water to flush them and the toilets themselves freezing over at night. only solar electricity. being cold all the time and therefore never changing clothes. once you're ascending above 10000ft and have to worry about acclimatization, you're not actually working that hard every day (only ascending about 400m/day), so most afternoons were spent basking in the sun or reading in bed. a lot of sleeping, but no good sleeping, always waking up and with strange (!) dreams. learned a valuable lesson about life at altitude from getting a little borderline frostbite at the top of kala pattar where the usual cycle of warming and cooling in hands and feet that i'm used to in the mountains no longer functions: having my toes hurt like hell when i finally started to regain some feeling in them and my fingers getting so cold i could no longer pull off my gloves with them (no worries, i still have all 20 digits; no permanent damage done haha).

one thing that did seem to become apparent on the trek that made me a little sad is that trickle down economics from tourism in nepal doesn't seem very functional. there is a booming tourist industry, especially in trekking companies, tea house lodges, etc. but the (very large) amounts of money poured into them doesn't seem to necessarily get spread around all that well.

check next post for photos...