Back to Nepal

Garden earth around the house is warm and bulbs are popping up. I’m counting the blankets around the house in case we have to protect them from frost. Hard to believe – but for the last few days we’ve been X country skiing in Haliburton – falling and sinking into the deep soft snow and skiing over rivers running across the trails. But skiing nonetheless.

This next week, I’m returning to Nepal and my experiences trekking to Everest Base Camp in the Solu Khumbu region, northeast of Kathmandu and just south of Tibet. I have many photos (taken with a non digital Nikon SLR using Fuji Velvia slide film and scanned onto CDs) of the mountains, the people, their customs and religions to show you.

While a trek like this isn’t for everyone, doing something beyond your comfort zone – whatever it is, will give you a feeling of excitement, heightened awareness (I mentioned awareness in an earlier blog post) and confidence from taking the risk to do something new.

In the map below, my friend Wendy and I flew from Kathmandu (lower left corner) to Lukla where you see the airplane on the right, then trekked north though a number of small villages to Gokyo (upper -- right of centre) then back down to around Tengboche and north to the top of Kala Pattar (a small mountain, upper right) for the best view of Everest.

I don’t want to simply recreate the trek in chronological order because I think that would be boring. I’ll attach a better map so you can see the route, though. I want to frame the experience so you’ll understand many facets of Nepal and have a sense of trekking there, to be surrounded by 8 000 + meter mountains – the highest in the world. I’ll also include experiences and photos from the Annapurna region to the west of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal – which is more accessible for those who want to see the towering giants in a shorter period of time.

The six chapters I've written for Finding Nepal have been collecting dust for six years. Now finally with the help of this blog and you, I'm dipping back in.

See you in Nepal!