Like most good ideas, this one started in a pub. This particular pub was ‘The Old Nags Head’ in Edale within the Peak District. Myself and my good friend Barry had spent a very wet and miserable morning walking the hills around Edale, on a Saturday in Early spring 2008.
As we sat drinking our pints, Barry told me about a colleague who had recently attempted to walk to Everest Base Camp (EBC), however he came down with altitude sickness and was unable to make it to the end point. My response to this was “Soft” and that we could do it.
We were both 24 at the time; Barry had always been a fitness enthusiast and I was doing morning circuit training with an ex-army PT instructor twice a week. Everest Base Camp was as good as done! So we put our money where our mouths were and started to plan.
After some research, we determined the best time to go would be autumn or spring, so we chose Autumn 2009, to give us more time to train and save up for it. We found a travel company that specialised in these types of trips and booked through them.
There were two options we could take: the standard EBC route or the more challenging route to EBC via the Gokyo Lakes. Naturally, to prove how hard we are, we picked the latter. We managed to rope another friend Pete into the endeavor and after a prolonged nagging campaign, I also convinced my brother, also called Pete, to join us.
Over the year we continued training and did some walks in Snowdonia to prepare us for the Himalayas. However as the date approached Pete dropped out and Barry wanted a career change and was due to start teacher training in September 2009. That left me and my brother.
Barry instead took the normal EBC route in spring 2009. He came back a little broken after suffering a stomach bug throughout most of the trek; he did make EBC though. This didn’t sit well, as it dawned on me, that this could be harder than I anticipated. However hearing from his experience and what he had learnt, bolstered my excitement for it and allowed me to refine my gear choice.
At the time I was in a minimum wage job and Pete was still at university, resulting in us equipping ourselves on a budget. The two things we splashed out on, were a warm sleeping bag and footwear. I got some Brasher walking boots, that lasted me years and had been by far the best pair of boots I’ve ever owned. It was a sad, sad day when they gave up the ghost while climbing Barrow in the Lake district.
The route we took starts at Lukla, the location of the most dangerous airport in the world. From here to the Sherpa capitol, ‘Namche Bazaar’; where we took a rest day to aclimatise to the altitude before moving on to the the Gokyo Lakes, to climb the mountain ‘Gokyo Ri’.
There are two glaciers in the region that we followed; ‘Ngozumba Glacier’ where you will find the Gokyo Lakes and the more famous, ‘Khumbu Glacier’ where EBC sits. The two glaciers are separated by the huge peaks, one of which is the towering ‘Cholatse’ at 6,440m. To get between them, you cross the ‘Cho La Pass’.
Once we conquered Cho La Pass we made our way to ‘Gorak Shep’. the last village before EBC. We would then go to EBC before climbing ‘Kala Patthar’; we then descended to ‘Tengboche’ before returning to Lukla.
In a nutshell, that is the background to my adventure in the Himalayas, between the 16th October 2009 to 6th November 2009. The start of my love affair with travelling and long distance hikes.
Stu's Camino 