In 2018, my wife Jackie and I had the privilege and pleasure of trekking with Jamling Tenzing to Nepal’s Mustang region near Tibet. In 2023, Jamling invited us to share in the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the 1953 ascent of Everest. His father Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary were the first humans to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain. I’ll never reach that summit. My Everest summit was making it to base camp.
A dear friend, Jan Morris, had been the only journalist on that 1953 expedition and had rushed the news down the mountain to ensure word reach London ahead of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth which led to a glorious celebration in Britain just eight years after WW2.
My story is a day-by-day account of the trek to base camp. Here’s Day 1; to read the full story please click here.
Jamling Tenzing in Namche Bazar, Nepal in 2023. A famous photo of Tenzing Norgay raising his ice axe on the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.
Day 1
Kathmandu to Lukla to Monjo (9,200 feet)
Reading Jan Morris’s Coronation Everest — the exclusive account of the 1953 British expedition that was the first to reach Everest’s summit — I learn that back then Nepal had no roads outside of its capital; the only way to get to Everest Base Camp was to walk 200 miles from Kathmandu. After arduous days of hiking, the climbers crawled into tiny tents, so low they could barely sit up.
Our journey begins quite differently. After three days at the luxurious (by Nepal standards) Hotel Yak & Yeti, where we enjoyed sumptuous buffet breakfasts and sipped gin and tonics at dusk, we fly from Kathmandu to Tenzing Hillary Airport in the vertiginous village of Lukla.
The plane flies lower than nearby mountaintops, zipping between peaks. Then we seem to drop straight down to Lukla’s impossibly short runway, so short that planes can only stop in time thanks to the 12-degree upward slope — the landing is the most frightening of my life. We shoulder our packs and begin our trek.
Six Sherpas hike with us, showing us the way whenever the trail splits and offering to carry our days packs on steep climbs. “If you need to give a bag to a Sherpa, give it to him,” Jamling says. “We want you to get to your destination, with a smile.”
Arriving at Everest base camp after eight days of trekking, with my wife, Jackie Yau.
We share the trail with dzos (rhymes with nose), pack animals that are half yak, half cow whose bells form a euphonic soundtrack to the cinematic views of the snowcapped Himalayan peaks.
The animals, despite being heavily laden, walk faster than we do, and our instructions are clear: When animals pass, always stay to the uphill side of the trail. Dzos and yaks have a nasty habit of knocking tourists off trails and down into the valleys below. We keep our distance and scramble a couple of feet above the trail whenever we see a caravan coming.
