Kathmandu to Everest Base Camp, Part I: Access

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Part I: Access

Three days I stayed in Kathmandu and I saw a city neither completely Indian nor fully Himalay.

Streets bustled with traffic anarchic: taxis buses, rickshaws, bicycles, tractors, motorcycles, stray dogs and lowly humans swarmed apparently without law or reason through dusty lanes, past colorful wares displayed from dawn to dusk; but entreaties of touts were polite, almost docile, and beggar children appeared only occasionally from the mud and sewage to ask for "pen" or "milk" or "sweet."

Hindu monuments and temples appeared, colorful and incongruous, in corridors and squares; yet the population was politically active -- riotous -- and stood chanting and throwing rocks at the royal palace, demanding the abnegation of the monarch, demanding a pure republic. Lines of police in riot gear stood stone-faced at major intersections.

Four on the morning of the fourth day saw me slurping down a carafe of Nescafe in my hotel room, and stumbling down into the Kathmandu darkness to catch a taxi to the airport's domestic terminal.

My destination: Lukla --- a village nestled at 2800 meters, outside the Kathmandu valley and into the Himalaya proper. There are two ways to get to Lukla. One, by lightweight aircraft. (Large planes like 737s have no chance of taking off at that altitude -- and besides, the runway is barely a pair of football fields.) Two, it's possible to bus to a town called Jiri and then walk -- for eight days -- up to Lukla.

This should give an idea of Lukla's remoteness. And this only the start of the trail.

The flight to Lukla revealed the Himalay to me for the first time. Undulating foothills (in America we call these "mountains") blanketed in conifer forests stretched horizonward to behemoths of rock and ice. Crags so angular, so audacious, they mocked the clouds themselves for their impotence and gravity.

Below me I saw meadows stairstepping into the slopes: the signs of agricultural subsistence living. It occurred to me, through the low whine of the engines, that the fundamental limitation of the human mind is the inability to grasp continuity. A slope can not be understood as a slope. As such it is barbaric, natural. It must be discretized, or it yields nothing to human ingenuity.

The mathematical understanding of continuity, developed conceptually by Leibnitz and Newton, understands it as an infinite sequence of discrete units, each infinitely small.

This means that the notoriously abstruse notion of infinity, the domain of mathematicians and theologians, is but a parlor trick to continuity.

Time is marked in seconds, space is marked in meters, and friends ask for goodbyes.

Such a simple thing to ask.

But ceremony is artifice which refuses to understand a life as a continuous trajectory of sensation and companionship. Ceremony is a quantum-mechanical interpretation of human intimacy, which sees the here and the there, but when asked of the middle lifts its hands and shrugs.

A white-knuckled landing. The villagers greeted me with a kata --- a golden scarf of good will.

At 2800 meters -- relatively low for an acclimatization line -- I learned of my susceptibility to altitude. So I spent a day bored in Lukla and a day bored in Phakding (a three-hour hike north, but nearly 200 meters lower).

Both nights, my room cost me 50 Rupees. That's 75 US cents.

Namaste, Nepal.

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