frank’s big adventure

Our second day in Tibet was to be the longest drive.  It took a good 8 hours to get to Lhatse and from the start I was not feeling up to the drive.  I had my first real bout of home-sickness and thought about all the people that have filled my life with joy back home in the states.  I closed my eyes and thought about Austin and then opened them back up to watch the Tibetan mountains slowly crawling past us.  It does not look like I expected it would up here and one could easily mistake this place for the desert mountains of Arizona or New Mexico.  It is very dry and there are not the fields of snow I expected.  The landscape is rugged, but in an arid sort of way.  I thought that there would be lush mountainous terrain with glacial rivers and foliage and an abundance of wildlife, but this place feels more like Mars than Colorado.  There are several places I have seen in the world that remind me I am on a rocky bubble of a planet amongst other, less hospitable bubbles in the solar system, and now Tibet is one of them.

Hello all, Jesse here. I’m posting this on Frank’s behalf as he is inside China at the moment. Not every day you get to help defy a major Communist nation (other than by purchasing Beastie Boys music, of course).

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Hello everyone, I’m writing from behind the Great Firewall of China so I cannot actually access this site myself, but I wanted to let everyone know that I have safely arrived in Lhasa and will be taking a train into mainland China today.  It is a 36 hour journey to Xi’an.
Tibet has been amazing.  I was not sure what to expect from this trip beyond cold nights and high altitude, but it has turned out to be a wonderful experience.  We travelled the first day in a microbus up to the Chinese border climbing higher and higher and winding through river valleys and past tiny Nepali towns.  We stopped at a tourist hotspot where paying customers could bungee jump off a narrow suspension bridge several hundred feet above the rocks and water below.

Our group, assembled from various different countries and backgrounds, is about 25 strong.  Most everyone is in their 20’s and we’ve become quite the crew.  Every night at dinner I marvel that we’ve only known each other for a few days as the conversation flows as smooth as the Lhasa beer, which has been consumed en masse (and would you believe that Pabst Blue Ribbon has made it’s way into Tibet?).  As we all stood on the bridge at the border waiting to get into China, Jacob and I thought about the implications of entering a communist country and the whole idea of a nation clicked into focus in my mind.

I was humbled by the landscape.  The river along the border is fresh and quick, cutting sharply down from the mountains, and there is a marked difference between China and Nepal.  The stoic soldiers and construction of massive new buildings made the Nepali side look a bit like a cozy little shanty town.  My paper visa passed the test and we were across.  From the border we all poured into five Land Cruisers and begin to make our way over the rough, unpaved road to Zhangmu.

The Chinese government began to pave the Friendship Highway last year and already they have almost completed the entire 700 or so kilometers to Lhasa.  The road itself is an amazing feat, but to think of how quickly it has been completed baffles the mind.  There is no doubt that once it is done, more and more goods and people are going to be cruising through this previously remote part of the world.  We got caught in some traffic due to construction and once we got into Zhangmu a wedding procession stopped us again.  Our group got out and watched as the bride and groom, looking rather glum, waded through the throngs of drunken revelers.

The first night into Tibet, I went out drinking with some of the guys and as we walked from bar to bar the cultural differences between a night out in Austin and a night out in Tibet became very apparent.  Climbing the steps up to one of the bars, the booming folksy-sounding Tibetan music that had drawn us in from the street became louder and louder and pulling aside the drape of a door revealed a nearly empty room.  It was very dark and there was a little dance floor occupied by 4 or 5 kids that looked to be no more than 16 years old performing some archaic looking circle dance.

With a few beers in my system I was quick to try out my dancing feet and I tried to follow the pattern of steps and kicks as we spun in lethargic circles.  My eager attempts to introduce new steps into the fold were met with looks that seemed to say “Who do you think you are?” so I spun and hopped and jumped my way back to the guys laughing at my failure.  The song hadn’t changed in what felt like years so we pressed on to the next bar, which was just like the previous one.

The next day I was moving slow and we had a long ride ahead of us to Lhatse.  Our driver had decked out his Land Cruiser with fancy seat covers and a fuzzy rear-view mirror dog slip and he insisted on playing his cassette of modern Tibetan dance music.  The incessant beats were driving my brain into a wall and the frequent English samples of lines like “Whys it gotta be so damn hot in here?” or “C’mon party people, get sexy!” were not funny enough to make up for the endless 30 minute loop of music.  I vowed there and then that I would buy another tape at the first opportunity, no matter what it might be.

“It is the middle of winter and I am somewhere in the highest mountain range in the world, outside and on my back looking at the stars from over 16,000 feet above sea level.” That’s the moment of realization that I had in Lobouche, when the magnitude of this trek began to set in.

I got sick the day before we left. I had made it all the way through India, eating at a number of places that should have made my stomach liquefy, without the slightest hint of illness, but one plate of Shahi Paneer in Kathmandu did me in. I was miserable, unable to sleep through the night, and barely able to swallow food let alone process it for energy and nutrition. I was in no shape to attempt the toughest climbing of my life, forget the fact that I am in less than peak physical condition and have not exercised regularly since…

Dawa will be our guide and he is a master of this mountain. He has been to the summit twice and is going again in a couple months with a man attempting to be the first open heart surgery patient to make the peak. It will be just the two of them going up the Tibet side and back down into Nepal. He feels no pain. He is immortal on this mountain. I feel good knowing that he will be there to pull me up to the top if I need it.

When the airport in Lukla finally was clear enough for our departure we climbed into a little bus and got shuttled out to a little prop plane on the tarmac. I had never been in a Twin Otter before. Before takeoff the stewardess, a beautiful Nepali woman, crouched down the aisle with a little basket full of candies and cotton balls. I deduced that the cotton was for our ears, as my view through the window was a close-up of the engine and propeller, and the candy must be handed out to sustain us for the first few hours after we crash into the mountains.

As we got closer in to the mountain the engines seemed to gasp a bit and I felt the bottom drop out. I looked out the front window and saw to my dismay a little spit of a runway angling up at about 45 degrees. There couldn’t have been more than 100 yards of it before a rock wall. I concentrated on breathing and began to open my first candy. Somehow we landed and spun around into a stop. The Koreans cheered and clapped.

We had been told that there was 2 feet of snow on the ground in Lukla, and while this turned out to be an overstatement, there was ice everywhere. I slipped and slid through most of the first two days to Namche Bazar where I succumbed to altitude sickness. I have never been higher than about 12,000 feet in my life and between my stomach and my lungs I was toasted. I tried to take my mind to the icicle waterfalls and magnificent suspension bridges from the hike to that point, but I couldn’t think about anything beyond the next 30 miserable seconds of existence. My head pounded and I was dizzy after climbing a flight of stairs. I knew that I wouldn’t make it up any farther and tried to think about how I would tell Jacob to go on without me.

The air was very thin and every time I exhaled, there was a panicked need to gasp in again. It came in waves. Sometimes I could go hours without thinking about breathing while other times I felt like I was constantly suffocating. That night it only got worse as it plummeted to 25 degrees below zero. The little room we were staying in had nothing in the way of insulation and I got little fits of sleep between long hours of shaking and coughing. And then…a miracle. The sun rose, I took an Immodium, and I had acclimated. Base Camp became a realizable goal again and I felt like a champ as I climbed up over the first ridge and Everest came into view.

Most people are lucky to catch a glimpse of the peak through rolling clouds, but we were very, very lucky. There was nary a cloud in sight and the mountain looked crisp against the sky blue sky. The few initial minutes of glory turned into hours of heavy breathing and labored walking. We had revisited our packing decisions in Namche Bazar and decided there were a good many (heavy) things that we could do without. Still, the 500 meter climb from the riverbed to Tengbouche made my legs rubber. We were done for the day.

The little towns that dot the map up to base camp all have the same basic accommodation: tea houses. Each tea house is made from exactly the same materials, those that made their way up the mountain on the back of some poor Sherpa porter, but the mood is set by the decorations, the people, and the fuel for the fire. In Namche Bazar, Jacob and I were the only foreign trekkers and we spent much of our time in the cozy little room with Dawa, the women that owned the place, and the kid that did all of the grunt work. There were windows on all the walls, they played festive Nepali music, and they burned wood.

In Tengbouche the tea house was packed full of people. There were two old French couples in their 60’s chatting a bit and laughing on the outside, crying on the inside, when they had to go outside to use the Sherpa toilet. The inside toilets all freeze up in the winter leaving the cold breezy hole out back as the only option. Their Sherpa guide was nearly as old as they were and I don’t suspect they were planning on reaching base camp with the way they handled the climate. There was an Indian man who had been living in Hong Kong for a few years chatting with an American man who had been living in Taiwan and each of them had a Sherpa there to lead them up the mountain. We saw the Indian man again a few days later trudging his way along the rocks to base camp and we chatted a bit more with the American about where we should travel in China. I cozied up in the corner and began discreetly drawing the faces I saw. Soon a young British couple came in with their guide and everyone tried to get as close as they could to the Franklin stove in the center of the room. In Tengbouche, the fuel for the fire is dried Yak dung.

The next morning we set out to Dingbouche and our bodies had become well-oiled machines, pressing ever onward, ever upward. We began to lose people as they stopped to continue acclimating in Tengbouche or Dingbouche, but we continued unfazed. There was a pair of young Brits that had been trekking together through Dingbouche, but only one, Joe, remained. Paul had apparently turned back due to the heights. Joe and Paul made Jacob and I look like a professional team of climbers. They had bummed in from Thailand a few days earlier and were just winging it up the mountain. Joe had a cheap sleeping bag, some cheap boots and a cheap jacket that he’d bought in Kathmandu. He was practically wearing pajama pants and there had been a rumor amongst the travelers in Tengbouche that he’d gone for a dip in the glacial runoff of a river.

Joe had been a Royal Marine for a few years and served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He joined the service at 18 to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and personal hero, but found life in the service to be too much for him after a few years. He never saw any action and described his time in Afghanistan as a 6 month mountain hiking tour with guns. They were looking for Al Qaeda in little towns long after they had fled across the border, so they spent their tour of duty wandering the beautiful countryside in 2 week spurts. In Iraq he again was spared of action, but the wear and tear of a life in the war zone brought about a change in his outlook and he came back to Britain to go to school to become a teacher. When that couldn’t keep his interest he set out to the mountains of Nepal for a while. Now he was freewheeling up to Lobouche with meager supplies and dwindling funds. Paul had most of the money with him when he turned back down the mountain, so Joe had to move quickly if he wanted to get to the top. As we climbed up along a glacier we could see his little backpack bounding quickly onward up ahead.

Lobouche is an extreme little outpost. It sits at over 16,200 feet above sea level and the air has little oxygen to feed the blood. Everything is frozen, crisp and clear and the peaks look too close for comfort. Once we arrived I wandered out onto a ridge and had a beautiful moment with the sun. My shadow was cast out across the valley of rocks and ice and I felt significant in time and space. I thought about the glaciers that ran thickly past Lobouche within the last couple decades before retreating back up the mountain. Along the path that day we came upon a beautiful memorial site for the climbers that have lost their lives attempting to top Everest. The rock stupas were perched at the top of a steep slope in full view of a multitude of amazing looking mountains.

I thought much of the rest of the day about my aunt, Anne Kearl, who had hiked this very trail a number of years back before she died of cancer. I was too young to really know her before she passed away, but I suspect that we would have gotten along famously. My shadow sat down with me for a while and we watched the light changing across the snow and ice which was clinging to a 20,000 foot peak.  Then the sun set and I returned alone to the tea house.

Joe was in bad shape and retired early. He pushed too hard and was now living with the consequences. Jacob and I decided to take advantage of the clear night and we put on as many layers of clothes as we had and went out to see the stars. I cannot begin to do justice to the mirror ball that was the sky. We had to lie down to let it all soak in. The Milky Way was a dirty splash of light, the Seven Sisters were joined by several new sisters I had never seen before and Orion wore a glimmering coat of starry armor. We talked about the world that was stuck to our backs as satellites and shooting stars came closer than they ever had before. We were out there for about an hour, our extremities slowly losing feeling and succumbing to the winter’s chill, before going to our frosty room and shivering in our sleeping bags for a few hours.

When I woke up the next morning it dawned on me that I had been abroad for exactly one month. It was clear outside and we were going to be mounting Kala Patthar to take advantage of the perfect Everest viewing conditions. On my first day in India I had seen the Taj Mahal and now, bookending my first month would be an Everest view from over 18,200 feet above sea level. We hiked through Gorak Shep, home of the last permanent structures on the trail, and left our bags behind to make the little hop up the little mountain. We had over 1600 vertical feet to climb and the higher we got the windier it became. By the end I was gasping for air as I let the wind carry my wilted body from rocky point to rocky point. I was carried up the last 40 feet or so just moving my legs and holding out my arms for balance. At the top Jacob, Dawa, and I sat behind the shelter of a big rock, taking turns to explore the little outcrop at the top.

And there was Everest, right there… I felt like a god.

The views are too amazing for words, so here are a couple images and links to videos Jacob took from what is probably the highest place I will ever be:

Some links to videos from our epic climb: