So here you go. This blog has taken fourteen days to put up, two days more than it took us to climb up to the Gokyo lakes and back. But it was fun, because it entailed reliving the trip of a lifetime. I only hope you have as much fun going through it.
A few things. The space alloted for photographs do not do justice to the breathtaking views of the Everest region (neither do the photographs themselves), so click on the images to magnify them.
In this blog, I keep talking about Khumbhu, it refers to the higher Northern part of the Solukhumbhu region of Nepal where the Everest is located. Our trek entailed travelling through Khumbhu only, but in the old days, when mountaineers started their journey from Kathmandu, they had to walk through the Solu district as well, and would have had the opportunity to experience the wonderfully diverse terrain, cultures and ethnic groups of the middle Himalayas. Today, sadly, Solu is in the grip of a raging Maoist insurgency although I am confident it is, as is any other part of Nepal, safe for visitors.
As I read this blog, I get a feeling that I have been a little harsh on our guide. He might have had his problems but he did try, in his own way, to ensure we saw everything he felt was worth seeing in the beautiful, brooding, majestic world that he inhabits. On our last day in Lukla, he came to see us off at the airport, and presented us two Sherpa scarves, which today, are draped over our bedroom mirror. They remind us that outside of office, deadlines, projects, bills, household chores and finances, there exists this other world. How often we choose to visit it depends on us alone.