Alessio’s Everest Base Camp Trek Dispatch

September 27, 2014 – The Grizzled Mountain Man and his Trusty Sidekick the Sweaty Mess

For those of you that are keeping score, this Everest trip is the side trip to the Bhutan biking adventure. Yesterday, we did the side trip to the side trip and it took us off all of the Everest maps, we were completely off the grid in Thame.

Does that surprise anyone who has ever been on an Alessio adventure?

This is a small village west of the main trails to Everest Base Camp. We passed three other tourists, the rest of the people were local Farmers. Once we arrived at Thame, we decided that 8km and 400m elevation was not enough for one day and we climbed another 200 meters to the ancient monastery that overlooks the town. This took us for the first time over 4000m.

One the way to Thame yesterday, we had great views of the local hydro power pipeline. So as we are both dedicated employees, we decided we need a training day for work.

So today, we inspected up close and personal the pipeline. It was an adventure to walk up the line and see the new installation of pipe. It was much different than what we would experience at home. As we neared the end of the pipeline, we were lucky enough to see the start-up of the hydro power plant after it has been down for maintenance (no power for the last couple of days anywhere in the valley). It appears the maintenance shutdown did not meet schedule.

We have two safety moments today. The first was while climbing a ladder over a barb wire fence, but the views while climbing were amazing. The second is one that we experience multiple times a day, the jest of it is "Don’t fall" as while there is often spectacular views, there is often NOT guard rails.

We were lucky that when we awake this morning the weather had cleared and we were able to see some views of mountains that are not nearly tall as Everest and we were still completely amazed, they were majestic. The pictures are taken from 3800m (higher than most of the Rocky Mountains). We have also noticed how clean and free of trash all of the trails have been so far.

Today, after the visit to the hydro project, we hiked to Khunde to visit the hospital that serves the region; it was founded by the Canadian Hillary Foundation. Then we moved on to Khumjung to visit a local monastery. This is where we had our very first YETI (Abdominal Snowman) experience. See pictures below.

Dad has also been working on his Nepali language skills. He knows two words "Namaste" and "Tuche", but it seems whenever he uses them the local people laugh. He will keep working on it. His next goal for the trip down is to learn how to say wine and beer.

We have now become the comic book heroes "the Grizzled Mountain Man and his Trusty Sidekick the Sweaty Mess".

Till Next Time.