Guest post this time.
One of the odd things in Australia is our habit of giving someone a nick name that is the complete opposite to the persons character or physical appearance. For example a guy with red hair is affectionately known as “Blue”, a tall guy might be tagged as “Stretch” Or a guy with a quiet demeanour has a nickname of “Rowdy”. And so it is that Rowdy (Aka Bruce or Bruiser) has just returned from a trek to Everest Base Camp. It’s something that I’ve often thought about and knowing through the experience of others, it isn’t something to be taken lightly. Being of the same age, I was curious to hear about Rowdy’s experience.
Why do it?
Apart from the usual reasons for travelling i.e. seeing a different country and how it operates, eating different foods, learning about the culture etc. I did the trek to see how I’d go with the physical challenge of exerting myself at higher altitude.
I also wanted to see the highest bit of land on the planet. I’d been to the lowest – the Dead Sea in Israel, many years ago when I was a carefree backpacker so it was an opportunity to do a top and tail!
Along with the physical challenge, I was anticipating a couple of adrenaline rushing highlights. Flying into one of the world’s scariest airports at the start of the trek was an experience.
Flying out you can’t see the end of the runway and it was a bit like driving off a cliff. Flights can only happen when there is a break in the weather so take-off and landings happen one after the other. As we were on finals to land there was another aircraft taking off.
As was crossing a number of suspension foot-bridges so high above the valleys below which raised the alert levels way above ‘watch and act’. But all good fun.
Learning Stuff:
I adapted to the altitude pretty well. However, I certainly found it harder to breathe the higher we went. Above 5000 metres it really was take one-step, breath, take another step and so on. Even stuffing my sleeping bag back into its compression sack at those altitudes needed a half-time break. Seeing a trekker affected by altitude sickness at 5100m, pale face, blue lips and not in a good way made you realise how difficult and dangerous the trek could be. The distressed trekker ended up being helicoptered out of the danger zone.
The trek itself took 14 days including 2 acclimitisation days. The final 2 days trekking towards base camp had ‘unseasonal’ snow which slowed us down a bit.
Our trekking guide amazingly had reached the summit of Mt Everest nine times. Everywhere we went he was well known and highly regarded, so he was a bit of a celebrity. Each night he was happy to respond to our questions about climbing Everest and dealing with things like the lack of oxygen, over-crowded climbing routes, cranky clients and the pressure to earn money to support and educate his family.
Whilst it would come as no surprise to anyone, Nepal is a country less-developed than ours and there were sights that made me again think about how fortunate we are in Australia. In Nepal many people live and work in very basic conditions without much opportunity to improve their lifestyle. Evidence of the 2015 earthquake was common and outside the built-up areas subsistence living appeared to be the norm. Travelling to such places makes me appreciate much more what I sometimes take for granted.
I hope my short story is of interest to the manstheory community. Thanks for reading – Rowdy.
___________________________________________________________
If you enjoyed this post, I would really appreciate it if you would share it with your friends. Head to the home page and enter your email address and subscribe to www.manstheory.com. I’ll look forward to having you as a part of the Manstheory community. Thanks again – Reece
