The Secret Of The Nepali Flats

You Guys.  I hiked to Mount Everest Basecamp.  LOL.  Typing that doesn’t even feel real.  Remembering it doesn’t feel real.  It felt real when I was doing it, though!  

First and foremost, I did NOT summit Mount Everest.  Man, I wish I was that badass.  Maybe someday…but for now I am quite satisfied with Mount Everest Basecamp.  At 5,364 meters (17,600 feet), I am pretty happy with that conquest.  That is not even the highest I went, though.  The day after reaching Mount Everest Basecamp, you wake up at 2:30am and hike to the top of Kala Patthar.  This mountain I did indeed summit.  My max height, and current record according to GPS, is 5,630 meters (18,471 feet).  I will take it.  To put it all into perspective, the summit of Mount Everest clocks in at 8,849 meters (29,032 feet).  Denali, the highest mountain in North America clocks in at 6,190 meters (20,310 feet).  560 more meters and I could have summited Mount Denali!  I joke, obviously.  But now you have a better sense of how high I was.

(Viewpoint along the way, Mount Everest Basecamp, & Kala Patthar Summit)

The Mount Everest Basecamp trek is the same with all outfitters and is 11 days total by foot.  8 days up, 3 days down.  Yes, you read that right.  3 days down.  It is a haul, and I will get to that later.  But let’s start with the ascent.  You guys will laugh, because this is how I roll now, but I literally decided 3 days before my trek departed that I was going to do this.  Most people plan for this for months or years.  A lot of people train for it.  The guys in my group asked if I did any training to prepare for it.  I was like, “Uuuummm…No.  I just decided to do this 3 days ago.”  I’m sure that scared the shit out of them.  Especially since I was older than all of them, and I am a woman on top of it.  But I digress…I came to Nepal knowing that I wanted to do some trekking. There are so many options – it’s not all about Everest Basecamp; but why not Everest Basecamp?

As a side note, someone recently asked me if I am a hiker by nature.  I guess, yes?  And no?  I grew up camping, thanks to my late Step-Dad, and we hiked often, stayed in tents, made campfires, cooked over them, and peed in the woods. I guess I took those skills into my adult life.  I have always loved camping and hiking, and I know how to rough it, but I wouldn’t call myself a pro.  Maybe an avid hiker?  In any case, I enjoy hiking, camping, and being outdoors, and this checked all those boxes.  

Anyway, I felt fairly confident that I could do this after my Mount Rinjani experience last year (read True Grit here).  Mount Rinjani is at a considerably lower elevation than EBC and clocks in at only 3,726 meters (12,225 feet), so I’m not sure why I thought I could do Everest, but for some reason, I felt more confident about EBC. 

Here is how I rationalized it:  The Mount Rinjani hike was 3 days and 2 nights.  You actually summit Mount Rinjani on the first morning.  That is how fast it goes.  And you are going STRAIGHT UP.  There’s nothing gradual about it.  And I was with a group of eight 20-year olds.  They were FAST.  I did my best to keep up with them, but I was behind and it wore on me mentally; more than I thought it would.  I won’t get into the details of this hike because you can read about it in great detail above, but suffice it to say, the vertical wall of volcanic ash that I was climbing at a ferocious pace really traumatized me and I just couldn’t imagine how anything could be worse.  I had asked around a bit, and I knew that the ascent to Mount Everest Basecamp was more gradual, you could go more at your own pace (regardless of who was in your group), and there was a lot of rest time and acclimatization days built in.  Things to worry about included the extreme cold and elevation – which included elevation sickness, difficulty breathing, and overall just not feeling well.  For some reason, I just felt like I could do it.  You don’t know how the elevation will affect you till you get out there and try, so I decided that I had to take a chance.  The worst thing that can happen is you get extreme altitude sickness and they helicopter you down.  You are required to get the appropriate travel insurance that covers this before you leave, so you are covered either way.  Might as well try….

(I didn’t take this helicopter, but it was definitely a cool photo opp!)

Preparing for this in 3 days on a backpacker’s budget and with no warm clothes or appropriate trekking equipment was definitely a challenge, but Kathmandu is set up for this.  There are hiking shops, rental places, and outfitters everywhere.  And luckily, Kathmandu is cheap.  So – it can be done!  I rented my trekking poles (which I will never hike without ever again), my shoes, my big winter puffy jacket, my sleeping bag and my day pack for about $50.  I bought hiking pants, a few quick-dry shirts, some trekking socks, a pair of gloves, a winter hat, a fleece long underwear set, and a quick-dry towel for $125.  $175 all-in for supplies.  The cost of the trip itself was $1,450 for me…these prices vary based on the outfitter you choose, but they are generally in the $1,200 – $1,600 range.  With spending money and a few extra costs along the way, I would say that I spent about $2,000 when it was all said and done.

So now that I have all my stuff…It’s time to get out there and be a hiker!  I sure looked the part!  Fake it till you make it, right?  LOTS of people doing that on this trail.  Seriously, you will see every age, every demographic, every nationality, and different levels of physical fitness…you will see it all!  And that gave me comfort.  The Nepali government has organized this trek in such a way that everyone can do it.  It’s very well thought out and it is safe.  Once you get to those higher elevations, you need to stay in certain places for two nights, doing acclimatization hikes on your “rest days.”  So you still hike everyday, but on acclimatization days, you go up and come back down.  This is to assure that you are adjusting gradually to the elevation gains.  The guides also take your blood-oxygen levels everyday.  It turned into a game.  Every night after dinner, I was like, “Who’s ready to play the blood-oxygen game??”  😝.  It can be kind of funny because sometimes our levels would start out low and our guide would be like, “relax, look at me, think of something calming…”. You kind of work yourself up sometimes because it is nerve-wracking to see your blood-oxygen level at 70%.  Ours was usually around 80-90, but someone took my reading at Mount Everest Basecamp and I was only at 66% or something like that.  I felt fine, and it may have been a bad reading, but it can mess with your head a little bit.  It is more about how you feel.  I definitely experienced some moderate headaches, but luckily, that is about as bad as it got for me as far as altitude sickness goes.  We all took Diamox, a drug used for the prevention or lessening of symptoms related to mountain sickness.  I have no idea if I actually needed it, but I figured better to be safe than sorry, so I just took it.  Please note, however, that taking Diamox just helps to mask or lessen your symptoms of altitude sickness.  Your breathing still struggles the higher you get, and hiking up a mountain with less oxygen than you are used to is not for the faint of heart.  And you can’t really get used to it, because Iike I said, it keeps getting worse.  The best is on the way back.  Those 3 days back down the mountain were fast and exhausting, but the lower we got, the more powerful I felt.  Breathing seemed so easy again!  Going up hills on the way back was a piece of cake on the last day.  I was like, “I can breathe!  This is great!”  I felt like I was running up those hills on the last day….

Next challenge – the cold.  Yes, even in May (when it is the warmest weather for this trek), it is still cold.  Right when you get off the plane in Lukla (where you start the ascent), you feel the cold immediately.  Especially because Kathmandu is so hot.  Right away I thought to myself, “Oh shit.  I hope I have enough warm clothes.”  But you get hot when you are moving…so it is all about layers.  So many layers.  I can’t tell you how many times I was taking things off and putting things back on.  The weather changes in a heartbeat up there.  When the sun is out it is pretty glorious, but the second those clouds roll in, and they will, it is cold.  And then there is the wind.  Some places were brutal.  Luckily, we didn’t have any rain on the whole trek.  I think it rained at night once or twice, but nothing while we were hiking.  So layers – lots of them.  And the higher you get, the colder it gets.  I’ll never forget when we got to Lobuche (which is 1 day before you get to EBC), it was COLD.  And the tea houses that you stay in along the way are freezing.  I felt like it was colder inside than it actually was outside.  And let’s talk about the teahouses while we are at it.  These are extremely basic accommodations.  No heat in any of them.  And the higher you get, the more your basic amenities disappear.  Before you know it, there is no heat, no internet, no running water, and sometimes no electricity.  You know what this means – no cell phones, no showers…you can’t even wash your face at night.  Luckily, this reminded me of some camping trips that I have taken in the past, so it wasn’t too hard for me to adapt.  But the cold in Lobuche….that was a doozy.  The only thing you can do to get warm is to sit around the wood-burning stove in the tea house, that is actually burning dried ox dung because they don’t have wood due to the fact that you are above the tree line. So you do your best to soak in the burning dung heat until bedtime…which is generally around 8pm. Then you go up to your room, and get into your -10 degree Celsius sleeping bag with your long underwear, another layer of clothes, your big warm puffy jacket, a winter hat, your gloves, two pairs of socks and a hot water bottle by your feet, zipper up all the way, and do your best to fall asleep.  That particular night was a bit rough.  One of the other trekkers on my trip knocked on my door the next morning and said if I was still alive they were giving away bumper stickers downstairs that said “I survived Lobuche.”  LOL. Of course they weren’t, but that made me laugh out loud.  We did all make it and thank God for my boys, my hiking companions, who made me laugh and supported me every day.

Finally, the trekking itself.  I found it to be extremely manageable.  This hike had it all…uphills, downhills, and my all-time favorite – The Nepali Flats.  Oh, how I loved the Nepali flats!  Every night after dinner our guide would give us a very detailed rundown on what to expect the next day.  Everytime he mentioned Nepali flats I would give a little “woot woot!”  The more Nepali flats, the happier I was.  So what are they?  Nepali flats are stretches of trail that are mostly flat, but have some gradual ups and gradual downs.  It is the perfect and most ideal way to hike.  You get a little bit of everything….just when you think you can’t go up anymore, it levels out.  And then when you think you can’t go down anymore, it levels out again.  And so on.  It is wonderful.  I wish every hike could just be a series of never-ending Nepali flats.  Yes, there were times that we had to go all uphill for an hour or more.  And the way home when it was mostly downhill was not ideal for my knees, but overall, the Nepali flats saved my life.

So, in sum, this is one of the best and most rewarding things that I have ever done in my entire life.  I actually think Mount Rinjani was harder for me physcially.  We are all different, but on a personal level I have learned a few things about what works for me when hiking at my age:  

1) It needs to be gradual.  I can’t be sprinting straight up a hill or any mountain for that matter.

2) I need trekking poles.  What a difference these make!  I only had one on my Rinjani hike and maybe having two would have made all the difference.  

3) I need to be able to go at my own pace and not worry about anybody else.  

4) I need a knee brace for the way down.  After 46 years of life, my knees are not the same as they used to be.  They are not in bad shape by any means, but I wore a brace on the way down as a preventive measure and I think it made all the difference in the world.  

5) Eat smart.  One night on the EBC trek I decided to have a creamy pasta dish and I felt SO heavy the next day…not a wise choice.  

6) Drink A LOT of water.  They recommended a minimum of 3 liters per day.  This is a hell of a lot of water and I did my best, but the days when I hit it, I did feel better.

Many lessons learned, beautiful scenery seen, mental challenges overcome, and physical limits tested; but what I really walked away with is the secret of the Nepali flats.  As we were traversing through them on the way back down the mountain, I realized how much they are such a great analogy for life in general.  Sometimes we have ups.  Sometimes we have downs.  But the real joy is found in the flats when you have your balance.  And isn’t life just one big series of Nepali flats?  Aren’t we all just trying to find that perfect balance?  We can’t avoid the ups and downs.  We have to experience them; but hopefully we can learn from them, and then settle into that great rewarding balance when things level out and everything feels good again.  Take comfort in knowing that when you have life’s great ups, and inevitably its low and depressing downs, the Nepali flats are coming, and they are so worth the wait.