Everest

Shortly after arriving in Nepal, I left for a trek to Mt. Everest. The first leg of the trip was a flight to Lukla airport, which is a tiny strip that literally runs down (20% gradient) the side of a mountain. A two day hike and my guide and I reached Namche Bazar, a mountain village that is great for acclimatizing, using the internet, and getting drunk off moonshine. After Namche the we reached 4000 meters and I got a headache. The human body is not really designed to go to high altitude, and when we do fucked up things start to happen. Some people are fine, some people get headaches and cannot sleep, and other people die. I was in the middle category, I had a headache for over a week. There were two main destinations on my trek: Gokyo Ri (5350m) and Kalapathar (5550m). In between them was a hike over the Cho La pass, which is a giant glacier at 5300m. Gokyo Ri is a 'hill' surrounded by lakes. You can see in the bottom pic, 2 of the lakes and the tiny village of Gokyo, where we stayed two nights. The top pic shows the Khumbu Glacier, and surrounding mountains, Ama Dablam being the most bad ass. The middle pic shows Mt. Everest in the center, the taller looking mountain in the front is Nuptse and is not actually taller (if your not an a complete idiot you probably know that in fact, no mountain is actually taller). Both these pics were taken from the summit of Kalapatar. I also went to basecamp, which was basically a bunch of tents filled with pissed off climbers who paid $50,000 a piece to summit the mountain, but who were barred from doing so because of Chinese paranoia about pro-Tibet protests. On the last days the weather turned to shit and I couldn't see anything, but that wasn't so bad because I had seen it on the way up. Overall a great experience, and one of the highlights of my trip so far.