Travel - Sunset on Everest

You have to earn your first view of the mighty Everest range. From the Lukla airstrip, a short flight from Kathmandu, it takes a day and a half, trekking through pine forests, past lodges framed in dahlias and rhododendrons, across dizzying bridges and up the long steep spur of the Namche Hill. Now and then, you flatten yourself against the cliff face to let pack animals and porters scrape past. Far below, the foaming waters of the Bhote Kosi roar through an invisible gorge.

At last, the pretty Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar appears, clinging to the very edge of the precipice, all pastel roofs and frilly awnings, prayer flags wavering like giant plumes and stepped alleyways where men carve Buddhist scriptures on the boulders and trekkers bargain for turquoise and Tibetan rugs. At 3340 metres, in the Everest National Park, Namche is the place to acclimatise for a day or two and enjoy glorious mountain views, here the holy summit of Khumbila, there the fluted walls of Thamserku or the snowfields of Kongde and on the horizon, the dark windswept cone of Everest. Spring is the best time for rhododendrons, autumn for clear views.

From Namche, Bazaar, it is a fairly easy stretch to Tengboche, the most sacred monastery in the Khumbu region, perched all alone on a wooded ridge. Boy monks scrub their laundry at the gate, chanting drifts from the temple, punctuated by cymbals and drums, and the twin peaks of Ama Dablam rise hauntingly, so close you could almost touch them. Beyond, the land is bleak and you pass only a few hamlets with tiny potato fields and yak dung drying for fuel on stone walls. Sometimes, wild Himalayan goats bound on the slopes and pheasants in iridescent rainbow colours peck on the edge of the trail.

Onto the forlorn village of Dingboche then Lobuche, past myriad stone chortens lined up on the pass, each one a shrine to someone who died in these parts. Now it is high time to eat garlic soup to thin the blood and fill up on energy food, pancakes, potato bread, vegetable rolls the size of a family pie. After a week of toiling up and down slopes and one last scramble over a moraine, anyone reasonably fit can reach Gorak Shep, the original base camp at over 5000 metres, now with a few lodges, tucked in a moonscape of tortured land and ice with gaping crevasses and the great cascade of the Khumbu Icefall. Lhotse, Nuptse, Pumori, Choyu, mountains rise in a magnificent amphitheatre across the Tibetan border, but Everest remains stubbornly out of sight, hidden by a lower but closer ridge.

So, to set eyes on the panorama of a lifetime, you have to climb even higher and tackle the seemingly easy but breath-taking, knee-jerking Kalapatar, the Black Rock above Gorak Shep, towering at 5623 metres. Slowly, Everest appears above Nuptse, rising higher and higher, and when the sun dips in the west, the whole mountain rumbles and groans as huge blocks of ice crash down the slopes. All around the peaks come to life, shimmering pink and gold in the dying light. Suddenly, sharp as a knife, darkness falls right across the land but for a long time, on the roof of the world, Everest continues to glow, a lonely beacon in a starlit sky.

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