Jeremy's First Transatlantic Yacht Race

A much easier day walking up the valley beside the river: gradually ‘climbing’ 500m to Tangnag at 4358m. It snowed 1cm last night (and a couple of cracks of thunder!) so it was beautiful scenery with stunning views up to Mera Peak along the way. The snow in the valley melted by midday in the sunshine and lunchtime’ Sherpa stew warmed us too.   A large group of nine trekkers from the Netherlands have caught us up: they have walked for 5 days from the nearest road, and will rest here a day. We will head on up to Khare at 5000m, then rest there with a ‘training day’ of ropes, belays and crampons!  We passed a solo tracker and guide who have just summited yesterday! So there is now a way up through the recent heavy snow falls! Bodes well. 

A beautiful sunny morning & an earlier start (7.30). I slept 10 hours! From 8pm! Re-energised! A good steady climb to lunch at 3629m with some quite slippery snowy downhill patches.   Stories of the summit meet us: a solo walking, Nepali woman describes reaching 6100m where the snow was too deep to proceed. Some climbers falling into hidden crevasses (roped) too. There is a big and experienced group ahead of us which should help beat the route to the summit, if the good weather holds for us. At present first possible summit day is Saturday 1st April! And we have an option of one or possibly two more days after that.   We descended in the afternoon to the River Inkhu for the first time, and then rose to just above it at Korhe at 3580m - to a rather cold ‘end of the building’ room with a run down the corridor to the loo! But we did all have hot ‘bottled gas’ showers in a very cold external breezy cupboard! At least we are clean again!

We awoke to blue sky and a fabulous view of the three Mera Peaks (North, South & Central) at the end of the long line of white mountains on the other side of the valley. We continued to follow the ONLY trail up to Mera Peak from this direction. At one point we had to clamber up very steep steps hugging a rock face (with a metal chain) but it has been a relatively easy day again of 4-5hrs walking up and down. We have reached Chettra Khola at only 3122m, but do have a roasting wood burner and a great plate of chips! And our rooms are above us, so are warming too!  

We awoke to a stunning view of snow covered mountains across the valley.     Yet these are small in comparison to where we are going. Three hours (half of it down!) led us to the best local food yet for lunch. We were also greeted by a big family of large grey monkeys (white headed with black faces). They were just above the hamlet in the tree line; many watching us, and others eating magnolia nectar high up in the trees. The ground below was covered in the confetti of white petals!   A steep 1500ft climb of switchbacks has then brought us up to 3300m by 3pm, and the snow line! The wood burner is already lit by 4pm and we are cosy with our tea and biscuits! It has clouded over but no rain yet! (SATS 94%)

We awoke to sunshine but it then clouded over and rained for our last hour of 5 hours of walking. However, our SATS have acclimatised to 93% already.  The burgundy rhododendrons and tall white magnolia trees are in bloom at this altitude. The trail is very quiet since we are early in the season AND bookings are down 60% because of the economic pressures across the West. The inclement weather is preventing anyone reaching the top for now and the rapid route over the pass from Lukla is now closed.  

We have flown into the infamous Lukla airport at 2780m, ‘The most dangerous airport in the world’… due to 4 fatal air crashes this century (tho only one involved passengers, in 2008). Very short 450m runway on 12o incline up to a sheer rock wall!   We then walked, down and then up, for 5 hours to our comfortable tea house, accompanied by our experienced guide Dendi, a fellow (Irish) trecker Cathel and two porters. Our altitude remains at 2800m (9000ft), yet our oxygen saturations are down to 88%!  There were many donkeys carrying bottled gas and goods from the end of the road up to Lukla and the Khumbu valley beyond. Stay on the mountain side as they pass!! (Our previous guide’s father had been killed falling from the ‘outer’ side.)

  48hrs later and I have just walked into the incredible tranquility of a beautiful boutique hotel (Arushi) that is the first day of our 19 day trekking package with Nepal Eco Adventure. It feels so very peaceful and homely, yet with the tourist area of Thamel just a street away. And it also represents the start of OUR next adventure together.   I have had the pleasure of staying with my PHASE Homestay since returning from Mugu. A lovely family with home cooked food, for a very modest amount. I also stayed with them twice in 2018/19. Their adorable young son is now 6yrs, with excellent self-taught English, though his parents do speak English too, mainly thanks to streaming Minecraft I suspect!!  Yet I am so looking forward to this 48hrs of relative luxury with deluxe hot showers, optional sauna and a roof top restaurant! 

And so I am now on my return flight out of the mountains, having had a 2 hour jeep ride up the Karnali valley & enjoyable 3 hour afternoon trek climbing the 2000ft up to the local airport yesterday . The Summit Air flight is a more powerful, faster but still small two prop plane. It snowed yesterday so it is now a pristine white above 3500m. The bad weather has meant that it does not feel safe to attempt the local summit of 4200m that Surya and I had planned for today. Instead, I am fortunate to fly out this morning in a clear window before more rain and snow that is forecast later today and tomorrow. Without it I would have had a two day taxi-jeep journey exit! Incredibly daily buses also follow the same route: I saw one yesterday and did not fancy the greater risk, and even longer and more uncomfortable journey, on the narrow unmade rutted rocky roads.   It has been a wonderful eleven days. I can’t say that I don’t sometimes struggle with daily rice & dahl, or that the la...

  A week anywhere brings heart warming familiarity, and so it is here. We walk to my last clinic past the staring faces - that broadly smile back when you smile at them. The youngest children play happily and carefree in the ‘street’ amongst the dust, ducks and windswept rubbish, with only a rare honking taxi-jeep to displace them. There are no toys, books and bicycles, nor anywhere to buy them. Some children have a home made sticks and ‘wheel’ (old pot or plate) toy. But there is community & a powerful neighbourly ethos. There is the usual group of men talking at the crossroads, whilst I also pass women scrubbing their shiny steel ‘breakfast’ pots and dishes or bent double in the patchwork fields. The warm sunshine reflects brightly on the brisk broad stream that we step stone-to-stone across, and then we briefly climb to the health centre, greeted by a handful of colourfully dressed patients.   The clinic runs smoothly. The broadly smiling, traditionally dressed, 6yr old...

A straightforward, rather cloudy, day of a busy clinic of 24 patients with many common local complaints. It even rained a little in the evening!   A wrist fracture, seen by the GP last week (and backslabbed), returned from the local hospital with a full (very large &    heavy!) plaster, for £20 - a huge amount for a villager.  A woman had a clinical diagnosis of hypothyroidism by the local hospital and had been to KTM where they had done lots of tests but NOT her thyroid!! She had all the records and wanted to know from me why she was not better! Sure enough she had classical myxoedema and simply needed the required blood test and the simple daily hormone replacement. She will have to take a 2 day taxi-jeep to get this. At least that is so much cheaper than her wasted expensive flights to ‘clever doctors’ in KTM!!  And a middle aged man has classical symptoms of chest TB - we refer him on to the local hospital 6 hours walk up the valley.  I politely dec...

After nine hours sleep (when do I ever sleep for nine hours?!) and a shave, we headed for clinic again: it seems the word has gotten around that I am here and we see thirty patients during a non-stop 7 hour clinic! Fortunately I bought some local biscuits to help us avoid the National disease of gastritis! (8p for 5 biscuits). We see the common cases of gastritis, colds, back pain, headaches and COPD but also see a likely fractured femur in a 10 month old (her sibling dropped her) & night blindness in a 6 yr old which is caused by common Vitamin A deficiency (and hopefully reversible). It is a sad reflection of the local poverty that the number of flies in the clinic gradually increases during the day.  The evening sunshine catches the brown sides of the tall mountains overlooking us, making them glow orange and creating a beautiful backdrop to the roadside balconies that we walk past on a short walk home.  The high rate of musculoskeletal pain reflects their very physical...

Another good teaching clinic of 20 patients including infantile wheeze, childhood pneumonia & uterine prolapse.   On the way ‘home’ we stop in the most basic of homes for some amazing roti (unleavened ground millet & water) baked on an open fire before us with a bowl of spicy spinach fried in mustard oil and salt. After a cup of tea, a rest and then supper, we follow our usual routine of my tutoring from 8-10pm, mainly using the cases from the day. The health supervisor translates for the ANM, whilst I try always to refer back to the excellent guidelines that PHASE have written for their rural staff (both in Nepalese and English). 

  How many adults can you fit on the back seat of a Jeep? I think there were six today - we gatecrashed a taxi-Jeep this morning just as it left Siba for the higher village of Jima, two hours walk away. The road to Jima arrived 6 months ago. It feels safe to use it, despite the precipice alongside.   We pay £3 each for the ride.  PHASE is here to give a health talk about general sanitation & personal care. About 30 women gather from the surrounding houses, which must be a large majority of this small village. We all sit on the stone roof of one of the large houses in the bright morning sunshine. Three men are on the fringe. It becomes an opportunity for one of the women to harangue the owners of a row of dwellings just above us: she is very unhappy that their rubbish blows down onto her fields below. But there is much good humour amongst the conversations too. The one pregnant woman amongst them (of two months) is not taking folic acid. After an hour or so we move on ...

Just finished 5hr clinic of 24 patients! Great for teaching & included the visiting Government Health Workers too. Nothing spectacularly unusual but all ages/sexes. One case of subcutaneous lumps with pigmented skin baffled us!   ?Weather is changing a bit with cloud and wind, & breakfast included an omelette!! A roll of thunder or two, but no rain! (It later became apparent that this was a common pattern of morning sunshine and late afternoon cloud and wind then clearing again at night.) 

There are no clinics today - the staff day ‘off’. Despite having never ridden a motorbike, the supervisor thinks it is a good idea for me to drive us on our morning trip to the local hot springs! It seems my long legs are decisive: he is very short! For me to learn on a helter-skelter dirt track with stones and a sheer drop alongside does not seem wise! But somehow we survived the three miles: we could have walked!   The sight of the deep, almost empty, algae bottomed ‘bath’ was not inspiring, despite the moderate stream of hot water flowing into it that created a hot shower one could bathe under. Rather, we shuffled our way past down to the fast flowing cold river below. I swam 30m or so downstream close to the edge, exhilarated by the coldness. Being a weak swimmer, my guide then explained that there are riverside hot pools 40m further downstream at the bend in the river. So I jump in again and semi-drift to the edge where the sulphur aroma appears. There is almost burning, hot w...

  Nepal! I am in a solo seat at the front of a tiny two engined prop plane with 20 Nepalese passengers flying to Lake Rara in the Western District of Mugu. The pilot is within a metre of me but behind a curtain, unlike last time I flew here in 2019 when you could watch his technique! We are flying over the dry forested foothills of the Himalayas as we climb to about 10,000 feet and then descend to a small sloping runway just below the deep blue lake. Cotton wool is provided as ear plugs for the engines are very loud. All the senses are stimulated: there are unsubtle oily fumes and the prop is also within a metre of me. I think as one gets older one’s mortality feels greater on these flights. Tragically a large prop plane crashed at Pokhara 2 months ago killing over 100 people: early reports suggest a technical failure of the feathering of the blades. A fellow passenger, working in Mugu for United Mission Rescue, was telling me of 14 people killed in a mudslide there in the October ...