Sights and Sounds from Everest Base Camp Trek

Moun­tain Mad­ness guide Shayan Rohani called in with the fol­low­ing live update from Nepal:

This is Shayan call­ing in from Ding­boche on our first spring Ever­est Base Camp Trek. So far every­thing is going exceed­ing­ly well.

We had some inter­est­ing weath­er try­ing to get into Luk­la, and end­ed up hir­ing a heli­copter in order to arrive on sched­ule. How­ev­er, the heli­copter wasn’t able to land in Luk­la, so we overnight­ed with the crew in Lami­dan­da, which is a small hill vil­lage on the way. Here we encoun­tered some very sweet peo­ple in the vil­lage who made us the most deli­cious Nepali dumplings (momos) I’ve ever had. The next morn­ing we were greet­ed with clear skies, and a ride all the way to Phakd­ing, where we were sup­posed to spend the night on our sched­ule, so we were back on track and trekked our way to Namche.

Heli­copter in Lami­dan­da. Shayan Rohani photo

Mak­ing momos in Lami­dan­da. Shayan Rohani photo

I have some audio clips from our city tour and trek that I hope you’ll enjoy.

The first is a col­or­ful scene we encoun­tered on the Mon­key Tem­ple tour. It was a cel­e­bra­tion for a Hin­du god, where there was feed­ing of locals, and Sadu was play­ing music for singing and danc­ing along. The smil­ing faces were a relief from the dev­as­ta­tion wit­nessed in Kath­man­du, still present from last year’s earthquake.

Next is the sound of yaks wear­ing bells as they lum­ber along the trail, car­ry­ing all of our things we thank­ful­ly don’t have to car­ry ourselves.

~MM Guide Shayan Rohani