Everest Base Camp- Piercing Peaks, Breathless Trails and Sherpas Stories By The Fire

“What do you mean you cannot see Mount Everest from the Everest Base Camp?”

- Tunali Mukherjee

I asked Rigzin, my trek leader, who flashed one of his disarming smiles in response. Day two of the Everest Base Camp (EBC) trek—and it was only just sinking in that I had voluntarily embarked on a 10-day trip that takes me up to a height of 17,389 feet across 130 kilometres of mountain terrain with a 10-kilo backpack. All this, only to reach a destination from where I cannot even see the mountain the trek was named after! I looked around at my fellow trekkers, determinedly huffing their way uphill. Are they aware of this… treachery? I had assumed that the world’s highest mountain would be a dominant figure in the Himalayan skyline, towards which we’d be marching—a fleece-clad army high on yak milk. Standing at 29,029 feet, she is Chomolungma (‘Holy Mother’) in Tibet, Sagarmatha in Nepal, and the reason why around 800 people risk their lives each year in their attempt to reach the top of the world. Obviously, I had underestimated the lofty eight-thousanders that surround Mount Everest, obscuring her from one’s direct line of vision. The Solukhumbu district in northeast Nepal, home to the summit, has four of the highest mountains on Earth. Locals here wake up to sights that people from the plains spend lifetimes chasing.