Getting Out of Lukla

After three days of trekking down from Gokyo Ri, which had been the last high destination of my trek, I finally crawled back into Lukla having had little food over the last week, spraining an ankle and being generally exhausted and run down. Trudging up the last long misty flight of roughly hewn stone steps to the archway that signaled the threshold to Lukla, I felt as though I was entering a long awaited home away from home. As rewarding and spectacular as my time in the high regions of the Himalaya had been, it had by far taken its toll and I was ready to recuperate. The prospect of making my way down the western coast of India, with Sophie, to the much talked about Goa - a tropical paradise from the sounds of it- was a dream I was holding on to. My tired eyes looked at the cold wet archway of Lukla as if it were signaling some magnificent accomplishment, holding beyond its threshold days of relief.

The weather was very poor that day and the deep green valley that I remembered seeing during my first week in Nepal, almost a month ago, was laid blind by the thick grey and ubiquitous cloud that draped the lower Himalaya. I thought nothing of it and breathlessly made my way to the lodge I had stayed in before. Dropping my bags and sleeping and eating. For the third time in two weeks I got sick, and two days later when my flight out of Lukla was supposed to take off, I stood in the airport all day with the constipated backload of grumbling passengers from previous days’ cancelled flights. Since my flight did not go that day, it meant that I was placed at the end of the back log, therefore, the next time the gods granted Lukla good weather, the people scheduled for that day would fly out and only after that days’ schedule was complete, would they start flying out the backlog of people, beginning with the first people who had missed their flight a couple of days before myself.

For the first two days the western mass was polite and complacent. By the third day, I had figured out the entire hierarchy of the Tara Airlines operation. The boss of the Lukla branch of Tara airlines was a short corpulent man, a strange sight among the characteristically thin Nepali population. Below him in rank were two ‘supervisors’ and below them a series of versatile ponds who filled in where needed. By the fourth day I was debating whether bribing the boss would actually do anything, when a couple of friends I had made shared with me a recent discovery.

Lukla airport comprised of three main rooms and one hallway lined with offices. The fist large room I walked into was a general area with bathrooms and a corner devoted to the sale of snacks and tea. Down a shallow flight of stairs led to the check-in counters and baggage check. This is where the most hopeful people would wait to get boarding passes and descend down the last flight of stairs to the ‘gate area’. a closed off area behind security that was starting to feel like some kind of promised land - promised by a false corpulent god. What my friends had discovered was that for the very few planes that did land each day the ‘Tea’ Lady who manned the snack stand in the first room was running out every time and renegotiating new manifests. We discovered that if one was so inclined, and had the right connections, AND THE MONEY, one could purchase a sold seat for three times the original price. Suddenly it made sense why she seemed so friendly with all of the Tara Airlines’ employees. I witnessed as an Australian couple watched their flight take off - FULL - while they were still waiting to check - in with ‘confirmed‘ seats. They were first in line the entire time and yet somehow the flight had ‘filled up’. By the fifth day two guys from Poland were so upset with the people at Tara Airlines that they threw one of Tara Airlines’ desk chairs through a window. In a reflecting rain of shattered glass the chair smashed into the tarmac below and stayed there for an hour before someone removed it.

For a people who believe in Karma, it wasn’t hard to spot the blasphemers.

On the seventh day I didn’t even go to the airport. I stayed in my lodge and chatted with a wonderful Australian couple the entire day. The weather was shit - I figured there was no reason to match my mood by sitting in the airport. In the evening, on a whim I went to the Tara Airlines’ office (something we were instructed to do every time we asked for help. This had led to nothing and seemed to be implemented only to placate the grumbling customers. On showing my tattered ticket, however, I was asked if I wanted to be on the first flight out, the next morning, to Rameschap.

“Is there a bus to Kathmandu from there?”

“Yes”

“How long is the ride?”

“12 hours”

“Yea, I’ll go to Raaameemsshappp --- wherever you said.”

“Check in, 7:15 am, second flight.”

At 7:00 am I watched the first flight take off into clear skies. The second one rolled in and I was first in line at the check-in counter. Hopeful and painfully anxious, I handed one of the supervisors my ticket, certain that this flight had to be the one I was getting on. He looked at it, and without looking at me, he said

“Not yet, next flight.”

I had heard this before. I had heard this many MANY times before. After being stuck in the tiny little town 3,000 meters up in the Himalaya for eight days, watching nothing but the uninterrupted triumph of greed and corruption, being unable to eat, and spending each night hoping that I’d be able to sleep the whole night without getting sick, I had felt as though I’d reached a bit of an impass with how much I was willing to put up with. I said it to myself, but loud enough so that everyone in the near and crowded vicinity could hear what it was. Anyone reading this right now certainly would have thought it, and most of you would have joined me in saying it, because, when you’re faced with a situation as paralyzing as mine - feeling like a fish in a bucket and all you want is the sea, only one thing comes to mind, and at that moment it came to my lips.

“What the FUCK!”

The Nepali man who had told me ‘next flight’ looked up from the ticket he was looking at and anger brimmed over the lens of his glasses.

“DON YOU SAY THAT WORD!”

He paused, paralyzed with anger. I was taken aback, feeling simultaneously embarrassed but also restraining the enormous impulse to laugh. The only thing that went through my head was Hey, look at that! I got a reaction!
 “ALWAYS THIS WORD! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK! ALWAYS, YOU PEOPLE FEEL YOU NEED TO SAY THIS WORD! DON SAY THIS WORD, EVER! YOU PEOPLE, YOU BRING THIS WORD FROM YOUR COUNTRY, BUT YOU ARE IN NEPAL! KEEP THAT WORD IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY!”

I bit my lip, I bit my lip hard and swallowed the convulsion to laugh. Here this man was, an integral part of the most corrupt organization I’ve had the opportunity to witness on such a detailed level, making thousands of dollars a day off of the desperation of trekkers who for fear of missing international connections were succumbing to the opulent, corrupt costs, and he was giving me a morality lecture on the use of profanity? Oh, this is good, I thought. I held his gaze for a moment and then responded.

“Well, airplanes also came from my country, and if it weren’t for that, you wouldn’t have a job.”

He looked back down at the ticket he’d been looking at, and when, a moment later, the Tara Airlines’ employee at the next kiosk called my ticket number (unbeknownst to me), the man in front of me instantly recognized it and ferried me over to get immediately checked in.

Profanity exists for a good reasons.

That low grade piece of shit card paper that my boarding pass was printed on felt like a sheet of gold in my hands. I hurried through security after throwing my bag in the right pile and entered the forbidden holding room. How pathetic, I thought, I’m actually ENTHRALLED with what this room looks like…I’ve been in Lukla way too long.
 When, ten minutes later, my flight was called and I found myself running across the open tarmac towards a small one engine prop plane, painted green and white and tipped with the floppy Tara Airlines’ ‘star’ logo, I felt as I imagine a prisoner does upon waking and finding all the guards handcuffed in a vindictive pile. I scanned the people lining the fence to see if the Australian couple I had become friends with were watching. Hyperventilating, I crawled up into the plane with my pack, squeezing myself in so that just barely, they could slide the door shut. Ten people in all, including the pilot fit into the plane and I thought to myself that Sardine Can had never been more appropriate. The single engine buzzed and then buzzed louder - this engine simply wasn’t going to roar, no matter how much fire it was fed. Nonetheless it perked up the plane and pulled it out onto the runway. The pilot pressed the breaks and made the engine buzz just a little bit louder before letting its long smooth winged teeth have at the mountain air. The tilt of the little plane was so high and the runway was sloped so far down that all I could see through the cockpit window in front of me was clear bright morning sky.

Lukla airport is said to be the world’s most dangerous airport, averaging one crash a year. (In 64 years of operation there have been 63 crashes) A fact that I did not learn until after I had flown into the airport a month earlier. When, on approach, a month earlier, I had looked over the pilot’s shoulder to get a peek at the runway, I’d said “You’ve got to be joking” and thought Holy Shit and Hell Yea!, all simultaneously. Staring up at the sky through that cockpit as the little plane put putted down the runway, I knew that we were headed for a cliff edge. I looked at the wing just outside my window. The sheet metal riveted to the frame rattled and shuddered and I said a prayer to the god of aerodynamics. Luckily, all of the risk for crashing is with landing at Lukla and almost none of the crashes had been on take-off.

I always feel a rush when a plane veers up and lifts up on to invisible tracks of air. I remember clearly when I took off from Boston, and everything - the hope for adventure, fear of the future, and the memory of everyone I’m leaving pulling at me - condensed into one moment. That similar electricity of emotion was with me but this time it was something more as Lukla shrank in isolation behind me.

The Nepali people as a whole impressed upon me a wonderful picture. Their kindness and harmony with their lives seems to give them an almost meditative quality. The steadfast porters, carrying unfathomable conglomerations of weight exemplified this immensely and it was as if the culture is without complaint. This compassion is, of course best exemplified for me by my experience with Sanjay Kulung.

But, as with every country and every place, there are the kind and then there are also the crass. I couldn’t have been happier for my time in Lukla to be over.

Once in Rameschap, I took off my coat and bore my face upwards to feel the heat of the sun, the air hot for the first time in weeks. How my childhood days in Florida have branded me to be at odds with the cold forever. I quickly found the bus and asked the bus driver if I could sit on top of the bus with all the luggage. He waved his hands upwards and I clamored up the ladder on the back of the bus and finagled myself between a guy from Spain and the inside edge of the luggage rack. I found myself sitting on steel bars that were unfortunately spaced. I knew it was going to hurt, but I knew it would be better than being on the inside after the horrors I’d heard of with regards to Nepali bus travel.

The ride was everything one could wish for in a scenic mountain drive. How did I phrase it in my journal? It was like watching the more scenic parts of an Indiana Jones movie while continuously achieving the sorest ass that memory or imagination could recall. I didn’t care terribly. I was happy to be out of Lukla and on my way. I knew that soon I would be in Kathmandu, with a good room, shower, food, and soon after that India with a good friend already waiting.

One of the friends I had made in Lukla was in the bus behind mine and when at the end of the night we sat in an Irish pub in Kathmandu recounting the journey, he said I’d looked like a scene from ‘Into The Wild’

“the one where he’s just left, and he just looks free. You looked so free up there on that bus.”