Editor's note: These entries were written in a field notebook during the trek and transcribed after the author returned to Kathmandu. Spelling and punctuation have been lightly corrected. The altitude figures are from a Garmin GPS unit.
The notebook pages are warped from condensation. My handwriting deteriorates above 4,500 metres — something about the hypoxia makes fine motor control the first casualty. These are the notes I managed to keep on the way to Everest Base Camp, written in teahouses and tents and once, memorably, while sitting on a rock in a snowstorm because I had nowhere else to be.
I want to say upfront that the Everest Base Camp trek is not a technical climb. You do not need crampons. You do not need an ice axe. You do not need to be an experienced mountaineer. What you need is time — the acclimatisation schedule demands it — and a tolerance for discomfort that goes beyond what most people encounter in ordinary life. The altitude is not a metaphor. It is a physical reality that will slow you down, give you headaches, disrupt your sleep, and occasionally make you wonder why you came.
I came because I had wanted to see Everest since I was nine years old and read a library book about the 1953 expedition. I am thirty-four now. It took me twenty-five years to get here. The mountain was worth the wait.
The Lukla airport is the most alarming runway I have ever landed on. It is 527 metres long, ends at a stone wall, and sits on a slope so that aircraft land uphill and take off downhill. The pilot of our Twin Otter touched down with complete confidence and I tried to match his energy. I did not entirely succeed.
Lukla itself is a single street of teahouses, gear shops, and bakeries that exist entirely to serve trekkers. We spent forty minutes there, ate dal bhat that was better than it had any right to be, and started walking. The trail drops from Lukla into the Dudh Koshi valley — a river gorge of extraordinary beauty, the water a milky turquoise from glacial silt, the walls rising steeply on both sides. Prayer flags everywhere. Mani stones stacked into walls along the trail. The sound of the river constant and loud.
We reached Phakding in three hours. I felt fine. My guide, Dawa, told me I would feel fine for the first two days. He said this in a tone that implied the third day would be different.
Namche Bazaar is the capital of the Khumbu — a horseshoe-shaped town built into a steep hillside, its coloured buildings stacked above each other like a Himalayan amphitheatre. It has a bakery that sells cinnamon rolls, a bar that shows Premier League football, and a gear shop where you can buy a down jacket for a price that suggests it fell off a truck somewhere between Kathmandu and here. It is also where the altitude begins to matter.
I woke at 3am with a headache that sat behind my eyes like a slow, insistent pressure. Not severe — I have had worse hangovers — but persistent and unmistakable. I took half an ibuprofen, drank a litre of water, and lay in the dark listening to the wind come off the mountains. The headache faded by morning. Dawa said this was normal. He said the acclimatisation day in Namche — a rest day with a short hike to higher altitude and back — was not optional.
We hiked up to the Everest View Hotel at 3,880 metres in the afternoon. From the terrace, on a clear day, you can see Everest for the first time — a black pyramid above the other peaks, identifiable by the plume of cloud that streams from its summit in the jet stream. I stood there for a long time. It looked very far away and very high. Both of these things are true.
The notebook pages are warped from condensation. My handwriting deteriorates above 4,500 metres — something about the hypoxia makes fine motor control the first casualty.
Above Tengboche the landscape changes. The trees thin and then disappear. The valley opens into a wide, high plain of brown grass and grey rock, the scale suddenly enormous, the sky a shade of blue that does not exist at sea level. Dingboche sits at the junction of two valleys — the Imja Khola and the Lobuche Khola — and on a clear evening you can see Ama Dablam from the teahouse window, its south ridge catching the last light.
My SpO2 reading tonight: 82%. At sea level it would be 98-99%. The pulse oximeter has become a ritual — first thing in the morning, last thing at night, a number that tells you how well your body is adapting to air that contains roughly half the oxygen it did in Kathmandu. 82% is acceptable. Below 75% is when Dawa would start talking about descent.
Sleep is the hardest part. The body's breathing slows during sleep, which means oxygen levels drop further. I wake two or three times a night, gasping slightly, heart racing, the tent walls pressing in. It is not dangerous — it is called periodic breathing and it is a normal altitude response — but it is deeply unpleasant and it means that every morning I feel less rested than the night before. Dawa says this improves. I am taking his word for it.
Altitude Warning
Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) can affect anyone above 2,500 m regardless of fitness. Symptoms include headache, nausea, fatigue, and disturbed sleep. The only reliable treatment is descent. Never ascend with AMS symptoms. Carry a pulse oximeter and know your baseline SpO2 before you leave Kathmandu.
The trail from Dingboche to Lobuche crosses the lateral moraine of the Khumbu Glacier — a long, grinding climb over loose rock and ice-polished boulders, the glacier itself invisible below the moraine wall. The memorials are here: stone cairns and plaques for climbers who died on Everest and the surrounding peaks, hundreds of them, stretching along the ridge. I stopped at several. Some of the names I recognised. Most I did not. All of them had come here for the same reason I had, and some of them had not come back.
Lobuche is a grim place in the way that all high-altitude camps are grim: a cluster of stone teahouses with thin walls and thinner mattresses, the wind constant, the temperature dropping to -15 °C overnight. The food is simple — dal bhat, noodle soup, boiled potatoes — and it is the best food I have ever eaten because at 4,940 metres your body is burning calories at a rate that makes everything taste like a gift.
All of them had come here for the same reason I had, and some of them had not come back.
We left Lobuche at 5am. The trail crosses the Khumbu Glacier — the actual glacier, not the moraine — a surreal landscape of ice towers called seracs, meltwater pools of impossible blue, and boulders the size of houses deposited by the glacier's slow movement. The trail is marked with cairns. In places it is not entirely clear where the trail is. Dawa walked ahead without hesitation. I followed his footsteps exactly.
Gorak Shep, the last settlement before Base Camp, is at 5,164 metres. We stopped for tea and I tried to eat a biscuit. My appetite had been declining for three days — another altitude symptom, the body diverting resources away from digestion. I ate half the biscuit and drank two cups of sweet black tea and felt approximately human. Then we walked the final two hours to Base Camp.
Base Camp in April is a city. Hundreds of tents in the expedition colours of every nation that has ever sent climbers to Everest — yellow, orange, red, blue — spread across the glacier in a sprawl that looks chaotic from a distance and reveals itself as organised when you are inside it. Ropes, ladders, oxygen cylinders, satellite dishes. The Khumbu Icefall rises above the camp, a frozen chaos of seracs and crevasses that the climbing Sherpas fix with ropes and aluminium ladders every season. It is the most dangerous section of the standard route. From Base Camp it looks beautiful and terrible in equal measure.
I sat on a rock at 5,364 metres and looked at Everest. The summit was clear — no plume, no cloud, just the black pyramid against a sky so dark it was almost purple. I had been looking at photographs of this view since I was nine years old. The photographs do not capture the scale, or the cold, or the quality of the silence — a silence that is not the absence of sound but the presence of something much larger than sound.
I wrote in my notebook: "Here. Finally here. The mountain is real." My handwriting was terrible. The altitude had done its work. But the words were right.
The Walk Down
The descent from Base Camp to Lukla takes three days. After nine days of climbing, the body moves downhill with a relief that is almost physical joy. The headaches lift. The appetite returns. By Namche I was eating two plates of dal bhat at dinner and sleeping eight hours without waking. By Lukla I felt, for the first time in two weeks, entirely myself.
There is a question people ask when you come back from a place like this: was it worth it? The headaches, the sleepless nights, the cold, the expense, the weeks away from ordinary life. I find the question difficult to answer not because the answer is complicated but because it assumes that worth is the right measure. The mountain does not care whether it was worth it. It was there before you arrived and it will be there after you leave. What changes is not the mountain.
What changes is the size of the world you carry inside you. Before I went, Everest was a photograph and a number — 8,849 metres, the highest point on earth. Now it is a smell (glacier ice and yak dung and juniper smoke), a sound (the crack of a serac calving in the night), a feeling (the specific weight of cold air in lungs that are working harder than they ever have). It is real in a way that photographs cannot make it real.
My notebook is on my desk as I write this, the pages still warped, the handwriting still deteriorating as the altitude climbs. I have been back in Kathmandu for four days. I am already thinking about going back.
Priya Nair
Contributing Writer
Priya Nair is a writer and trekker based in Mumbai. She has trekked in the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Atlas Mountains, and writes about altitude, endurance, and the particular clarity that comes from being very far from anywhere familiar. The Everest Base Camp trek was her twelfth Himalayan route.
