On Namche and Ageing

On Namche and Ageing

Everest Base Camp the Lazy Way Day 17: Tengboche to Namche

We moved our flights out of Lukla forward to accommodate extra rest and acclimatisation days. Now, for some bizarre reason about which Nir is vague, we are unable to move them back one day, so are stuck with the leisurely schedule we agreed earlier.

I’d be inclined to get up early and make tracks forthwith for Kathmandu, but Zac is happy with this gentle amble.

As we descend, now firmly below the treeline, in a world that’s shading from the dull dark greens and browns of autum into blues and vivid greens – yes, even in December! – our pace is slowed by a gadzillion cuddly critters.

The kitten we met on the way up has grown, there are a ton of baby yakalos and even baby chicks, not to mention rocks and walls to climb.

“You know what?” Zac says. “My coat doesn’t feel heavy at all at this altitude. On the Cho-La, it felt like it weighed a tonne.”

Me? Well, I am tired of smelling like a vagrant, desperate for a hot shower, a proper wash and a change into the top, cardigan, leggings and clean underwear I had the foresight to leave in Namche on our way up for laundry.

The walk is beautiful, but repetitive – even for us, who went over the Cho-La pass rather than the straight-in, straight-out route to Everest Base Camp – and yak and mule trains make the path uncomfortably busy after the quiet of the high mountains.

Namche, though, is super-exciting. And when I find that the chap I met on the mountain has replied to my text, I revert, rapidly, to age fourteen, which is to say, roughly two years older than my son.

While my love life hasn’t been quite the desert it might appear from this blog, there hasn’t been much action since we left the Middle East and I have WAY, WAY, WAY too much time on my hands.

It is a sorry measure of my general lack of desire for further cultural immersion that when I arrive at our lodge to find an entire posse of Tibetan Buddhist monks engaged in some lengthy blessing ceremony of, I believe, a new stove, I ignore the chanting, beads, ritualistic sipping of snacks and other stuff, and focus exclusively on a shower.

I pay 500 rupees for a room including bathroom and use of the shower, a separate item from the one in our bathroom, which, like most showers in the Everest region, appears to be entirely decorative. Immersing myself in the scalding water, I scrub away with the cleanser and shampoo I also left in Namche until I’m pink and gleaming and all the ingrained dirt has gone.

It is difficult to explain how very, very good this feels.

It’s warm enough, at least when I’ve had the shower running for the last half hour and warming the surrounding air, for me to apply moisturiser, condition my hair and put vaseline on the flakiest bits of myself.

I don clean leggings, clean knickers, a clean bra, a clean T-shirt and a clean cardigan, all of which I’ve had the foresight to leave in Namche for laundry. I smell of absolutely nothing but soap and moisturiser, and brave the temperatures in flip flops rather than crunchy socks.

As I head up to the moneychangers to pick up the cash advance I need to pay Nir, I feel positively decadent. Even the absence of bacon does not darken my mood. Two days from now we’ll be in Kathmandu! Bright lights! Big city! And…

We did it! Slowly. But we did it.

Some kids we met up the mountain are staying at our lodge. I have a couple of beers with them, while Zac indulges in some long overdue internet time and a bit of discreet bragging to sundry adults who are debating the wisdom of attempting the Cho-La Pass.

They’re still at uni.

How did this happen? When I was first seriously going out in London, strutting to the head of the queue at the Atlantic and bouncing between speakeasies underneath Soho sex shops, illegal afterhours parties like Dirtbox and allegedly legal Sunday morning discotheques like Trade, I was still at uni.

So I was always pretty much the youngest person in these rarefied social circles. Lissom, eighteen, desperately naïve and awkward, but with the lean figure and strong features that landed me in modelling shoots, I was the little one, the one that people made allowances for.

Particularly, with the benefit of hindsight, male people.

Two decades later, these people could be my children. They’re the young and beautiful ones. I’m the apparently sophisticated older one. It’s odd. A disconnect. A crossing over to the other side, and I’m aware, now that this crossover will happen again, and again, at 50, at 65, at 80, until I’m a reprobate ancient, a type I have appreciated since I was a child.

I don’t particularly mind it, but it’s like the lines that assail me when I make the mistake of looking in the mirror we have here in sophisticated Namche.

Where did they come from? I think. Where the HELL did they come from?

I remember a conversation with my grandmother, about how surprised she was when she looked in the mirror, because she always expected to see her younger self looking back, and I know, again, even through the windburn, exactly what she meant.

And, I also know there’ll be a time when I look in the mirror again, and this time when I could hike up bloody mountains and pass for 30 through beer goggles or mountain goggles, will seem almost unimaginably young.

Meanwhile, I am endeavouring – with no mean success: go me! – to transform the soldier’s texts into billet doux from a romance like something out of Jane Austen, or (better) Emily Brontë, or at the very least, a straight-to-video mid-90s rom com most likely starring Sandra Bullock.

Given the raw material I have to work with, this is a veritable triumph of self-deception, the veil of which slips only when he makes a bold attempt to deploy the comma.

We lady writerly types are good at self-deception – it’s the creativity, you know? — one reason among many that we generally end up dying alone and being eaten by our cats.

You can read the last post in this series on our Everest Base Camp trek here, read the next post here, or start from the beginning here.

If you’re thinking of doing the Everest Base Camp trek, I recommend my Everest Base Camp FAQs.