WAKING UP IN THE KHUMBU VALLEY
On failing to make the summit — and what I found instead

I went to the Himalayas with my head full of mountaineering books. I had three weeks, a carefully planned itinerary and a summit in my sights. I came back nursing a bruised ego and wondering what the journey had actually been about. It was only later, reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, that I began to make sense of it.

I.

I sat at a table for one, watching a Sherpa carry my breakfast to me on a tray. He walked slowly across the moraine, trying not to spill my coffee. The wait was awkward and colonial. I realised that I didn’t even know his name. 

Should I have gone over and taken the tray from him? In the nausea of altitude sickness, it didn’t seem a good idea. Base camp was empty. My teammates were high above me, climbing the ice wall on Island Peak, a 6,200-metre mountain in the shadow of Everest.

I had signed up with a British expedition company, and in just three weeks of holiday from work, I was set to climb my first Himalayan peak.

Beyond Namche Bazaar, I felt nauseous and the headaches began. The Dal Bhat at the teahouses turned from comfort to trial. I wanted a day’s rest to acclimatise, but the schedule was too tight. We only had one spare day, and it was reserved for emergencies. I had always been strong in the mountains, but my experience in the Alps seemed to count for little here. 

The group, mostly British climbers, coped better than I did. Conversation revolved around work, previous adventures, current fitness. I was physically in Nepal but mentally I’d not left Britain. 

Just after Dingboche, we left the Everest Base Camp trail and climbed Pokalde, a 5,806-metre trekking peak, in time for a dawn cloud inversion over the whole Khumbu Valley. It was the sort of view mountaineers treasure. I witnessed it, and threw up on the climb to summit.

I told myself I felt sick because I was the only person in the group not taking Diamox. I told myself altitude sickness was a lottery. I told myself that even famous climbers had suffered from altitude sickness in the Himalayas. I told myself I would feel better soon. None of it helped.

The evening before the summit bid, I could not walk in a straight line to the toilet tent. Fearing something worse, I pulled out of the expedition. My English guide was disappointed. In the way a father might say he was ‘disappointed’.

I’d fallen off a conveyor belt that was moving too fast.

My tent mate left at 2 a.m., and I wished him luck. Later, I learned he collapsed on the summit and had to be lowered down the fixed ropes on the mountain.

II.

I packed up my gear as the Sherpas ate breakfast in a huddle. I told them I was walking down to Dingboche to lose some altitude. Pema filled up my water bottles and said he would walk with me.

Until then, Nepal had been mediated through the expedition. Walking down with Pema, that arrangement fell away.

We walked in silence until he asked me “do you have a religion?”. I told him no, but I had started to meditate with a local Zen group. Pema told me he followed Tibetan Buddhism, which worships a litany of old animist mountain gods and Buddhist deities. In the imposing valley where we were dwarfed by foreboding 8,000-metre peaks, one could sense that something other than humans are in charge here. Mountain gods seemed appropriate. I could see why Pema had no truck with Zen. 

I flopped on a rock and gazed at the ice-fluted pyramid of Ama Dablam. In European expedition brochures, it is marketed as ‘the Matterhorn of the Himalayas.’ I had studied diagrams of the routes. I knew where high camps were, where the crux pitch lay, and that you could book it as a four-week expedition.

Then I remembered something. Our expedition had skipped the traditional Puja—the ceremony where juniper is burned, ropes and ice axes and ropes are blessed and climbers ask the mountain spirits for safe passage and permission to climb. We had flown in, sorted our gear, and marched straight into the home of old gods.

I mentioned this to Pema. He gave a shrug. “Yes, it’s common now,” he said softly. “Groups are in a rush. But it is disrespectful. And unlucky.”

I might have pondered how western enlightenment thinking, with its empirical reason and the subjugation of nature, clashes with traditional Tibetan view of the land as living and sacred.

But all I wanted was lunch. 

III.

A decade has passed. While the others in the group have their summit photos, I kept an image of an eye painted on a stupa above Namche Bazaar. A compassionate eye watching over us all.

When I got home, I dug out my copy of Siddhartha. Flipping through the final pages, a line jumped out that made sense of everything that had unravelled in the Khumbu:

“When someone seeks,” Hesse writes, “it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing he is looking for, and he becomes incapable of finding anything... because he always thinks only of what he is looking for, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal.”

I had gone to the Himalayas blinded by seeking. It was only when altitude sickness stripped away my ambitions that the real journey began.

Walking down to Dingboche with Pema, empty-handed and stripped of achievement, was the first time I felt genuinely free. Looking back it was a small, humiliating death of the ego, followed immediately by the simple, miraculous appetite for hot tea and Dal Bhat.

These days, when I go to the mountains, I’m in the huddle - making coffee with my hosts instead of waiting for it to be carried to me. Physically there. Actually there. 

Read the Book:
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse