What Am I Doing Here? (2011)
What Am I Doing Here?
“ON YETI TRACKS This April, having spent the hottest part of the year in the Central Australian desert, I felt the urge to get out of that tired red country and clear my head among some mountains. I had always wanted to walk in the valleys around Mount Everest and remember, as a boy, going to a slide-lecture of the Hillary-Tensing climb and forming a very vivid impression of rivers rushing with snowmelt, bamboo bridges, forests of rhododendrons, Sherpa villages and yaks. I wanted to see the Tibe...tan Buddhist monasteries that lie on the Nepalese side of the frontier. As for the Yeti, I wanted to explore, at first hand, that nebulous area of zoology where the Beast of Linnaean classification meets the Beast of the Imagination.
From Sydney, I called my wife and told her, firmly, to meet me in Nepal.
‘I can’t,’ Elizabeth said in a dispirited voice. Her favourite aunt was having her ninetieth birthday party in Boston.
‘The offer’s open,’ I said. ‘Call me if you change your mind.’ ‘I’ve changed it.’ The Everest region is known as Khumbu Himal and to reach it you must either trek for a week over three high passes, or fly to Lukla where the airstrip tilts off the mountainside at an angle of 25°.MoreLess
From Sydney, I called my wife and told her, firmly, to meet me in Nepal.
‘I can’t,’ Elizabeth said in a dispirited voice. Her favourite aunt was having her ninetieth birthday party in Boston.
‘The offer’s open,’ I said. ‘Call me if you change your mind.’ ‘I’ve changed it.’ The Everest region is known as Khumbu Himal and to reach it you must either trek for a week over three high passes, or fly to Lukla where the airstrip tilts off the mountainside at an angle of 25°.MoreLess
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