The younger members of our trekking group had to bargain extensively with their school teachers to be released from the classroom for the whole month of October. John, Richard’s 14 year old son, promised his teachers many pages of geometry problems, an essay about a notable figure from history, analysis of works of classic literature, and on top of all that, a science project. The scientific study John chose would measure the cognitive and physiological effects of the high elevation of the Himalayas on the nine members of our hiking group over 4 weeks and over 18,000 feet of elevation gain. You can imagine that it was a large undertaking, and the real challenge ultimately was to manage all the variables and to find a way to relate the large amount of data to a solid hypothesis.

One of the factors of an authentic camping experience, next to a leaky tent and sliding downhill in your sleeping bag, is to be swarmed with ferocious deep forest mosquitoes. Amazingly, as we were trekking in the Khumbu we had practically no bugs to worry about. There was no kamikaze buzzing at our ears and no creepy things crawling on our noses in the middle of the night. Looking back now it was an amazing phenomenon that we didn’t see any bugs, not even any flies. Considering some of the sanitation in the region you would expect to see a lot of unpleasant infestations, especially in the yak dung and in the lavatory facilities. Now I’m really curious how the mosquitoes, flies, earwigs and centipedes totally missed this corner of the world. My uncle Alan claims that flies are incapable of flight above 12,000 feet because of issues with aerodynamics, but I’m not sure about that. But the fact is that at Namche and above I didn’t see or even think about any bugs.