This weekend I stopped by to visit some family in the area and I was excited to report on my experiences from Nepal. I brought along a few tapes of digital video I had shot over the month, and I figured the best way to describe the whole adventure was to show them the footage. That’s a treat I’ll have for this website some day soon, but there are a lot of wobbly miscues I need to edit out first. I’d like to convey the true sense of the surroundings to them, with all the sounds and smells, but watching all of the video for the first time it seemed far removed from the muggy heat of Bangkok and the sense of dread of climbing the hill above Namche. Maybe with some editing magic and some extra action scenes I’ll be able to enhance the sense of immersion.

The funny thing is that I neglected to bring the most engaging part of the documentary, that is the tape that shows our trek above Namche and the surreal views beyond Lobuche. They practically booed me out of their house and told me to come back when I was ready to show them something better. As a matter of fact, they weren’t convinced I even left the country. They figured I had pulled up a van to the Salt Lake City International Airport, then slipped off to some weird city like Reno, Nevada and staged the rest of the hoax in the Little Kathmandu section of the city. They say it was easy for me to fake the hectic city traffic because, as they say, “You know those crazy Nevada drivers!” I could easily fake all the prayer wheels and mani stones because the hills out there in Nevada are crawling with hippies and hermits. So the burden is on me to prove that I actually left the United States to find such extraordinary scenes. I wish the video did better at capturing the feelings I was having. Maybe they’d believe me if I brought over some old laundry we still have sealed up in our duffel bags.