Before I left for Nepal I read through a number of weblog reports from the travelers trekking in the mountains ahead of me. The exciting accounts were from the hectic taxi rides through the city, the wonderful food, and the great fun making friends with the Sherpas. All of that was fine, but I became fixated on the minor detail of how all trekkers to the Khumbu practically have to crash land into the Lukla airstrip in an outmoded propeller plane from an airline named after a mountainous myth, Yeti Airlines. Richard was probably fabricating a little of his own myth too when he described the extreme conditions and the terror of every flight, how pilots would roll the dice with every approach for the sheer challenge against the terrain. I was pretty nervous on the early morning that we crammed our baggage and our bodies into the small airframe and rumbled down the runway. Getting airborne was a good first accomplishment for us, considering all the gear we had with us. Remember, we also had a couple of huge duffel bulging with extra jackets and school supplies we were going to donate along the way. Of course I remembered the maxim that falling/crashing doesn’t hurt until the last part.

One of the joys for our trekking group was meeting all of the children along the trails. In each village there would be a small group of them together watching the hikers pass by. Sometimes they would give us a “namaste”, but usually they were very shy and would just keep to themselves. Seeing children sitting outside in the sunlight is actually a rare sight for us because kids here are either at school, in the living room watching television, or at the computer. An American youngster couldn’t stand to loiter outside for no purpose over an extended period of time. The younger members of our group (well, not to be a hypocrite, I include myself in this) went out of their minds with all of the long stretches without diversions. It’s not that the Sherpa children had made a lifestyle choice, there probably just wasn’t anything useful for them to do. They were enjoying their temporary relief from the kind of hard work their parents were doing. On occasion we saw children who were not much older (starting about 10 years old) who were hauling loads and starting their lifetime of hard work.