I don’t know which piece of good news to share with your first. I guess I’ll postpone some of my self-promotion and give you an update on our good friend Pema. He keeps himself busy from fall to spring hiking the steep Khumbu trails of his home neighborhood in Nepal and tends to maintaining his prosperous lodges. You can be sure that he gets quite enthused when summer comes along and the heavy monsoon rain make his trekking business impractical. He absolutely loves getting out and traveling the world in the summers, as he has been doing for many years. He has made so many friends across the far corners of the globe that it takes him all summer to dash around and drop in for quick visits. For now he’s in the eastern United States, and by the end of the summer he’ll whip through here on his way to California. I suggested that either he has too many friends to visit or he should find more excuses to get away from Nepal.

Are you spontaneous like me when it comes to adjusting your day’s plans, or your lifetime destiny for that matter? Let me clarify a little; I’m a Space Cadet when it comes to making a plan and I’ve just adapted to being very flexible and minimally invested in setting my itinerary. One December I arranged for some extended time off from work to allow for a far away visit home. I thought I had prepared just sufficiently for my travels by clicking enough buttons on an airline reservation website, and I had shuffled a few official memos around my office to arrange for my absence. Literally the day I was planning to fly out I realized I didn’t actually have an airline reservation at all. I thought it was a little mysterious that my credit card was never charged and I never received any kind of confirmation. To some this might have been a devastating realization and a startling rebuke to take more personal responsibility.

Happy New Year and be safe!

I know it may seem I’m repaving the old pathways up through the Khumbu trek with my review of the villages and sights from last October. Yes, it’s entirely true that I’m passing through all of the same trails in my mind and mentioning a lot of familiar areas and ideas from before, but consider that this is now the time to look back on the experience and draw out deeper impressions of our experiences trekking in Nepal and perhaps to remember it more the way I want to rather than how it really happened. In any case the real benefit is just to make sure I adequately covered all the angles and experiences to bulk out the overall coverage of this blog and to give a complete collection on the topic to keep the search engines fully engaged in this site. If I repeat myself enough times I’ll get the details right and the site crawlers will finally figure out this is a blog about travel in the exotic land of the Ghurka tribes and has nothing to do about alcoholism counseling. I mentioned alcohol in one entry and for a month I was drawing ad slots about booze and interventions and mormon.org. Anyone following me during that time may have wondered why I wrote “Trekking in Nepal! Trekking in Nepal! Trekking in Nepal!...” for days on end. I was sending a subtle message to try to place myself in the travel listings instead of among the 12-step program industry.

Today I’ve been scrubbing through our group’s combined collection of photos from our trip through Taipei, Bangkok, Kathmandu, and our trekking to see Mt. Everest. There were 3 or 4 digital cameras between us, I was taping onto digital video, and the Strange’s brought an actual film camera (they must have borrowed from a museum). It’s wonderful looking through all of the old scenes with the perspective of a little distance, and so many of the sights were amazing and unforgettable. Of course we have probably hundreds of landscape photos featuring white-capped mountain peaks. Along our hikes we had to stop around every new turn in the trail because we would get another spectacular view. There were also a lot of memorable people we met and there were a few yaks that left an impression on us. A lot of the pictures were of us relaxing and having fun, so those must have been after we had rested and gotten warm from the day’s hike. There’s just so much to tell in the pictures, and I could go on for quite a while on many of them. Maybe I’ll feature photos here on the blog and give a little back story. In any case, I have prepared and uploaded a selection of the 200 finest photos for you to view in the SherpaTrek Gallery, along with some stunning wallpapers.