Everest Every Day: Post 6

This morning we woke up at 5:15 am and were consequently very tired. We walked to the airport, but because we were a day early and on standby, they wouldn’t give us our boarding passes. However, it ended up not mattering because the sky became engulfed in clouds and only four planes were able to fly in before they closed the airport. While we waited, a small black dog came in and I played with it. We left and ate lunch, then returned and, after a lot of persuasion, managed to get a helicopter flight to Kathmandu. We were supposed to wait for twenty minutes for a helicopter, but we ended up waiting for 2.5 hours! It was odd because a helicopter landed for another group every couple of minutes even though we were there first, but it was never ours. Another odd thing was that there was a chicken in the landing pad! It didn’t even seem nervous at all! We finally got a helicopter and rode with a woman who had altitude sickness. Previously, we thought that we were flying with a young German woman with really wrinkly hands, but we were wrong. The view from the chopper was wonderful. There was a sea of dark green trees below us, but every once and a while I saw a bright red, yellow, or purple one as well. We flew over small and large villages and rocks covered with Tibetan flags. We went through valleys in the mountains and over the city, and once again Aba looked like he would die.

When we landed at the airport, the woman who was with us got taken away in an ambulance and we drove to the Dalai-la hotel in a car. After today’s fiasco, we had gotten there seven hours late. Ganesh’s wife called him, and he told her we were still in Lukla! We got to the hotel and took showers… Which was pure bliss. We ate dinner to the sound of lively Mexican music, did homework, and went to sleep.

5-1-19-1-14-1-2-4-26-1-3-13!