Trekking in the Himalayas
The Himalayas are truly magical, I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone that you make at least one trip there during your lifetime. I did the Everest trek, which is one of the more touristy destinations, since lots of people seem to want to see the world's tallest mountain.

The trek up is really quite fantastic. Unbelievable views the whole time, with increasingly common glimpses of the great mountain and its plume of cloud, resulting from the fact that it is so tall that it sticks up into the jetstream.

The only downside to the process of gaining altitude is that you can't go more than 300m higher on any given day, or you get altitude sickness. Some days you do a fair hike anyway because you need to cover some horizontal distance, but other days you go up fairly steeply and get 300m higher in no time, so you have to stop. After many days of anticipation, it starts getting increasingly antsy to have to sit around and wait to acclimatize before doing the next leg.

So there I was on the last day's hike towards Everest Base Camp. I'd patiently acclimatized just the recommended way, but you never know how altitude is going to affect you, and sometimes the guidelines are too loose. One of the first signs of altitude sickness is headache and confusion, which I started getting on that day.

"Never mind," I thought, "I'm almost there, I'll just push it a bit and I'll be fine."

Well, I wasn't. I spent that night, all the next day, and the night after that in a filthy guesthouse, flat on my back, puking every 15 minutes, with explosive diarrhoea, and gasping desperately for breath. I had barely enough strength to stagger outside and find a new spot in which to evacuate the meagre contents of my guts before I collapsed back into bed. The whole time I felt like I was going to die of oxygen deprivation, and kept trying to take deeper and longer breaths, but my body was hyperventilating wildly and still not getting enough air.

I stubbornly kept thinking that I would acclimatize and recover, but by the end of the second sleepless night, I had had enough. I hadn't managed to set foot on Everest, but I was past caring, I just wanted to descend.

What was most incredible was the way I magically recovered as I walked downhill. It was like having the most unbelievable hangover of your life just lift away in the space of five minutes. I practically skipped down to the next rest stop!

The really strange thing was that the next day I climbed another mountain, Chukung Ri, which is the next one down from Everest though very much smaller. At the peak I was significantly higher than I had been during my attack of altitude sickness, and yet I felt fine!

The view from that point was so incredible, I will never forget it. The lanscape was so vast that I found my mind playing tricks trying to gain perspective. It seemed like I could reach out and touch the sand down below me, when I knew that what I was actually seeing were the huge boulders that I had walked past the day before.

So I've never actually been to Mount Everest, and I'm not sure that I ever will. But the mysterious blissfullness of those mountains was a far greater gift than standing on the world's tallest mountain could ever be, and I feel thoroughly blessed to have had the chance to experience their majesty.

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(arvana, Fri 22 Apr 2005, 3:27, Reply)