The Himalayas Pt. 2 - Pain, Suffering and Worse

After talking about all that stink hanging on me from traveling, it was a rather big pain in the behind to come back to Kathmandu and find that the hot water was off in our hotel. Ugh! It's a strange city like that, with things not always working the way they should, or being "scheduled" to be off at the worst possible times. In fact, the power is usually turned off from sun down till about 7 or 8 each night, right when people need it the most. The city has about 3 or 4 seconds of complete darkness, before every generator in town is fired up and putting out electricity again. Some places only use candles, though the mix makes for quite an unusual sight.

The city shuts down around 10pm as well, though by 8 or 9 you already get the feeling maybe it's time to get home. The streets go from bustling busy shopping centres to being extremely deserted and locked down. The first night in town I was shocked when I woke up at 1am to use the washroom and could hardly hear a sound outside the hotel window. Other than the stray dogs, there was absolutely nothing moving outside.

Anyway, back to the mountains. Most people are pretty aware of altitude sickness, but it's quite another thing to actually go through it. I'm not fully aware of all the physical happenings that occur in your body when you get it (pulmonary ademeia or something like that is the term I think), but it's a strange thing to feel and see.

It starts with a headache, gentle but never ending. That got quite bad at times. You have trouble sleeping, though you can't really figure why or how. Every activity becomes a challenge to complete, and most people get the "Khoumbu Cough", a deep phlegmy chest cough that won't go away till you're down. I missed out on the cough fortunately, but otherwise I felt the rest. When it gets worse, you're in trouble - people start losing their appetite, they have trouble focusing on things and their vision gets blurred. At night, as your breathing slows down, you wake up frantic, gasping for air due to the lack of oxygen. Your circulation can get worse and frostbite happens sooner than normal. And then, you start passing out and dying.

We met heaps of people suffering worse than us, and a few that got it real bad. Every day rescue helicopters flew back and forth taking people down the mountain, and we saw one guy being put in a gupa (?) bag, a pressurized bag that increases the oxygen you breathe. One night, a porter was taken out of our lodge at 3am due to excessive elevation sickness, and he died en route to the lower village. In October alone, at least 6 people died (5 local porters and an Indian tourist) due to elevation sickness, all most likely avoidable though if they had just taken care of things when they started going bad.

We're down though, safe and sound and off to the next adventure. My bag is overflowing with Nepalese goodies and souvenirs now, so I think I'll have to stop buying crap in the next stop. And that next stop turns out to be India - which my god, is one nutty, nutty country. I'll write more later, but wow, I don't know how to explain the things that have happened so far, and it's been less than 12 hours in the country. Anyway, might be too hard to add photos, so they'll be a bit sporadic over the next few weeks. So long!