Everest Base Camp Trek #6 | The Ultralight Hiker

Three weeks ago now since I left Namche Bazar for Everest with this awful life form growing in my chest like some incubus from ‘Alien’. Since then it and my body have waged an uncivil war back and forth with my life for stakes. Sometimes one has the ascendancy, sometimes the other. The medicos have been entirely unsuccessful in isolating it, and the three types of antibiotic I have quaffed so far have only managed to hold the line – if that. The outcome remains uncertain, though some days I do seem almost myself. Others though I am back to being as weak as a kitten, even if (as today) I have pumps to fix, or other jobs must be done.

I have had I think five crises since it hit; once between antibiotics, I was so weak I could not rise from my couch, and could not even call loudly enough to alert Della , (whom I could actually see just in the next room) to take me to hospital. Fortunately, instead of slipping away, the other antibiotic kicked in after about an hour, and I was able to rise and resume my conversation with the world.

Pneumonia is not particularly distressing: when you are at your weakest you feel quite unconcerned that you are slipping away, though I must say I do not particularly enjoy the not breathing! The most unpleasant it has been was on my ‘trail of tears’: the 60+ km interminable two day journey (normally four short!) staggering myself back from Dingboche to Lukla desperate that Della would have a chance to save my life. (She still seemed to want to – habit is a funny thing!) And she has, so far, succeeded! ‘It is the physician’s love heals the patient’ was Ferenczi’s dictum.

Many people succumb to this dreaded ‘Khumbu Cough’ on the Everest Base Camp Trek. The trail is suffused with the most awful dust during the dry season as there are thousands of trekkers on the trail with their attendees of yet more thousands of guides, porters, yaks, donkeys, horses, dogs…all of them defecating , hacking and spitting on the trail which is bleached dry by an eternal sun, so that the dust ever whirls up, become a loathsome fug of bacterial stew which you means must breath in. The air is too thin to breath through your nose so you are eternally gulping in huge but unsatisfactory lungfuls though your mouth which you make your best effort to keep covered with a neck warmer, buff , scarf or balaclava (against the cold mostly) – but it is not enough to keep whatever these bugs are out.

The excessively dry air probably aids its malevolence. The altitude, exhaustion, poor diet & etc no doubt do not help, so that many people become quite ill and may take long to recover – if at all. Some cough so much they break ribs – thankfully not me! Pneumonia used to be such an infection: ‘the ‘old man’s Friend’ they once described it as – as it gently led him to his end). If you survived, a long sea voyage of rest and recuperation for six months was normally prescribed – for the well to do. The poor, no doubt simply perished. It may be possible to wear a more serious dust mask to keep it out. I would do some research on that if you are silly enough to be contemplating this awful trek. I will have a subsequent post with recommendations. Watch out for it!

Photo: Namche Bazar, Nepal.