Day 1: April 28, 2025. Kathmandu, Lukla, Phakding.
Everest Lodge-to-Lodge, April 28–May 9, 2025. We did the Everest Lodge-to-Lodge hike in the spring of 2025.
Pan said he’d pick us up at the Shanker Hotel at 5:15. We’d set alarms to go off at 4:45, but we didn’t need them. I woke up at 4:15 and just lay in bed for a while thinking, “Wow, we’re going to see Everest today!” That was exciting.
Pankaj met us in the hotel lobby and spirited us to the airport, a drive that only took ten minutes at that time of day. Though we had said we didn’t need them, the hotel had packed us box breakfasts. Bala was waiting for us there. We went through the initial security check (you can’t enter a Nepali airport without a ticket and going through an x-ray machine) and then the regular security check. We weighed ourselves and bags at the Fishtail Air counter, drove out to the helicopter pad, and we were off!
Our destination was Lukla, allegedly the most dangerous airport in the world. Bala insists there is no crash evidence to support this claim.
In any case, because we landed at the helipad, we didn’t have to use the short, slanted runway, designed to use a slope to make up for the distance runways usually provide to allow planes to accelerate and decelerate.
The first thing I noticed was the cold. It was mid-40s. The second thing I noticed was the smell of donkey pee. The third thing I noticed was the mud. And then I realized it was really hard to breathe.
Bala led us slowly through town on Lukla’s main street to the Mountain Lodge so that he could organize his paperwork and hand off our bags to our porter, Mila Dai. We gave Mila our breakfast boxes, too.
The lodge is beautifully situated on the edge of town–with its entrance up about 50 steps. We made it to the top, where I collapsed at a coffee table. I briefly wondered if we’d just made a terrible error coming to this strange cold place–would it all be awful and breathless?
It would not. Several cups of hot tea with sugar later, I felt more normal. Maybe it was just jet lag.
The initial walking wasn’t bad. Bala walked slowly, and the morning’s journey took us downhill.
Primroses (cultivated) and rhododendrons (wild) were in bloom everywhere.
It was cloudy. Though there must have been high mountains all around us, the visible scenery was restricted to the river below us and grey mist just above.
We reached the Mountain Lodge in Phakding at lunchtime. This was our first Mountain Lodge meal, and it gave us our first inkling that we might not lose weight on this trek. The Mountain Lodges don’t do “light” meals–multiple courses and desserts are the rule.
Our room was in a separate building from the dining hall. This presented a shoe problem. We removed our hiking shoes when we arrived at lunchtime, the better to keep mud and dirt out of the living quarters. This is customary practice at almost all mountain lodges. Everyone’s outside shoes sit in little cubbies while their inside. The lodges keep an assortment of crocs for guests to wear in the buildings–some fit better than others, though I almost always found a pair in my size. But then we had to walk outside through the lodge grounds to reach our accommodations.
After lunch, Bala took us on a short walk up the mountainside above the lodge–our first “walk high, sleep low” acclimatization hike. He started teaching us to recognize the songs of various birds; the laughing thrush was singing up a storm as we climbed.
It was starting to rain, so we abandoned our more ambitious plan to visit a monastery further away and went back to the lodge for a nap.
Bala advised us to shower that afternoon, when the solar water heating system was most likely to contain hot water. The water here was hot enough–not hot, but warm enough not to be uncomfortable. The bathroom itself reminded me of the painted wood facilities at U.S. summer camps and national parks.
The Mountain Lodges always offer at Happy Hour featuring rum punch (it used to be called “Yeti punch,” but Corporate has evidently ordered the servers no longer to use that name) with baskets of popcorn and shrimp crisps. Bala allowed us one cup of Yeti punch in the evenings but otherwise strongly discouraged any consumption of alcohol at high elevations. (He assured us that after the trek, we could “swim in whiskey” if we so desired.)
The stoves initially felt great in the cold room but quickly became quite hot.
At dinner, there were only two other guests with their guide. They’d just flown in from Houston and were doing a more rapid trek to Everest Base Camp; they were splurging on a helicopter ride from EBC back to Kathmandu at the end.
This was our first night in a cold room. The hotel had turned on our bed warmers before we arrived that afternoon, and they made climbing into bed very comfortable. Bala had advised us to turn them off before going to sleep lest we wake up overheated, which was a smart plan.
It was quiet and dark. We slept well.