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View from Namche
Namche Bazaar - Friday, April 28, 2000

DISPATCHES

Berg

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Hi Mountain Zone, this dispatch is coming to you from, you guessed it, Peter Potterfield's favorite room, up top here in the corner here at the Panorama Lodge. I'm looking out on the misty, gray evening that's coming down on those colorful rooftops and houses down below in Namche Bazaar, those houses spread out through the amphitheater. It's a semicircle that makes up the village of Namche Bazaar.

This morning we got up very early, 6 o'clock, and took our bed tea and walked immediately up the hill to the national park viewpoint which is just above the Panorama Lodge and as we're walking up it was quite cloudy. As a matter of fact, one group of trekkers was already coming down and they made comments like 'enjoy the view' because they had seen nothing up there. But I thought it would be worth walking on up and standing around to just talking about the trip up there in the clouds. We had the Sherpa guides up there with us and I thought it would be fun to get a group photo, even if we weren't looking at the big peaks. But as luck would have it, after we stood around for a few minutes the clouds began to lift, first off to the left and we saw Kwangde and later we saw Thamserku and even Ama Dablam and before we descended you could even see the base of the Lhotse-Nuptse wall and we're looking across at the Thyangboche Monastery, which is very visible — we'll be there in a few days.

So that was great, we walked back down and had our introduction to the commercial bustle of Namche Bazaar, which I talked about in the past, but before we went down into town right after breakfast we did something that's traditional on these treks — when you can finally get all of the staff in one place which is usually impossible. In fact, we weren't all here yet today, but we do this introduction of all the Sherpa staff. Pasang Rita, the sirdar, brought each person forward, introduced him to the group. As I told you, it was the same crew essentially that we had last time and a lot of these people work behind the scenes and the trekkers don't necessarily get to know them until they step forward and get introduced — we had a lot of fun doing that.

One new fellow this time is Phu Nuru, who is a Sherpa guide and he, like many of these other guys, comes from the village of Thame — or Thamo, he's actually from Thamo. And Phu Nuru I had never met but we're really delighted to have him, his father's a character I've talked about on these dispatches this spring; Phu Nuru's father is Ang Rita — the famous Ang Rita — who has 10 summits of Everest and has been a legend to Western climbers and is now a national hero in Nepal. It's really great to have Phu Nuru with us, he's from the same area as these other guys and of course with a lineage like that we're happy to have him approach Base Camp with us.

One fellow's that was missing is Salia, who is also from out there and — Salia's the Sherpa that we sent from Namche only day before yesterday when we arrived. I had these One Sport, size nine climbing boots for Stacy Taniguchi on the Alpine Ascents' climbing team and they'd been delivered in Kathmandu by Thende, who's a friend of ours who sells trekking equipment there and Stacy really needed these for the climb and I wanted to get them quickly to Base Camp. So we gave them to Salia only day before yesterday and the amazing thing is Salia walked back into Namche Bazaar here about an hour ago, having already taken that package to Everest Base Camp, said 'hi' to everyone up there and got all the way back to Namche today; he really moved. And besides knowing that the boots got delivered to Stacy it was good just hearing some first-hand information about things at Base Camp. We heard that all of the Sherpas and climbing members are down and doing well and that the Sherpas are planning to move back up to Camp II tomorrow and that things...everbody's doing great and the weather's good.

So we'll be there quite a while from now. We're not going to actually arrive until May 6th, but it's one of the great things about being in Namche and in the Khumbu is you're in touch with Base Camp: runners are coming and going all the time; you get news about what's going on the entire time you're up here.

So tomorrow morning's market day as you know, we'll hit that first thing in the morning and then we'll be off to Thame and the Thame Monastery and a visit to the home of many of our closest Sherpa friends and climbing partners.

— Wally Berg, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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