Our last full day in Lukla.
On the way in, Nicholas and Pokin never actually saw the town. They were sick, we took a helicopter straight to Phakding, and Lukla went by as a blur of “please let the rotors keep spinning.” So today we wandered. Properly. Up and down the back alleys, no duffel bags, no agenda.
The Most Dangerous Airport in the World#
Lukla Airport has a reputation. Short runway, hard slope, a cliff at one end and a mountain at the other, and a habit of showing up on every “scariest airports” list ever written. We went and watched a few planes land on it, which is a deeply strange thing to do for fun.
Good news for me: we’re flying out by helicopter tomorrow, not by one of those. Apparently a helicopter is the safer option here, which tells you everything you need to know about the planes.
Shopping, and a Basket Situation#
We did some shopping around town, and this is where it got serious. Someone had woven one of the traditional head-baskets, a doko, in a size that was suspiciously, perfectly, me-sized.
Naturally we had to get it. I am a bear of refined taste and I now own a tiny artisanal Himalayan basket. I have no plans to ever carry anything in it. That is not the point.
We also passed a bunch of chickens and a pile of tiny chicks, which was more interesting than it sounds. Lukla is about as high as chickens go. Any higher and they don’t make it, so all the chickens on the trek live down here at the bottom. The whole way up the mountain, no chickens. Come back down, and suddenly poultry everywhere. Nature has opinions about altitude.
The Goodbye Dinner#
Then it was time for the real reason today mattered. The farewell dinner for the crew.
These porters hauled our gear up and down a mountain for three weeks. Our duffel bags, the food, the boxes of fruit, all of it, on their backs and headstraps, while we struggled to carry ourselves. Tonight was the thank-you.
Nicholas spent a good chunk of the afternoon counting out tip money into red pockets. There were stacks of rupees and dollars laid out on the windowsill, and at one point he looked less like an engineer on vacation and more like a small-time crime boss doing his books.
We brought treats too. A friend of ours owns a cookie company, so we’d hauled a stash of her cookies all the way to Nepal, and the porters got plenty. They seemed genuinely pleased about it, which is the highest praise a cookie can earn from people who carry sixty kilograms uphill for a living.
And then the part they’d actually earned: the red envelopes.
It was a good night. Everyone fed, everyone tipped, everyone in one piece after three weeks of mountain.
Tomorrow morning, the helicopter back to Kathmandu. The trek part was officially behind us.
So I did what any reasonable bear does at the end of a long expedition. I claimed the best bed in the room and went to sleep.