Author Archives: Fergus

Three Small Children Climbing Extra-Ordinarily Big Mountains

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View from Gokyo Ri

by Scarlett

Today, the 3rd October, 3 children were claimed to be seen climbing Gokyo Ri at 6:00am in the morning. They were going up that day because their father woke up very early and saw that the sun was shining. Gokyo Ri is in the Everest region and it can get quite cold. A lot of people claimed they were there when this event took place, so it was very busy.

It is free to go up Gokyo Ri. It is also very, very steep.

We Made It!

Adults with the children numbered four, were 3 men and a woman. It was a tiring climb and they didn’t really enjoy it but the view at the top was amazing! The other people climbing Gokyo Ri were astounded at the 8 year old triplets and kept encouraging the girls. People can’t believe that 3 girls made it to the top since they are only 8 years old. They said it was easy going down. One of the girls got altitude sickness and had to be carried by one of the men.

At the top of Gokyo Ri there is an amazing view of a glacier surrounded by mountains. These mountains have a big lake in front of them. The lake is turquoise and the sun glitters off it. There are prayer flags hung around the top which can have icicles hanging from them. Sometimes it has less snow. It can be rocky.

The best parts of climbing Gokyo Ri are the view and coming back down. Coming back down is amazingly easy!

[This was Scarlett’s ‘Write a Newspaper Article Challenge’. It was typed up, paragraphized and spelling-corrected by Dad but otherwise all Scarlett’s work. Only 8 wrong spelling’s, too, (and not turquoise!) which is wonderful.]

Travelling Songs

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Daddy is too tall,
Too tall for Nepal,
Or is it that Nepal is too small for Mr Tall?

It’s a Long way To Gokyo Ri,
It’s a long way to go,
It’s a long, long way to Gokyo Ri,
To the sweetest lakes I know,
Goodbye Kathmandu,
Farewell Durbar Square,
It’s a long, long way to Gokyo Ri,
But we’ve climbed up there!

Kacophonous Kathmandu

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by Jemima

If you want to go trekking, you have got to go to Kathmandu first. Here are ten of the most important things you need to know:

1. You sometimes have to be really unkind to people to make them go away when they are trying to sell you things.

2. It’s extremely noisy and it’s likely that the first sound you will hear will be honk honk!

3. When I arrived I could smell hot air but I got used to it. I hope you do.

4. If you want to stay somewhere, I would recommend the Kathmandu Garden House because it’s got comfortable rooms, balconies and a lovely garden bordered by flowers.

5. There are lots of insects so you have got to just not bother about them. The mosquitoes will probably bite you. You can buy a spray called Deet which will keep them away.

6. There is lots of junk on the streets and you will probably get dirty. Try not to bother.

7. Try not to fall in love with pretty things in shops too much like I did because the shop owners will see that and make them really expensive. You have got to bargain by making it look like the thing you want more is the thing you want less.

8. When you are travelling around Kathmandu it is easier to go in a taxi or walk, not go on a bus. The buses are too crowded and sometimes they drive around with the doors open because there are so many people inside.

9. There are street food stalls but I got a very spicy chilli. It made me cry so we got some juice and chocolate! If you want to go to a restaurant, I would recommend the Northfield Cafe.

10. If it’s the festival of Desain, lots of people feel like they shouldn’t be at work so the food in cafes is not as good. But the pizza at the Northfield Cafe is still good!

10.

Recommendations for Places to Visit When Trekking

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by Scarlett

We have been in Nepal for nearly a month and by reading this you will find out some of the best places to stay at and visit when trekking.

I would recommend walking to Namche Bazaar in four days with children, two days with an adult and maybe three days with a big group. Good places to stay at would be Tok Tok (with its cozy guesthouse and pretty views of the forest and a river). Chheplung would also be a nice place place to stay. It’s very close to Lukla if you have booked a flight the next day or something like that. In Benkar, there is a waterfall which is great for your children to play in.

Namche itself has a lot of lovely bakeries. I recommend Herman Helmer’s Bakery. It has great apple pie, beautiful pizza but very small sandwiches that aren’t worth the money. The pizza has nak cheese on (it’s nak cheese not yak cheese because yaks are boys and naks are girls). If you want to write a diary or something like that then Herman Helmer’s is often a quiet place to sit. The Everest Bakery is also very nice and it does pasta which Herman’s does not. Apple pie at Everest is more cinnamony that Herman’s.

In Pangboche, they have a Herman’s Bakery (different to Herman Helmer’s Bakery) which does the best chocolate cake I have ever tasted. It was called chocolate trefoil and was proper English chocolate.

At Gokyo, it all quite expensive and I would recommend taking a down jacket which you can hire in Namche Bazaar. You cannot hire children’s down jackets.
Gokyo Ri is nearly always worth the climb to the top except when it is cloudy. The view is undoubtedly the best one I have ever seen. You can see a glacier from above. It’s amazing.

Buddha at Tengboche Butter Lamps

In Tengboche, you can go and see an amazing monastery but you have to be very quiet. In the monastery, you can pay Rs. 25 to light a butter lamp even if you are a child. A butter lamp is a sort of little candle and if you light one, Buddhists believe that Buddha will pray for you. There was a bakery right next to the monastery.

Yak (or maybe a Nak) Donkey TrainDzho

To keep safe, you must always get out of the way of yaks which you often meet on the way to Gokyo. You must also get out of the way of donkeys. If you didn’t, you could get pushed off the edge of a mountain!

It’s a Long Way to Gokyo

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by Evie

If you want to go to Gokyo, then you have to go upwards most of the way and downwards most of the way back. There is not very much flat land in the Khumbu region (the region Mount Everest is in).

It is extremely beautiful once you get to Gokyo. There are lots of flowers of interesting colours. They are called “alpine flowers”. There are three lakes on the way and you can go to the fourth one or the fifth one without having to camp, whereas if you want to go the sixth lake, you have to camp because you cannot get back to Gokyo in one day.

The lakes are emerald green. They are surrounded by mountains. It snowed when we arrived and on the day when we climbed Gokyo Ri.

Gokyo Lake from Gokyo Ri

Gokyo Ri is a mountain that is quite hard to climb, in fact there were some grown-ups climbing it who gave up but we got to the top. It gets cloudy during the day so if you want to climb Gokyo Ri, you have to leave very early. We got up at 5 o’clock!

I didn’t want to leave Gokyo because it was beautiful, even though I did get an altitude headache.

On the way down, it is much easier. It took ten days to get there and nine days to get back because we took a detour round Pangboche and Tengboche. You cannot go too far in a day on the way up because you might get an altitude headache like I did at Gokyo. Mummy got it much more than me and my sisters didn’t get it at all.

Top of the World

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Just a quick entry today as we’re paying by the minute in a cybercafe but this morning we saw Mount Everest!

We arrived in Namche Bazaar yesterday afternoon after a scary twin-prop flight into Lukla and four days of walking only to meet some young brits who had done the same journey in one day. Still, they hadn’t had to shepherd three children who were passing a tummy bug between them. And taking it slowly has been fun. We’ve stopped in some quieter villages and had the afternoon to explore most days.

And our guide taking us to his home was fascinating. The girls could hardly believe that their whole family live in one room but I think it brought it home to them how different life here is. That and the constant diet of dahl baat.

And even taken slowly, the trek was great. At first it was just like a rather exaggerated Lake District (rain included) but by yesterday I felt like I was walking in some kind magical mountain kingdom from Monkey. The path hugs the valley all the way here, gradually climbing higher and higher as the peaks grow around you until there’s an enormous drop below and the peaks above strain your neck to look at. And then you get to the suspension bridges. Suffice it to say that Scarlett had a fear of bridges when she arrived here. She doesn’t any more.

And then today… Everest! Sure it was only in the distance but it was still a powerful experience. And definitely worth the trekking, diarrhea and deadly flights to see.

Little Monkeys

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Yesterday we finally got through enough of the necessary recovery sleep and last-minute organisation to do some sightseeing in Kathmandu. The girls were thoroughly fed up with getting their final rabies and Japanese encephilitis inoculations, finding a new, cheaper guest-house, changing money and buying air tickets to Lukla (which took longer than buying our tickets to Nepal!), so we took a taxi up to Swayambhunath, also known as the Monkey Temple.

The temple used to be on an island when all of Kathmandu was underwater but now stands on a hill to the west. It is also home to thousands of (rabies-carrying) rhesus monkeys which locals consider holy to the Hindu god Hanuman. Which is why no-one beats them off with sticks when they steal ice creams and generally bother the pilgrims, tourists and groups of cool, posing Nepalese teenagers.

I’m not sure my three monkeys are holy to Hanuman but no-one seemed to beat them off with sticks either, so I guess they might be. And they certainly had a great time at the temple. They weren’t too bothered about the statuary or carvings I tried to point out but they liked spinning the Tibetan prayer wheels, chasing the pigeons and, of course, the monkeys, but we did have an interesting chat about who the Buddha was, enlightenment and reincarnation (they were particularly outraged at the idea that women who behave well might just be lucky enough to reincarnate as men).

For myself, I found the temple fascinating. It has been in constant use since Europe was in the Dark Ages and, apart from the teenagers, is probably largely unchanged, and is packed with a mixture of Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu iconography. Wherever I looked, there was something I would have loved to examine more closely if I hadn’t also been realising that I could no longer see my children and leaping to my feet in panic.

And a few of us:

At the top of the Greeat Eastern Stairway
Jemima
A monkey
Dad
Ice cream thief
Mum
Stupa
Monkeys watching monkeys
Triplet attention

Plenty of Planes!

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by Jemima

I was very excited about the plane but it was very long and boring except that they had TVs on the plane and we could play games, watch films and do other interesting things on them.

When we got off the plane we slept for a bit in Mumbai but we didn’t get enough sleep. In Mumbai we had a sandwich from Subway and it was slow but scrumptious. Tettie didn’t like hers because it tasted too much like curry and it was meant to be Italian. The cheese in the sandwiches was not very nice but my cucumber, tomato and olive was nice. The music that was playing in the sleeping area where we didn’t have much sleep was not very good at first but then it got into real piano music and it got much better.

After twelve hours there we caught a plane which didn’t have a TV because it didn’t need one as the flight was much, much shorter. I slept with my head tilted up and my mouth wide open. When I woke up we were landing in Nepal and I had no idea that I had been asleep. I kept thinking the plane was going to crash.

When we got off the plane to Nepal we went to the Hotel Blue Horizon in a taxi. At the Hotel Blue Horizon we had a choice of two rooms. One was small with not much light, the other was bright, big and more expensive. We chose the bigger one. On the way to the hotel we saw loads and loads of interesting things such as buildings which were interesting colours such as blue, green, pink, yellow, orange and purple.

On our first night we slept sixteen hours which means that we slept until dinner time. It was a lovely hotel and they are very good.

The food is filling.