Flying Off Everest (3 page)

The communists promised to empower the people, redistribute the country’s wealth, grant women equal rights, and eliminate the Hindu caste system, which had been “officially” adopted by Nepal during a period of absolute monarchy between 1960 and 1990. The Maoists looted police stations for weapons and made homemade explosives, preparing for the long guerilla siege to come. As the conflict escalated they began invading remote villages like Babu’s, which were unprotected by the royal army, barging into classrooms, shooting teachers and abducting the pupils, forcing them to fight as child soldiers. They tortured their opponents and exhibited their mutilated bodies in the streets. They had lost their cause, but continued fighting.

In 2001 the Nepali Parliament passed the Terrorist and Destructive Activities Act, allowing ninety-day detentions and the unapologetically forceful interrogation of known Maoists. King Gyanendra suspended the elected government and instituted martial law, effectively controlling the military and the press.

Babu, like most people in the country who scratched a subsistence living off the land, was rightly afraid of both the government and the insurgents. He didn’t know whom to trust, if he must, and that the answer was probably neither the Maoists nor the government. He was on his own, and he knew it.

Once in Kathmandu, Babu’s friend immediately got him a job working in a carpet factory. He spent anywhere from twelve to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, working along with dozens of other teenage boys and girls, sitting in a small, crowded room. According to Babu, his payment was 200 rupees per month ($2), two meals of
dal bhat a day, and a space on the floor inside the factory on which to sleep. His friend had gone and had not returned. Babu was alone.

This, of course, was not what he had been hoping for when he had left home. He was accomplishing nothing, he thought. He was frustrated. So after two months of mind-numbing, tedious labor, Babu quit, with almost no money and no place to stay.

Babu slept on the streets in cold, dark corners until he found his next job, working as a bus assistant. This new position required him to stand in the aisle of the bus and collect fares all day, and to clean it each night—sweeping, picking up trash, dealing with belligerent passengers who were unwilling or unable to pay. It was the easiest thing young Babu had ever done in his life, and it paid, respectively, in spades: 500 rupees a month, and 100 rupees per day for food. He ate well: two meals of dal bhat each day, every day. It also afforded him the opportunity to sleep on the bus. After twenty-six days Babu had managed to save over 1,000 rupees ($10), all the money he had earned that he hadn’t spent on food.

He bought a bus ticket back to the nearest road to his village and walked three days along the river home, proud to have doubled the money his father had originally given him for his graduation present. His parents, although glad to see him and more than happy to have the unexpected extra income he gave them, didn’t want him to go back to the city. They asked Babu to remain in the village. Yet, just a few months later, in January 2000, Babu returned to Kathmandu again, this time with no money. His grandfather had needed help herding cows to a neighboring village, and after helping him move the cattle, Babu simply kept walking to the road and caught another bus back to the city. This time he was looking for a job in the tourism industry, which he had learned, during his time working on the bus, was the real moneymaking business to be in. Besides, he still wanted to learn how to kayak. So he went where the tourists go: Thamel.

Located on the north side of Kathmandu, Thamel occupies less than 1 square mile of the city. Yet it is the sightseeing hub of Nepal,
housing nearly all of the country’s adventure tourism companies, upscale hotels, and restaurants that serve everything from pizza to steak and apple pie. The streets are narrow, winding, and categorically confusing, built in a time before cars and, evidently, reason. There are no sidewalks. Tucked between old, close-fitting buildings that tower up to seven stories overhead, it’s like walking through a small, urban canyon: more often in shadow than not, even on a sunny day. Crowds of people, scooters, motorcycles, and cars all navigate the tiny alleys, darting beneath innumerable signs covering the walls, directing people to businesses that oftentimes no longer exist. Or perhaps have just moved locations, without bothering to remove the sign from their old whereabouts. Standing in front of their shops, vendors call out to passersby, hoping to lure them into a sale by yelling louder than anyone else. A collective cacophony, advertising everything from a simple loaf of bread to a multiday rafting trip down the Karnali, rises up from the smog. The sound of motorcycle and scooter horns regularly punctuates the dissonance. Small children in tattered clothes and lepers crawling on the ground ask for change, speaking English.

Upon arriving in Thamel, Babu saw some men loading equipment into a line of trucks: backpacks, portable stoves, tents, food. He approached them and politely asked, “Where is this trekking equipment going?”

“Pokhara,” one of the men told him.

Babu had heard of Pokhara before, during his last visit to Kathmandu. He knew that, like Thamel, it was a place tourists often went. And that it was a popular place for whitewater kayaking and rafting in Nepal. At least, that’s what he had heard. He had never been there, and he didn’t know anyone who had been there either.

“Do you need a porter?” Babu asked.

“Have you done trekking before?” one of the men loading the truck probed.

“Yes,” Babu said without hesitating. He knew if he told the truth—that he had never worked as a porter before in his life—they would
never take him. He spent the day helping the men load their trucks for the expedition. They gave him no food or water. As the afternoon wore on, Babu began to wonder where he would sleep that night if they didn’t take him along. They hadn’t told him yes, but they hadn’t told him no. He was hungry and thirsty. At the end of the day, when the trucks were finally full and as the sun was setting, one of the men put 20 rupees in his hand. “Thank you for helping,” he said. “But we cannot take you with us. You are too small.” With that, the men got into the trucks and left.

Babu walked to the bus station. He asked the man working at the counter how much a ticket to Pokhara cost. The man told him it was 150 rupees. The last bus scheduled to leave Kathmandu that night departed at 9:00 p.m. and was expected to arrive in Pokhara at around 4:00 a.m. the next day. Unable to afford the fare, Babu waited, watching the people loading and unloading as it grew dark. He watched quietly as the last bus turned on its engine and slowly began to roll away. He looked around. Then, when he saw that no one was looking, he ran and jumped through the door, onto the bus.

Babu found himself seated next to an old man holding crutches. Babu could see that the man had only one leg. He looked ragged and disheveled. Destitute, just like him. The old man, having watched Babu’s desperate leap onto the bus, asked him how much money he had.

“Twenty rupees,” Babu told him truthfully.

“Do you know how much a ticket costs to Pokhara?” the old man asked.

“The counter price is 150 rupees,” Babu admitted sheepishly.

“Yes, yes,” the old man said. “Now here’s an idea: They can see that I have only one leg and will feel sorry for me. But you, you have everything they can see. So if I tell them you cannot speak, you must not speak. When people come to collect money, I will tell them that I have no leg and that you cannot speak.” Babu, having no better alternative, agreed to follow the plan. The bus bumped and swayed on the broken
road. Outlines of dimly lit buildings passed slowly through dark, dusty windows.

Babu could see the bus assistant looking at him and the old man, obviously concerned, as he collected fares from the other passengers. Babu had done the man’s job himself, and he knew what was coming.

“Hey, you two,” the young man finally said as he reached their seats. “Where are you going?”

Babu, not actually knowing sign language, raised his hands and wiggled his fingers with imagined meaning. The old man waited a moment for the uncomfortable display to finish, then spoke.

“We are going Pokhara because we have trouble,” he said. “This boy is my friend. He cannot speak. We don’t have money.” The statement hung in the air, shuddering along with the bus as it jostled itself noisily over the cracks in the road. Babu put his hands down.

“You don’t have money?” the assistant asked, alarmed. “Why did you come to Kathmandu then? Why didn’t you just stay in Pokhara?”

“We wanted to come to see our relatives,” the old man said simply. “But we cannot find them. So we have to go back.” The bus assistant thought about this for a moment, considering the difficulties involved with stopping the bus and throwing an old man with one leg and a mute boy out onto the street at night. The other passengers would not be pleased, he knew. He then turned and continued to walk down the aisle, collecting fares, leaving Babu and the old man to sit together in silence.

Through the windows, Babu watched the silhouettes of Kathmandu’s tall brick buildings slowly turn to vague outlines of dark roadside shacks. Sheet metal roofs held down by old discarded tires, rocks, and bricks. The mountains in the distance became distinguishable from the starry sky only by their darker blackness—a series of jagged holes in the horizon. The bus, rattling, climbed steeply out of the valley to the west and then crested over a narrow pass, dropping suddenly, clinging to the sides of the shadowed mountains, turning sharply, back and forth. Switching back on itself as it descended rapidly down to the Trisuli River and into the even deeper night of the valley below.

Hours later, the bus rolled to a stop in the small roadside town of Mugling, the halfway point between Kathmandu and Pokhara. Babu rose stiffly from his seat, exiting the bus for a scheduled thirty-minute bathroom and dal bhat break. The town was dark and still, save the lone roadside vendor who had stayed open to serve the passengers on the last bus to Pokhara that night. The old man with one leg immediately began to beg for food, asking the other passengers to buy him and his young friend a meal. Babu hadn’t eaten in almost two days and so didn’t find it prudent to discourage him.

“Can your friend work?” someone asked, pointing to Babu.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” the old man replied, ready to volunteer him for any sort of labor that might get them both some food. Babu knew he was too weak and malnourished to work, so he began to wave his hands wildly, making recognizably desperate gestures in the half-light of the bus stop. He placed his left palm up in front of him, like a plate, and mimed the motion of eating dal bhat, pinching the imaginary soggy lentils and rice between his fingers and shoveling them greedily into his open mouth. It was pathetic, he knew, but the display had the desired effect. Babu and the old man ate their free meals quickly and got back on the bus, completely silent.

At 4:00 a.m. Babu stepped down onto the gravel parking lot of the Pokhara bus station for the first time. The city was quiet, the morning air still cool and dark, waiting for the sun to rise and glare off the whiteness of the mountains in the distance. In his pocket he still had the 20 rupees (about 20 cents) he earned helping load trucks back in Kathmandu. Looking around the vacant lot and the surrounding darkness, he realized, suddenly, that he had absolutely no idea where he was, where he was going, or what he was going to do next.

He asked someone walking by, “Do you know where I can find the tourists?”

“Run,” Babu said, and watched as his new friend, Lakpa, sprinted toward the steep drop-off 20 feet in front of him. Below lay the terraced rice fields of Sarangkot, a small hillside village located 2.5 miles north of Pokhara that’s not entirely unaccustomed to paragliders crashing into it. Pokhara is one of the best and most popular places in the world to go paragliding, and the crest of the hill above the small village of Sarangkot is the best and closest place to launch a paraglider from the city. On good days, when the sky is clear with a warm sun and no wind, the grassy hillside bustles with pilots and their tandem passengers and the sky above fills with a circling swarm of paragliders, rising up into the clouds and then sinking back down on the breeze. Beyond the fields to the south sits the growing expanse of the city and the dark blue of Lake Phewa.

Lakpa’s paraglider wing caught the air and quickly began to rise. The large, 40-plus-foot sail pulled back at him. A few more hurried steps and suddenly the ground was out from under his feet. He was flying—
although not well,
Babu observed. Lakpa didn’t actually know how to fly. Unlike the other pilots around him, who circled upward in the nearby thermal—a hot uprising of air beside the hill, like the
swirling eddy that forms behind a rock in a river—Lakpa floated straight down toward the lake. He had flown only a handful of times before, first during a nine-day introduction course in Pokhara in 2009, and then again a few months later during a quick and mildly disastrous flight in the Khumbu, which resulted in him landing rather inelegantly in a tree. In Sarangkot he was the only pilot in the sky wearing a personal flotation device (PFD). Knowing he could land in the lake, Lakpa, who couldn’t swim, borrowed the PFD just in case he overshot his landing site on the shore.

Babu considered this as he watched his new friend descend, and wondered why Lakpa, a well-paid Sherpa who made his living climbing mountains, would ever want to fly.
It is not normal
, he was certain. Babu waited to see how the landing went before making any decisions about sharing his plans for Everest with Lakpa. He didn’t want a dead Sherpa on his conscience, certainly—but he also couldn’t help but wonder if Lakpa might just be crazy enough to help him with his idea to fly off the top of the world. After all, Lakpa had already told him that he wanted to fly off all of the peaks he regularly guided on. And the man had already climbed Everest. Three times.

The city of Pokhara is in central Nepal. The town sits on the eastern shore of Phewa Tal, a large lake in Pokhara Valley, which is a widening of the Seti Gandaki Valley just south of the 26,545-foot Annapurna Massif—a broad, gleaming white band of the Himalaya rising up from the forested foothills just outside of town. The Seti Gandaki River
runs through Pokhara, its churning waters flowing through deep, cavernous gorges, often right beneath the city. A single two-lane mountain road called the Prithvi Highway follows the meandering banks of the nearby Trisuli River and its white, river-washed boulders out of town, connecting the city to the capital, Kathmandu, 126 miles to the east. By a rather remarkable orographical fluke—the combined interaction of the area’s mountains, valleys, and the resulting paradise-like subtropical weather systems—it’s also one of the best places in the world to go paragliding. Nearly every day of the year dozens, if not hundreds, of paragliders can be seen floating overhead—brightly colored, downward-curving crescents carving wide, deceptively lazy-looking circles in the sky.

In the daytime the narrow streets are filled with buses and trucks, cars and motorbikes—the squawk of their horns, the belch of exhaust—bicycles, pushcarts, horses and wheelbarrows, dogs, chickens, children, and trash, and tourists taking pictures of it all. In the morning, when the roads are quiet, before the sun is high and disperses the fog that settles in the valley each night and often lingers to midday, shopkeepers stoop in front of their open-air stores with short-handled brooms, sweeping the night’s dust into the street. Some will later ask the foreign tourists who walk by on their way to Lakeside, on the north end of town, to “sponsor” them for a work visa out of the country, already knowing the answer (no), but still hoping, trying to escape the tourists’ paradise.

Lakeside is a single street, a little over a mile long, that houses nearly all of the local adventure tourism companies, the most profitable businesses in town. They sell everything from guided trekking and rafting trips, to kayak and bike rentals, to tandem paragliding flights in which a trained vulture lands on a paying customer’s outstretched arm in the sky. Most of the buildings have new-looking signs featuring large, color photographs of bright orange, red, and blue paragliding wings in flight, framed by the white teeth of the Annapurnas. Other displays feature smiling customers rafting, biking,
hiking—sometimes even rappelling off waterfalls. In many places kayaks—old sun-bleached models, never new—line the sidewalks, blocking the footpath. Between the outfitters are restaurants with English-speaking waiters and signs that advertise American and Italian food (A
MERICAN
B
REAKFAST
! F
IRE
W
OOD
P
IZZA!
). The remaining structures are Westerner-friendly hotels that offer hot water, “expensive” $3.50 beers, and sit-down toilets. Foreign tourists call it the nice part of town.

At the end of Lakeside, on the left as one walked north toward the mountains, across the street from the Pokhara Pizza House, was the office of Blue Sky Paragliding, one of seventeen paragliding companies in the city. A large, hand-painted picture of Hanuman—a holy, flying monkey god and a popular member of the Hindu pantheon—adorned the sign hanging over the entrance. Propped up on an old tree stump out front stood a 6-foot-tall (fake) yeti, welcoming guests—mostly from Europe.
*
An old rooster crowed out back.

It was November—one of the two best months of the year (the other is December) for paragliding in Pokhara—and the Blue Sky Paragliding shop was busy. A man standing in line at the counter waited patiently to ask his question. It was the same question he had been asking all over Lakeside the past two months, at each of the paragliding shops, leaving repeated messages on their voice mails and sometimes even stopping strangers in the street to ask it.

He was tall for a Nepali: 5-foot-5. His boots were well worn beneath his faded black leather pants and brown leather motorcycle jacket. An army-green fighter pilot helmet, emblazoned with the red star of China, was tucked under his arm. He was not a communist; he simply liked the look of it. His eyes were dark brown and intelligent. On his chin sat a medium-length, well-kept goatee, and he had an impish grin.

The young man working on the other side of the counter was clean-shaven and short, even for a Nepali. Strong, but boyish looking. “Hello,” he said, his eyes also brown, but liquid and bright—gleaming like a child’s. “My name is Babu.”

The man in the motorcycle jacket quickly flashed a broad, white-toothed smile. “My name is Lakpa,” he replied. “I’m looking for a secondhand wing.”

Babu actually knew the stranger, and Lakpa knew Babu. They had, in fact, become friendly acquaintances on a rafting trip a year earlier. Babu, a lower-caste Sunuwar, was guiding the trip, and Lakpa, a relatively high-caste Sherpa, was on holiday, sent by his employer as a perk. They hadn’t seen each other since.

Babu knew all too well how hard paragliding wings were to come by in Nepal—typically having to be bought from visiting foreigners to avoid the government’s roughly 200 percent tax on all imported goods (hence all the old kayaks lining the streets of Pokhara). But what he heard next made him wonder if he should actually tell Lakpa he had an extra one, let alone sell it to him.

“I crashed mine into a tree, flying in the Solu-Khumbu,” Lakpa said, still smiling. “I work as a climbing sherpa there, and I’m looking for a new one.”

The Solu-Khumbu area, which lies just to the south of Everest in northeastern Nepal, is a dangerous place to fly, even for an experienced pilot. Babu knew this. It’s filled with powerful updrafts and crosswinds, amidst some of the highest mountains in the world. Towering black cliffs line deep, narrow valleys covered in bristling conifers. There are plenty of hard, sharp places to crash into, which is the reason that people don’t generally fly there and that the ones who do tend to get hurt. Babu had no idea whether Lakpa was an expert pilot or not.
He could just be an idiot,
he wondered.

“You didn’t break anything?” Babu asked, a little surprised that Lakpa hadn’t died. “Never do that again,” he suggested warily, and then he recommended they take his old beginner wing out ground
handling. That is to say, unfold it and see if Lakpa knew which end was up.

Neither of them knew the other was also thinking about flying off the top of the world’s tallest mountain soon—or the other’s remarkable backstory.

Lakpa Tsheri Sherpa was born in Pokhara in 1976. His parents, Nima Nuru and Nima Phuti Sherpa,
*
who share a first name that means “Sunday” in English, named him Lhakpa,
^†
or “Wednesday”–—after the day on which he was born. Lovingly, they gave him the second name of “Long Life,” or Tsheri.
^‡
A few years later, before Lakpa can even remember, they moved their family, including Lakpa’s two older sisters, Nyima Yangji and Jangmu Lhamu, back to the family farm in Chaurikharka, south of Everest, where they soon had Lakpa’s younger sister, Nyima Doma.

Chaurikharka is a small mountain village in northeastern Nepal, tucked into a green, forested hillside beneath the towering white peaks of the Solu-Khumbu region. Like all of the small villages in the remote 425-square-mile valley, it doesn’t have an inch of paved road. There are no buses or cars. No bicycles. Everything from potatoes to the toilets that are brought in for the tourists that come to see and sometimes climb the surrounding mountains must be carried in on foot or by yak along narrow, well-worn paths through the mountains.

Before the Himalayan Trust
^§
built the airport in nearby Lukla in 1964, the only way in or out of Chaurikharka had been a week’s walk
through the mountains to the nearest road in Jiri. Today, it’s a thirty-minute light jog to Lukla, followed by a forty-five-minute hair-raising small plane ride to Kathmandu, taking off from what The History Channel officially labeled in 2010 as the most dangerous airport in the world. Still, there are no roads.

Lakpa’s parents’ home, like nearly all of the structures in the village, was made of uneven stones, plucked from the terraced fields on which his family farmed. A small stand of evergreens behind the two-story building offered some semblance of shade from the afternoon sun. Inside, over a high wooden threshold, on the first floor, was a low-ceilinged windowless room, filled with sacks and baskets brimming with potatoes, turnips, cornmeal, and dried yak and dzo dung (used in place of limited wood resources for fires). Up a short wooden ladder was a single, long room with wood plank floors, lined with benches for sitting or sleeping, and shelves filled with bright copper kettles. Narrow windows with whitewashed frames and no glass let in beams of sunlight to the space. It was a good, relatively wealthy home to grow up in, by Nepali standards.

As soon as Lakpa was old enough to attend school, he began skipping it. The thick forests covering the hills along his walk to the schoolhouse in the village center provided a convenient hiding place for his frequent truancies, where in lieu of his studies he enjoyed climbing trees. Sometimes his young friends would join him, and they would build small fires to cook the potatoes they stole from nearby fields. They ate them plain, roasting them first on the glowing coals, pulling them from the fire with bare hands, laughing. He and his friends got in trouble for this, of course, but Lakpa discovered early on that he “learned more from being in nature than sitting in a classroom,” as he would later say.