Nothing says Kathmandu quite like momos and Everest beer. The size of the bottle does justice to its namesake.

Chris, Tara, Abby and Andy: you made it fun!

Again Mountain Madness showed their muscle and had us on the first flight out.

We said our goodbyes, got another prayer scarf (never can have too many of those before a flight in or out of Lukla) and got on the plane. Again, it was a crystal clear morning.

No big deal. Just roll down the ski-jump-like airstrip at Lukla and you’re winging your way back to Kathmandu. No worries.

Some combination of emotions from completing a grueling trek which had been an obsession for well over a decade plus the release of sitting in an airplane, ipod playing a favorite song, and the mountains receding into the distance started a torrent of tears rushing down my bearded face.  My time with these friends was slipping away. Nothing I could do about it except let it be part of the moment.

This shows that Starbucks has either a sense of humor or a good dose of pragmatism knowing that copyright infringement halfway around the world in Nepal is pointless to try to stop. If it had been a fake McDonalds they would have targeted it with drones.

Anyway, there is a faux Starbucks in Lukla. Check out the logo. Instead of the mermaid it’s a mountain. Brilliant! We stopped in to buy a mug, expecting it to be a schlock spot, but it was really nice!  We changed plans, got a couple of coffee drinks, and sat down in an almost elegant place to celebrate the end of our hike.

We finished the last few hundred yards to the tea house, got cleaned up, and had a celebratory dinner with the Sherpas. The high point was some Nepali gambling where the only uncertainty was how long it would take to lose all our money to the house. The house’s winnings all went to a good cause so it was OK.

From the cold, grey underworld of high altitude, we had now descended over three days from 17,000 ft to the sunny and relatively balmy Phakding at under 10,000 ft. In an inverse Oz sort of way, we went from a bizarre world in black and white to a comforting one in living color. Loved the vibrant prayer wheel set in the orange flowers.

We picked up something else in Phakding…Maya. A four year old orphan, Maya had a tragic start to life when her unwed mother committed suicide in light of beatings from her alcoholic father, but with the help of a local family and Deana, Maya was heading to a school in Kathmandu supported by an American foundation. Maya was a testament to human resilience.

We said goodbye to Namche. We were now on familiar trails…the same ones we took from Lukla to Namche the first time. We remembered it being a long, steep UP the last few hours on the way in, but none of us seemed to remember just how long and steep it had been for now it seemed like we were hiking down a steep grade for hours. No complaining. It was great.

We shared smug laughs about the fresh-faced trekkers making their way up the hills. The trails were SO crowded with people, dzokios, and regular porters carrying on normal trade and cargo transport between Lukla, Namche and places farther up. Boys that didn’t seem much older than 13 or 14 were carrying massive timbers up the trail and having to turn almost 90 degrees sideways when they met someone coming the other way.

We recrossed the suspension bridges and walked along the river. It started to hit, when we left Sagarmatha park, that this adventure was ending.

My mind must have been drifting (vacant) after lunch. After hiking for awhile all of a sudden I recognized we were walking down into Namche Bazaar. Namche, sooooo glad to see you. We got our room assignments, and the smart climbers shot into their bathrooms for the first decent showers in about a week and a half. In fact, since we left Namche the first time.

Everyone split up with some going into town, others chilling at the tea house (my favorite option). No more shopping needed…I already had a yak bell.

Yeti-like creature stalked us for days:

Smiley girl. Something about her doesn’t look quite right:

We stopped for lunch at a little place situated at a little pass. Looking back at the pictures it seems to have been called Mong La (or just Mong from the map). Moods were improving even though the terrain was steep up and down. But then again it’s the Himalayas, not New Jersey.

Sara would have liked the organic food place. We went somewhere else a little farther down the trail, though. At lunch I celebrated and bought a Fanta for a few hundred rupees. Took me back to my O.G. days.

On the edge of recovery, but not there yet. Still at almost 14,000′ I was exhausted, my lungs were making bad noises, and I hadn’t slept more than an hour straight in a week. Still, the days were full of amazing sights and we just ran on adrenaline.

I believe that Phortse is off the beaten path. Most trekkers return to Namche the way they came. Again, Deana knew the woman who ran the place and I’m so glad we stopped there and saw something different. The views from the trail were remarkable (that’s a new word. I’m tired of spectacular).

It was my worst night. I wasn’t sure I was going to wake up so I didn’t want to go to sleep in the last hour. Not that I had slept before that. So of course, I fell asleep and it was the one morning when nobody knocked and woke me up with ‘milk tea pleeze’ so I was a half hour late to breakfast and had to rush to get packed.

But as usual the sun was shining when we woke up, I wasn’t dead, and the only good way to get to Namche was to shoulder the pack and start walking. If I’d been at home I wouldn’t have moved from bed. But I was still in the middle of nowhere in Nepal so it wasn’t worth thinking about.

The world was turning green again.

Sancho is aparently a local or regional version of mentholatum. Remember images of grandpa putting a towel over his head, over a bowl of steaming water, with a weird medicine smell rising in the air? Well that’s just what they had us do in Phortse to treat our coughing and wheezing (when it wasn’t HAPE or HACE. but that’s another story).

Tara demonstrates: