Today we walked up to the Namche “airport” , the Everest View Hotel, through Khumjung, and then back to Namche. The airfield is technically at Syangboche, 500m straight up from Namche and a very “nice” start to the day.

It was a short walk from there to the Panorama lead us to our first views of Ama Dablam, Everest, Lhotse, Nuptse, and a host of other peaks. It was certainly an “oh WOW!” moment.

At the Everest View Hotel we met up with our friend Chris. He was on our flight to Lukla (the first person on the plane) and stayed in the same hotel with us in Phakding. Australian, he’s a professional photographer so we had a lot to talk about! We had tea together next to a table of apparently wealthy Arabic or Palestinian men. They’d chartered a helicopter to bring them to the hotel and were having an absolute feast, using their own dishes, pouring out champagne, the works… They offered us dates from their homeland (they said from the “holy land”) along with cookies. It was absolutely unreal, the sort of thing you’d see in a movie.

After our dates, it was a brisk and mostly downhill walk to Khumjung. In Khumjung we stopped by a gompa that supposedly had a yeti skull. We paid a small donation to the gompa and tools lots of pictures, both of the “yeti skull” and the gompa itself. From there we made our way to just outside the Hillary school where we had lunch.

After lunch, we walked back to Namche. Along the way we passed the longest mane wall in all of Nepal. Manes are stones on which prayers are written. They’re inscribed on massive boulders as well as on small slate tablets, which are piled up to form either a domed shape or in more extreme examples, long walls. Here the wall was some 200m in length. Again, we took scores of pictures before making out way back to Namche for the evening.

Stats for the day:
Miles: 5
Ascent: 593m
Descent: 586m
Time: 5h46