The 3th of July wefinally arrivedin the middle of the Himalayas, one of our favourite and long awaited destinations!

But first we have to cope with Kathmandu, the busy, dusty and a (bit) dirty capital of Nepal! The narrow streets of Kathmandu are full of small Suzuki taxis with at least 6 or 7 persons in it, holy cows, rikshas, street dogs, tuktuks, garbageand people.We settled in a decent hotel just outside the busy tourist area Thamel, a neighbourhood full of cheap hostels and restaurants, trekking agencies, trekking gear shops (with the real original copies ofthe big outdoor brands), handicraft shops and the usual aggressive street touts.

Here we had to arrange our trek into the mountains through a local travel agency. After careful consideration, we chose an agency and allthough it is monsoon (the rainy season) and therefore not the best time to do a trekking, we decided to go for a 17 day journey in the Everest region.Now we know that it sometimes pays off to book these things in your home country!It took us 3 days to settle everything with these slick bastards that never kept their promises......In the meantime we visited the Buddhist Monkey Temple (I forgot the Nepali name, but there were plenty of these curious animals).

Nevertheless... 3 days later we are very excited and ready to fly to Lukla, the start of our trek! Unfortunately the weather in Lukla is not good and after waiting for 7 hours and having actually been in the aircraft ready to depart, the pilot decides to cancel the flight and slightly dissapointed we are forced to go back to the hotel. Yet the next day we are lucky and we head of to see Everest in small 12-seater propellor plane. When approachingour destinationwe understand why it was cancelled the prior day: we see a 250m runway on the edge of a cliff! Luckily we have an experienced Nepali pilot that brings us safely to Lukla (at an altitude of 2840m), a small village high up in the mountains and the start of our trek!

But first a good breakfast! I decide to order the 'light' breakfast from the menu of Sunny Garden Restaurant, not knowing that in the next 24 hours I will actually loose a lot of weight due to food poisoning(: I should have known betterwhen on the menu are things like Kaiserschmarrn (an Austrian delicacy). So after a bad start I recovered the next day with the help of Immodium, biscuits, some tea and the moral support from Sharda! After a long day (at least for me) we arrive in Namche Bazar (3440m), as all mountaineers know, 'the gateway to the Kumbhu and Everest'. Namche is a small but bustling town on a ridge surrounded by beautiful and impressive mountains. As there are only some 200 tourists in the total Everest region in this month (compared to some 9500!! in October during the peak climbing season), local people, the Sherpas, are working hard on constructing new teahouses for the tourists and you can hear the sound of hammers hitting stones from dusk till dawn. These big and very heavy stones are carried by very strong porters (starting from the age of 13....) and are handmade into nicely shaped bricks!

On the way we (Sharda, Jordi, guide Deep and porter Jaya)only meet some locals, carrying unbelievable loads (e.g. 3 doors, 10 wooden planks of 5kg each at least, 3 20L jerrycans with gasoline) and one lonely and crazy Korean. As weare on a17 day trip we first go into the Gokyo valley, a beautiful valley full of emarald lakes, meadows with yak and an enormous glacier going all the way up to Cho Oyu one of thefourteen 8000m+ mountains in the world! We have a steady pattern these days: every day we get up around 6, ascent some 300m to our next teahouse in 3 or 4 hours, have lunch and drink a big pot of tea of 2L and costingaround 8 euro compared to 2 euro for a bed!!!), do our afternoon acclimatisation hike of some 2 hours and return to the teahouse, have dinner and go tobed at around 8pm. After some 5 days we ascent our first 5000m+ peak: Gokyo Ri (5360m). Unfortunately the promised Everest view is not meant to be for us as clouds are abundantly present that day!

After a bit more than a week we are getting a bit annoyed by our guide who is constantly and irritatingly on our side! We could however not have imagined that he was a very inexperienced mountaineer, as we unfortunately had to find out when crossing a dangerous glacier and glacier lake at the Chola Pass (5350m), which we only should have crossed with crampons and ropes, which our guide said we did not need. It felt a bit like the last passage climbing Grossglockner with my friend Stijn, but then with a 'guide' without experience who sends his porter (an 18 year old boy) carrying a heavy loadin front to find the way through the crevasses! Luckily we survived and after a 11 hour day we arrived in our teahouse, tired and very angry!

The next morning, feeling still a bit shaky and tired from the prior day we headed to Gorak Shep at 5147m (our highest teahouse). Just before arriving there I had my moment......... I saw a glimpse of the summit of Mount Everest (8850m). The three names in the title of this story are the English, Nepali and Tibetan name for the highestmountain on this planet which wasconquered firstby Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953. I must say I felt a bit emotional as I had been dreaming of this mountain sinceI was a little boy, that together with his friend Stijnstudied all the 8000m+ mountain names and altitudes from his fathers book ''Welt der berge' if I remember correctly.

In the afternoon we tried to go for Everest Base Camp (EBC at 5400m).Half way we had to turn around as I felt a bit shaky, suffered from stomach painsand probably had some mild symptoms of high altitude sickness. Luckily people that went there said we did not miss anything as due to the absence of climbers in this season there was nothing to see except for even more rubish as we've already seen along the way.

That night our alarmclock went off at 3.45am TRIIIING: SUMMIT DAY! We were ready for our ascent of Kala Pattar (5560m). The prior week had learnt us that in order to acclimatise best and to avoid altitude sickness you better ascent very slowly and just before sunrise in our our so-called 'turtle walk' we reached the summit. Jordi setting the pace and Sharda following orderlypreventing herself from going to fast.From here wehad the most stunning views of Everest, Khumbu icefall, Everest southcol, Lhotse (4th highest mountain in the world) and other beautiful and wellknown peaks such as Nuptse, Pumori and Ama Dablam. We stayed on the summit for 2 hours and just enjoyed the fabulous scenery!

We were happy to have done it slowly as we saw some other trekkers that did not have or did not take the time to acclimatise, that had to go back down in the middle of the night or that walked like drunks after a good night in the pub whilefacing severeheadaches.

During our trek we also made new friends: Yasar, a friendly Turk from Antalya,with whom we spent some more time in Kathmandu and Pokhara later on and Sharda fell in love with Sheppy, a lovely black dog that followed us for a day on the way down. Unfortunately (or fortunately for me) he broke her hart when leaving her the next day for Luis, a Spanish guy!

I totally forgot to tell you about the food and lodging during our trek: as we were the only visitors during our first week in the Gokyo Valley the abundant menu full of Western delicacies like pizza, lasagna, spaghetti, apple crumbleand (yak) steak were not available and we had to eat theNepali treat, Dal Bhat (rice with lentils and vegetables)instead!The secondweek was a bit better with an occasional pizza and spaghettiand not to forget Kailash's (porter of Yasar and chef of Namche Bazar guest house) unforgettable and tasty cheese, veggie and meat momo's (fried or steamed)! I cannot say the trek was very romantic either as except for 1 night we slept in seperate beds covered in smelly quilts on very hard mattresses, allthough that maybe was the best thing for the both of us as we did only take 2 'showers' during those 17 days!!!!

On the way back we had the same problem as at the start, a flight cancellation, and we spent our day playing cards with some other trekkers! The next day the clouds had dissapeared and we could return to Kathmandu, where we enjoyed an honest Italian diner with a well deserved bottle of wine!

Stay tuned for our next adventure in..................... Bhutan, the land of the Thunder Dragon!