Thursday 26 March 2008 Phakding, Nepal

26 March 2008 Thursday

Up today at about 4am unable to sleep and needing to pack for the trek. Easily done by 6 my departure time to the airport for the 7:30 flight to Lukla. My watch must have been off by 15 min or I never set it that accurately, because I thought I was coming down for the taxi at 6 and it was 15 after. I was a little afraid I might miss the flight but there was no traffic and I was there in 30 minutes. I checked in and went to the waiting room. The flights were not announced in English so every time a flight was announced I had to watch the color of the boarding passes the passengers were carrying but they never had my color. About every fourth flight I’d go and ask one of the guards but he’d look at my ticket and just motion me not yet. My flight was finally called at 8:30! Glad I rushed here.

The flight had a few bumpy moments and a bit of time spent in zero visibility, but was otherwise uneventful. Naturally, we were offered cotton for our ears, and pieces of hard candy as a snack by the stewardess, everybody took both. My baggage was in the check area at the end of the flight and there were many eager youngsters to help me get to the lodge where I had always found a guide/porter, and in fact as I arrived there an employee of Peak Promotion said he had received Wong Chu’s call and had found me a porter. I was introduced to Kami Sherpa the proposed candidate for the spot. He was pretty tiny, about 5’1” and 120 lbs I imagine, but eager, and, as it turns out the brother of Nwang Sherpa my guide in the year 1999! He looked sober and cheerful so I agreed to 800rps per day and he pays for his own food.
After finishing that business I sat for some breakfast. There was an Indian looking fellow who had been sitting through my arranging for the guide/porter and we finally introduced ourselves. He said he was from New York, and I responded I had lived there 18 years and had gone to NYU. He said he lived on Bleeker Street, I was taken aback, what a weird place to live, I assumed it must be far west on the street because near NYU it was very commercial and honky tonk, no serious people live there. He said he lived at the intersection of Bleeker and La Guardia. I was shocked, then he added he was a professor at NYU and lived in the faculty housing there. I confirmed, “You mean the buildings with the Picasso sculpture out front?” Yes, those. I was doubly shocked and totally impressed, knowing the general intellectual profile for a student at NYU(which was way over my head, even though I was a student there once), I imagined he must be some kind of genius or near genius to be on the faculty. And it wasn’t just any old faculty, it was the Stern Business School, one of the highest ranked in the country.
His guide came in and they left but I said I’d see him again that night at Phakding the resting spot for the first day of trekking.

Kami and I were the last to leave Lukla and the first to arrive at that evening’s lodge. At first I wondered if I would be exhausted by my big photo bag and it felt too heavy as I slung it on my back for the first time in earnest, but everything clicked perfectly and I walked strong and without fatigue. The distance is rated for a 3.5 hour walk but we arrived in 2.5 hrs, no problem.
Later, I had another chat with the NYU professor, Anindya Ghose, and I explained the nature of my photographic project and he told me about his work. His specialty is internet marketing.

That night I met several interesting people from many countries we’d criss-cross paths with over the next week or so.

Tuesday 25 March 2008

I awoke in the night about 1am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I am making progress reading the autobiography of Mahatma Ghandi – it’s a surprisingly unremarkable life to the point I’m at.



Went to breakfast at Hot Bread at 7am – got a pair of pants for 600rps because the pair I brought was ripped – then went to Tribhuvan University to try to find Dr. Shreeham Upadhaya. The Professor has written some scholarly books about the economic history of Nepal, and must certainly be one of the most distinguished professors up there, and yet as I arrive no one really knew him or even which department he may be in. I finally found someone who had his mobile number and spoke with him later in the day – we decided to meet when I returned from trekking.

He wrote in one of his books about the Treaty of Segauli of 1816 between The East India Company and Nepal which I believe may have the recognition by Britain of Nepali Territorial Integrity and Sovereignty which would mean that England’s subsequent naming of a mountain within Nepal would represent an abrogation/violation of the Treaty.



For the rest of the day I collect the rest of the things I need for my trek which will start on Thursday.



I visited with Wong Chu Sherpa at Peak Promotion(he was sirdar to the Imax Everest team with David Breshears). He wanted to supply me with a guide and porter or a guide/porter. I told him I had always had a problem with his people because anytime I was with them in the Khumbu and I’d want to climb up somewhere they’d always have some lame reason they wouldn’t want to do it. He said that wouldn’t happen.

I told him I wanted , among other places to go to the Khumbu Icefall and he said “Well, that really wouldn’t be possible” and gave some reason, and I said to him, “See, I’m not even out of the office and you’ve already told me it’s not possible to do something I really want to do, it’s a bad attitude, even you can’t be positive enough to say, if it works that’s OK, if the soldiers or the laison officers don’t permit it then it can’t happen” He could tell I didn’t want to book with him but offered to call ahead and have one of his people in Lukla find me a good independent guide/porter.

I asked him if he thought that the name Everest was right for Nepal or perhaps the Nepalese should be more forceful with the name Sagarmatha. I told him that my thinking on this subject had been influenced by his exhortation to adopt ‘Right thinking” while climbing or approaching the mountain, and I believed this to be an example of right thinking. He said he would be diplomatic about the issue and give no response.

I bought two small cans of Primus gas for my stove at $5.50 each before leaving his office.

Monday 24 March 2008 - Kathmandu

24 March 2008 Monday

I tested the lensboards I had made the last night at home and they are perfect. All my stuff is ready to go – I regret not bringing my rope and tent but how really could I have? The bags I did bring, all four of them, weighing about 50lbs each and the little one only30lbs(!) – had to be carried by me at several junctions or I would have had to ferry them – which I did consider many times, but which thing to leave unattended?
Anyway, I say to myself I have always considered myself a travel-lite photographer who shoots at and on a human vision scale, and the idea of adding the climbing paraphanalia and the additional people necessary to pull that off may cloud my landscape vision. There’s always that insecurity thing nagging at us all over every issue which says, ‘Take this extra thing, you may need it’, or ‘Get that extra piece of equipment, it may come in handy’, but at some point we are crippled by the weight of all that extra and don’t even achieve the simple thing we set out to do – and then again, this thing I’ve set out to do isn’t exactly simple but for this moment I think I should move quickly, and light, get what I can, and, when more resources become available, come back for what I see but can’t touch now. I keep thinking of Reinhold Messner, his Fair Means approach – he carries nothing; no rope, no pro (protection), no oxygen ! He uses only his own personal resources and resourcefulness.
It’s 8:15am. I’m back at Hot Bread my favorite coffee and pastry shop in the center of Thamel, sitting on the second storey terrace. The pastries are wonderful, the sights and sounds of the city rising are ever as they’ve been, a gentle bustling town with narrow streets on a human scale, that set against a cacophonous background of honking cars, rickshaw and bicycle bells and the, at times, incessant beep of motorcycles horns.
For 60rps I get a 5” diameter 1.25” high quiche either mushroom or mushroom/chicken and a raisin bun for an extra 30Rps also a small pot of coffee on the terrace upstairs is 77rps (the dollar is currently trading at 62.3rps per). The quiche is heated in a microwave(!). The ubiquitous Eurasian tree sparrows hop around at my feet hunting for the tiniest crumbs. These birds are amazing! I grew up with them in New Jersey, we called them English sparrows, I've seen in everyplace I've been in the USA including Hawaii, also Hong Kong and in the airport in Frankfurt.

23 March 2008 Kathmandu, Nepal

23 March Sunday

I took a taxi from the airport to the Tibet Guest House and as I walked in, I recognized every staff member and it seemed they recognized me. They welcomed me back as if I had been a long time in the mountains trekking, but like a person coming home after a long absence there was a special moment of recognition that’s higher than usual, almost as if we all recognized some real but unspoken degree of community or family bond that existed between us.
They gave me a break on the room, $15.00 which was my previous rate instead of the current rate of $25.00.
Rikshi, the bellboy who’s been here forever and looks like he’s wearing the exact same clothes he had worn when he helped me in ’98 and every other year and has the same little mustache, showed me to my room. Since I had just come from the airport bank and had only big bills, I gave him a 500rps note, he thanked me greatly and said it would buy milk for his baby for a month.
I quickly changed and went to Qayoom’s but he’s in Kashmir now. I burst into his rug shop and bellowed with my arms flung open, “My Brother’s!” and Yuseff, Q’s natural brother, gave me a bear hug and was astonished to see me after my 5 year absence as if a ghost stood before him. We talked for awhile then I went for food, realizing that jetlag and the fact that I had slept only an hour or two on the plane and was truly exhausted.
I lay down at about 3:30 – woke up briefly at 7:30 but this sector of the city’s electricity was off, went back sleep and with minor awakenings in the night, slept til 5am! So great to be back in Kathmandu! What a magical place. A lot of people grouse it's gone downhill with tourism and commercialism but compared to everywhere else still one of the greatest places on earth to be.

First day entry

I am somewhat different from all other photographers working in the Himalayas in that I use the large format 8x10" camera. Most people may not be familiar with that terminology, large format 8x10" camera, but if you can visualize the kind of cameras used in the civil war in the 1860's, yes, the same ones that look like an accordion with a lens attached, with the photographer disappearing under a cloth to focus the thing, you have the camera in mind. You may be asking yourself why would I bother with such ancient and arcane technology. The answer is that this type camera gives a very high resolution image, very clear and highly detailed. Many people are familiar with the photography of American Master photographer Ansel Adams: he used this same type camera to capture the beautiful images he made in Yosemite and the American West. Mr. Adams was an original inspiration of mine but after discovering his work I found that most of the photographers I really liked, Edward Weston, Edouard Baldus, Maxime Du Camp,have all used this type of camera.
I went to the Himalayas in 1976 with my Nikon camera and shot with 35mm Kodachrome film. Although I made pictures that impressed friends and surprised even me(!) I felt that the landscape was really too grand to be expressed in the diminutive 35mm format! large format style. I thought that it was crazy to try to compress a 12,000' view into a single inch of film space, as in the 35mm system. I remember saying to myself that I would've traded all my 35mm slides for one black and white photo in the style of Adams or any of the other photographers I had admired who used the large format.
I finally started to photograph in the Everest Region with the big camera in 1998. Since then I've won a couple of grants, had a show at the Hickory Museum of Art, was the subject of a large article in the Charlotte Observer(2/27/07), was on Mike Collins radio show, Charlotte Talks and his tv show, Charlotte Now.

I have started this blog to illustrate the daily life of a photographer in serious pursuit of the making of a comprehensive body of photographic work. Ostensibly, my subject is the world's tallest mountain, called in the West, Mt Everest, but as I've learned, known in the countries where it's located, Nepal and Tibet, as Sagarmatha and Qomolungma, respectively, more about that later.

Tomorrow I will start to file the daily logs of my trip to the Everest region in March and April of this year and will illustrate it with some AVI's and some of the photos I made.

First Day Entry

20 March 2008
The ‘Running Down A Dream Tour’

6:55pm As the bus is ready to pull away from the curb on the side of the Port Authority Terminal on 42nd St in New York City heading to JFK Airport, I can see my Brother Jim driving away in my car after dropping me at the bus stop.
Traffic is NYC typical : moving at a snail’s pace and everyone displaying a cut-throat driving ethic I had perfected when I lived here but have long since forgotten about.
This had been a long day or so. My original plan had been to leave Charlotte Wednesday at around 6pm get to my brothers in NJ in the morning then go into the city by about 2pm. I only had two things to do Wednesday – make two lensboards out of Plexiglass and pick up some posters that were being reprinted – I say reprinted because they had been printed the previous Thursday but the entire run, 1500 copies, on the wrong paper stock. They had been promised to me by noon but as it was being explained to me now, I’m just a little fish in the printing scheme of things and a big fish had bumped my job! So my job would go onto the press at midnite and I could pick up my 200 copies at about 3am! I had pretty much packed but there were always little odds and ends surfacing I wanted to bring. It took a couple of hours to make the lensboards, then cleanup the house, empty the fridge, etc. I got the call from the printer posters would be ready at 3:30. I got going. The posters looked good and I had them in the car by 3:45 and I was on the road a few moments later. I was looking at a 10 hour drive under the best of conditions, and conditions were rarely the best. I hadn’t slept at all so after an hour or so I stopped and slept 45 min, then I was on my way for real. I made good time by staying pegged on 68mph, stopped and bought a pair of hiking boots in Pennsylvania that were reduced from $115 to $68, good boots, not exactly my size but pretty close and usable. Arrived at my Brother Randy’s house at little after 3:30pm and repacked the bags for the last time with the ‘essential’ 178lbs of stuff – the posters are heavy. On the way Jim and I plan our rendevous and stay in touch by cellphone til I see him on the street in the city.
We arrive at the airport at 8:20. I run in with my three big bags and a carry-on in hand. All very cumbersome and heavy – I later weighed them and found the three big ones to weigh almost exactly 150 lbs!! But they were distributed slightly irregularly – the small bag a mere 28lbs! That’s a lot to carry any distance, but I’m desperate to catch the 9pm flight, so I do my best to shuffle rapidly into the terminal .
My Brother told me that he had heard on the radio that because of high winds all flights at JFK had been delayed one hour – that wasn’t true. The counter personnel for my flight had already packed up and left the area – I had missed the mandatory 90 minute advance check-in( guess they weren’t kidding about that!!!) There was a woman who was in the same predicament and she was being as ugly as a mad New Yorker could be to anyone who would listen, saying that although the plane wasn’t scheduled to leave for another 40 min, they still wouldn’t let us board. There were some scary moments, but finally someone from the airline said we could fly on the same flight the next night.
I gave the counter guys an Everest poster I had taken out of one of my bags when we tried to rebalance my weights. I wrote on it “Great service, thanks, Jeff!” I wasn’t sure if that was sarcasm or what but they loved it and promised to put it up in their office. I knew as I was writing it their boss wouldn’t be able to perceive the sarcasm. The boss gave me his card and said if I had any trouble the next day he’d be glad to help – and, in fact I did call on him and he put on pne of my bags for free, a $100 value at the weight. Hopefully, they won’t charge me on the other side.
During the transactions I glanced at my passport and noticed to my horror it was scheduled to expire on 21 April ’08! So I spent the day on Friday jumping thru hoops to do the impossible: renew my passport in a single day! I finally left the passport office at 4:30 Friday afternoon, I even had to call Amy and have her forge an urgent request on her business letterhead to permit me to renew the passport and fax it to me - the guards at the street door finally realized I deserved help and told me about that ruse after I stood before them and offered $100 cash to any person on line who was willing to sell me his confirmed appointment!
If it were n’t for the fact that this was Good Friday and there was about 20% the amount of the traffic as the night before, I may again not have made it to the plane in time.

21 March 2008 Friday

So, on Friday the 21st of March 2008, I took off out of JFK once more to my second country,
Nepal, and the mountains, the Himalayas. We touched off at 9pm, stopped Brussels for two
hours then landed again in Delhi at 3pm Saturday, New York time. Elapsed time, 18hrs – in air time, 16hrs. The time in Delhi was midnight Saturday.
Everywhere in the Delhi Airport there are signs saying ‘Get Set For A New Tomorrow’ in bold 4” font but right under it in much smaller 1.5” font, as if as explanation of an imaginary asterisk, are the words, ‘Till Then Inconvenience Is Regretted” sic. So very Indian! Even the dropping of the article before the word inconvenience, as if it’s somehow less inconvenient, less of an inconvenience because it isn’t given the importance of ‘The Inconvenience.” Some of the signs say, in the large font, “A World Class Airport Awaits You”. Almost like an explanation for everything in India itself. Then reflecting, I wondered if it didn’t sound so much like me, always explaining off the present as an investment in the future. I need to move up to the future, India has always been the definition of the frustrating and ineffectual.
On the flight into Nepal we could see some mountains to the West of the Everest Group, one of them the Annapurna Group – even to my eyes, which have seen so many mountains, I found them surprisingly impressive. The form and the fluting on the flanks, the shadows and the general modeling was intensely beautiful(later, thru photos I realize I was looking at Dhalughiri), then the Annapurna group. I made some funky low res shots with the digital camera.