大象传媒

The Battle of Wounded Knee

• Ben
• 5 May 07, 07:51 AM

It's a strange thing, how your own memory can mislead you into doing some fairly stupid things. This happened to me over the last few days, as I have come down from Everest Base Camp to Lukla, with the intention of joining a trek on the way back up.

The plan was to get from Base Camp to Lukla in two days. It's a walk of about 30 miles, up and down hills on quite rough paths, so I suppose I should have known I was asking for trouble.

Setting off from Base Camp, though, I felt a degree of invincibility. I'd been acclimatising for a month and felt good; and after all, the journey was mostly downhill. My pack was also fairly light, because my camera and much of the other gear was being carried by Pasang, one of our Sherpas.

We reached Pheriche for lunch, a journey on which we had taken three days on the way up. Already, I was noticing my legs were beginning to hurt, my knees and thighs in particular, from the incessant stomping down steep slopes.

By 4.30 we had stopped for the night at Deboche; we were both tired and didn't think it sensible to go any further that day. My invincibility was slipping away rather, but I was confident we wouldn't have any problems getting to Lukla the next day. Hmmm.

The following day we set off at 8.30 and, three hours later, made it to Namche Bazaar. Although it was only 11.30 we stopped there for lunch, not least to chat to the Namche lab team, whom I hadn't seen for a few weeks. Also, the remaining distance to Lukla had been a mere two days' trek on the way in. In my super-acclimatised form I was sure it was only a hop and a skip that afternoon, and we would be in Lukla by early evening. That was where my memory sadly let me down.

I completely misjudged how far we still had to go, and how hard it would be. My knees were really giving me trouble, and even Pasang's leg was hurting. We had to stop periodically to sit down.

By about 6pm we had still only reached the bottom of Lukla hill. Coming down it on the very first trekking day it had seemed simple enough. Now Pasang estimated we were still two hours from our destination.

Climbing the hill I began to notice that my left knee didn't really hurt any more, but my right knee was really playing up. I reasoned it was unlikely my left leg had suddenly got better, and more likely that my right had got worse and was hogging all the attention. That didn't seem good.

It also got darker as we climbed, until we had to put on head torches. The distance to Lukla began to seem unfeasibly long to me. I couldn't believe it had been this far on the way out. I even began to wonder whether Pasang had mistakenly gone the wrong way, and were were fruitlessly climbing some unknown Himalayan peak in the darkness.

Of course, I should have had more faith, and we ultimately arrived in Lukla just before 8pm. We found a nice guest house and ordered beers.

The next morning I was to meet the trekkers, arriving from Kathmandu at about 7am. I got up and got the camera ready, but walking the short distance from the guest house to the airstrip proved excruciating. My right knee stabbed with pain whenever I walked down hill. It was fairly obvious I wouldn't be able to walk that day.

So now, three days later, I'm still in Lukla, waiting for the next trek and hoping my knee recovers in time. I think that, although I was well acclimatised to low oxygen, my time at Base Camp also wasted some of my muscles, so I wasn't as invincible as I'd thought.