Let’s get high. Like, seriously high. Your host Stephen Bailey takes you on a personal journey to Everest Base Camp, via three incredible mountain passes. Learn about what it is like to trek in the Everest region, the different routes to Base Camp, and how much time you need. Close your eyes and be transported to another place in this ten-minute episode on top of the world. Your host Stephen Bailey tells all.

Getting As High As We Possibly Can

Welcome to a new year. I’m your host Stephen Bailey, travelling the world with you — and today, getting as high as we possibly can. Let’s take a journey to a place where it’s impossible to get any higher. Let’s travel to Everest. Let’s trek for 17 days on the trail in the Nepalese Himalayas. The Nepalese know the world’s highest mountain as Sargamatha, the Forehead of the Sky. It rises relentlessly beneath the sun, towering above the Khumbu Icefall, peaking above the icy frame of nearby Lola.

To one side lies the Tibetan Plateau. Beneath the mountains, perched on the side of an icefall, is Everest Base Camp, where climbers acclimatize for three months before attempting the summit. And all around Everest there are the sister mountains. This is part of the great Himalayan chain. It’s around Everest that you’ll find almost all the world’s very highest mountains, all those above 8,000 meters. And it’s this pristine alpine region that you can go trek into. I was very fortunate to trek to Everest Base Camp with two very good friends in 2018, something I had been dreaming of, planning, for over 10 years. And I will admit that Everest Base Camp is quite a lot of anticlimax.

The Destination Is An Anticlimax

Because when you get to Everest Base Camp, you have reached the destination on your journey. The whole trek, the whole expedition, is geared around Everest Base Camp. Once there, then you start coming down, you start going back to where you started. But at the same time, when I got to Everest Base Camp, I saw the tents of the trekkers who were going to summit Everest. And that was quite disheartening. I had got to the end of my journey. I had reached the goal. Yet for all of these people in the tents, they were just starting. The Everest Base Camp is where they started their journey.

So that made it a bit of an anticlimax — along with the amount of people. Everest is popular. It is as high as you can get. And the Base Camp — there were around 50 people there and quite a lot on the last bit of the trail. the guides were telling me — the Sherpa guides were telling me — that there is a bottleneck on the top of the world at 8,800 meters. So only about 50 meters below the very summit, the very pinnacle, the highest point on our planet. And there’s a bottleneck and you have to queue, you have to queue because it takes climbers a long time to get through this very tricky section. And with so few days of good weather where a summit attempt is possible, that there is a queue to get as high as you can get. So, Everest Base Camp — an anticlimax.

Perhaps My Greatest Travel Experience

But the entire expedition, absolutely not. The greatest expedition, perhaps the greatest travel experience I have ever had because it’s not about the destination. It’s famous and cliche to say it’s about the journey, but really in this sense, it is. Because we were tracking for 17 days. We crossed three passes.

We summited three different peaks as well as Everest Base Camp. My highlight was a peak called Gokyo Ri. The first time I got above 5,000 meters. And from this peak — it was about nine days into the trek — it was everything I imagined of the Himalayas. It was standing in the snow on top of a jagged mountain, really steep all around me, looking out over a completely uninterrupted view, 360 degrees of the highest mountains in the world. Including the big triangular frame of Everest.

And that was just one peak. There were another two peaks that we did on the trek, as well as the three passes. And the trek I did, which was highly recommended — and I’ll pass on the recommendation because it’s longer and you need more time, but it’s, it’s beyond extraordinary. So the whole trip is really three weeks, three passes, three peaks with Everest Base Camp somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in the second week. Now, if you just want to go to Everest Base Camp you can go the shortest way. So you can trek up and trek back on the same trail.

For me, I didn’t want to do that, because being so remote, I wanted to make sure that every step I took was going to be somewhere new. So you can do the trek in only 11 days — even less, if you are really fit — but the problem is, there’s a high risk of altitude sickness because you basically go too high, too soon, too quick. And you are always on the main trail. And the main trail is filled with processions of donkeys and Sherpas carrying all the equipment for Everest Base Camp. The main trail is actually pretty crowded because they’ve got to get all this gear up to the Base Camp, certainly in spring, less so in the Autumn.

There Is Nothing But Silence And Solitude

Whereas the three passes trek does a loop that pretty much circumnavigates the main trail. Other than the two days directly around the Base Camp, we barely saw more than 10 other trackers in a single day. And this was in season, in Nepal. And for me, that was the beauty. That was what was extraordinary about the experience. To walk where there are only, and where there only has been, trails. To stop in these tiny tea houses where it’s cold, it’s basic, but you are completely surrounded by the world’s highest mountains. After five or six days, my legs said, no, they didn’t want to take any more. It was so painful to sit down, to sleep, to do anything.

But after eight or nine days, my legs were completely used to it so that when the 17 days of trekking ended, I really didn’t want it to end. My body wanted to do more, because in my mind, I knew I would perhaps never get an opportunity to get so high. To explore a place so remote, where the air is so thin, where the mountains are so spectacular, where the wilderness is so pure and wild. Where there is nothing but silence and solitude, just the sound of your own footsteps and your own thoughts.