Questioning My Life Choices

One fine day, a group of friends that (to my dire embarrassment sometimes) live up to the #YOLO adage, invited me to their 12-days Everest Base Camp hike. As a person fit enough to manually change my TV channels when the remote batteries died, the immediate answer was “Splendid! Of course!”

When the dreaded yet anticipated hike came (and here forgive me for the generic phrase), it was truly an experience none of us could forget.

Every morning the routine was waking up snug and warm in self-made cocoons; heavy-duty sleeping bags and layers of thermal wear. This was followed closely by questioning the decisions made in life before slowly inching out onto frozen floors and changing into the day’s hiking apparels as fast as jumping around to retain heat would allow. This is where you ignore my omission of a morning shower as my mates politely did.

Thus off we go to see the unforgettable vistas.

We saw massive, rapid waterfalls amongst colossal-sized rocks and towering trees that formed beautiful canopies over crunchy, brown, leafy walkways. We walked on several metres long suspension rope bridges that rocked precariously harder as more of us happily jumped on like it was built with cutting-edge German engineering (It’s not, in case you’re wondering).

We saw stupefying views of rows and rows of undulating mountains and the seemingly microscopic villages snug between its cleavages. We could see our next intended village, even if the journey was to be another eight hours.

We caught views of several sunrises, with rays cascading through veils of chilling fog or a clear sunrise rising over an untouched sky and lighting the valleys in gradual colours of brown, orange, dirty yellow and a curious purple.

As we descended higher, we caught teasing views of Everest's peaks, sometimes through fat clouds, highlighted by flattering sun rays reflected from unknown sources. We walked over precarious edges overlooking valleys of very unfortunate mistakes if one were to miss a step.

All that still didn’t prepare us for the view of the majestic sunrise creeping over Everest’s outline as we looked at it from the top of Kalapathar (Black Rock Mountain; A beautiful mountain of black earth that I wish to rename to Black Rock Murderous Mountain because the original name fails to allude to the impossible 3 hours, 45 degrees slope, continuously ascending hike with inhuman temperature and ridiculously thin air, making it literally breath-taking).

Simply put; Beautiful.