Hitachi Daily Dispatches [CLICK FOR INDEX] Charles Corfield A Little Shopping in Namche Bazaar
 Sat, March 27, 1999 — Namche Bazaar, Nepal
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This is Charles on the Everest Millennium Expedition calling from Namche Bazaar. The day is the 27th of March. It is Saturday. More importantly, that is market day here in Namche. Market takes place on a couple of narrow streets and is just choc-a-bloc with everybody from miles around who come to buy their groceries, produce, and other housewares. It's a great place, from a tourist's perspective, to go and see all the people who live around here: what they look like, what they buy, and their lives captured in a small vignette. Needless to say, we've been busy taking pictures and video and film, and it's been a great morning.

Khumbu Trek We made our way up yesterday from a place near Phakding — went through into the Sagarmatha National Park. We had a little bit of difficulty with the park official there. When we produced our expedition permit, this needed a stamp on it. Apparently, the Minister of Tourism's signature was not enough for this official. So after a certain amount of odgy-bodgy, we pressed on, to a great amusement to a couple of soldiers there at the guard post who thought the whole thing was a riot.

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Namche Bazaar
Namche Bazaar
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Namche is a marvelous little village. It's a natural amphitheater in the Khumbu region just over 11,000 feet high. The houses are stone houses often with a whitewash over some adobe. Beautiful Tibetan-style windows where the jams are wider at the bottom than they are at the top. Often painted in black and then roofs of assorted colors on corrugated iron.

All this has to come up on people's backs. There are no wheeled vehicles around here. And so, if it can't be put on a person's back or on the side of one bovine or another, it does not get up here. There is, right now, a building construction boom in the Khumbu. And yesterday, just as we checked out of the place we were staying, it was really interesting to see some builders at work with their plumb lines and spirit levels and sitting down with hammers and chisels, Khumbu Trek basically mapping stones to beautiful fits and putting them up on the corners.

And, after that, we came on up to Namche; it started to snow in the afternoon. We noticed as we came up the Namche hill, that this must have been a very dry and comparatively warm winter since the huge ice smears or waterfall ice-routes opposite Namche were pretty much out of condition and most of them had fallen out. The locals here say they've had only a couple inches of snow total this winter instead of a several feet as is normally the case. To make up for this, yesterday evening it snowed an inch or two. This is like pre-monsoon weather where, gradually as time goes on, more and more moist air will come up-valley and in the afternoon, it will precipitate.

Khumbu Trek This morning, everyone went down to the market to do filming, and we have several projects coming up over the next few days. A visit over to a gompa, over Thome way. We'll also make our way up to Khumjung, Thyangboche, and we hope to sample some of the life around here-including, there's another new bakery has opened up, bringing more baked goods into the valley. And we have a number of other projects which we want to take care of.

Meanwhile, a lot of our gear is now moving up to Base Camp on the backs of yaks masterminded by Nima Tashi, our climbing sirdar, who is based in Thyangboche and had a lot of yaks to provide to the expedition. I will leave it at that for now. This is Charles Corfield reporting from Namche Bazaar. Take Care.


—Charles Corfield, Climber

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