Getting to Nepal

So for a while now, like years, I have had in the back of my mind that I want to go to Everest Base Camp. Here has been the problems: 1. The best time to go is October - May, smack in the middle of the school year 2. It's a long hike. At least 12 days of hiking to get there and back 3. All the tours I had seen were sooooooo expensive, like so so so expensive. These three things put it out of reach for me for a number of years. Every year I would look at it. See if the dates over Christmas break would work, see if it magically got cheaper. Turns out they don't usually get cheaper. Well sometime in 2018 I found a company that was significantly cheaper out of the UK, Kandoo Adventures. They are more than 50% less expensive than any other company I had seen. So CRAZY! This year they also had a tour that lined up perfectly with my Christmas break. I decided that it was meant to be and started to communicate with the company. I am not going to lie I was crossing my fingers that is wasn't a hoax because it was so affordable. Luckily it wasn't and I just returned from an extraordinary trip in Nepal.

One of the trickiest things was packing. We were only allowed 15 Killograms for the trek. This is fine except it is very long and you want to be able to change your clothes, turns out we didn't get to. It is also winter there so we needed lots of warm clothes which take up space and add weight. It took a lot of looking at my gear and work to get just the right stuff and make sure it all fit. I also wanted to bring extra clothes for after the hike. Laying everything out that I wanted to take.

 It seems like so much stuff but we were gone for 17 or 18 days.

After lots of reaaranging and eliminating I got everything to fit!!!!!

 Nepal is a very long ways from Utah. Getting there was not easy. There are no direct flights and pretty much every flight required a long layover somewhere in Asia. Cyndee and I flew out of Salt Lake on December 19th. We went to LA and then Hong Kong. We had a 15 hour layover in Hong Kong before making are way to Katmandu.

We were ok to do this because we thought a day in Hong Kong would be fun. And it was fun to see a place I have never been. It was just complicated by the fact that our luggage didn't make it from LA. Are you kidding me? That was stressful and meant that we had to spend a couple of hours dealing with that. Eventually we kind of figured it out and were able to get out and see some of Hong Kong. It is a very busy city. We enjoyed walking around a nice park and their down town. It was really nice to be out moving after such a long flight. The weather was also amazing, actually the weather was HOT!

We made our way back to the airport a little early because we had to check on our luggage. Luckily they found it and told us it would arrive in Katmandu the night after us. This was great news but also a little scary because we would be leaving for our hike at 6am after it was supposed to arrive. If it hadn't shown up we would have been in trouble!