Kathmandu to Lukla

Awoken at 0545 am after a restless, noisy night. Breakfast in the hotel 30 minutes later followed by some last minute packing. By 7 am we were heading in a rickety old coach towards Kathmandu’s national airport. Despite the hour the streets were already chaotic.

At the airport we entered through ‘local' departures. It was a hurly burly, do-it-yourself kind of check in but somehow it seemed to work.

There were already some eight planes awaiting as we were bused out to a twin engined Otter operated by Yeti airways. These planes can make four or five trips a day to somewhere like Lukla, some 30 to 40 minutes of spectacular flying time away.

Localised fog out on the runway meant everything was grounded until the sun was properly up to burn away the early morning mist. We hung around outside the plane with the chance to closely examine what looked like a flying relic of days gone by. Hopefully good enough for one more trip into the mountains.

Thought it’s not entirely logical, I feel thankful that we have two pilots as we career down the runway and buzz up into the air away from Kathmandu.

It’s a tight fit for 16 people and all the trekking gear for 10 days and we have an intimate view of the two pilots at the front. Soon we are flying over hilly farmland at about 10,000 feet. To the left there are distant towering mountain ridges.

As we can see through the cockpit window the tiny mountainside landing strip comes into view. It has to be a pinpoint touchdown here as the runway is short and ends in a wall of mountainside. No second chances as the pilots line up for what must be one of the most exciting landing strips in the world.  It is a unique and truly memorable flight.

The mountainside settlement of Lukla, gateway to Everest, is bustling with people and small aeroplanes and even a couple of helicopters. No sooner has our plane turned into the tiny parking area and another is buzzing down the runway to leap into oblivion over the mountain edge. Bags and people are unloaded immediately.

The airstrip at bustling Lukla was built by Sir Edmund Hillary and his friends to service the Everest region when he began his work of building schools and hospitals for the Sherpa people.

We are immediately impressed by the scale of the huge peaks that surround the settlement, as we greet our Sherpa team and take time loading gear with the porters and yaks.

Our party sets off from Lukla at about 11 o’clock, down from the landing strip through a narrow cobbled street. Tiny shops spill onto the walkway and there is the smell of wood fires with smoke rising into the still air.

We snake downhill on a broad and well-marked rocky trail towards the Dudh Kosi, a raging river that flows from the highest peaks. At 10,000 feet the air is already thinning and cool, and you can taste the mountains with every breath as - it is both intoxicating and exhilarating.

Flight to Kathmandu

Our flight from London to Kathmandu seemed dark. By the time we flew into the bright lights of Bahrain for a 1.5 hour stop-over it was early evening. Then it was on to Abu Dhabi in the twilight hours. A two hours delay in a dome-shaped terminal, with little to do in the middle of the night.

We were travelling Go Air, an Arab-based airline which serves curry flavoured meals whatever the time of day. Tasty, but lamb curry at 3 am in the morning local time was a big adjustment and just the first cultural challenge for a momentous trip ahead.

There was a delay on our morning flight into Kathmandu international airport as a bank of fog formed on one end of the sloping runway. Our pilot circled for 30 minutes then went into land - but just 30 seconds or so before touchdown, as dropping into the cloud tops, he pulled out in a steep climb, up and out and away.

We flew on to Dakar where we landed for refuelling. Just over an hour each way and about 45 minutes on the ground before returning to Kathmandu. It had been a long ‘day’ since leaving London Heathrow but at last we had arrived.

Stepping off a plane into Kathmandu is an exhilarating shock - the sights, sounds and smells quickly lead to sensory overload after the confines of several aeroplanes.

Buzzing around the crazy traffic in a local bus, trundling down the narrow winding streets of the old town in a rickshaw, marvelling at Durbar Square or dodging the tiger balm sellers and trekking touts in Thamel - it is an intoxicating, amazing and exhausting place.

As the largest (and pretty much the only) city in the country, Kathmandu also feels like another developing-world city rushing into a modern era of concrete and traffic pollution.

But a walk in the back streets and the Nepali capital's amazing cultural and artistic heritage reveals itself in hidden temples overflowing with marigolds, courtyards full of drying chillis and rice, and tiny hobbit-sized workshops.

At an altitude of 1336 metres above sea level, Kathmandu is an exotic and fascinating showcase of rich culture, art and tradition - and for us, of course, an important gateway to the Himalayas.

Late afternoon we arrived at Hotel Shanker, a stunning former royal palace full of character and charm. The weather was warm and sunny, if a little bit muggy.

Beautiful manicured gardens with potted plants, many of them Marigolds. We were all given garlands of Marigolds on alighting bus from the airport, a traditional form of Nepalese welcome. Darkness had descended by 6 pm.

Our hotel for the night had a restaurant called Kailash restaurant and two bars - the Kunti Bar and the One Eyed Bar. The former boasted a traditional setting of intricate wood carving and lattice windows.

At 21:50 local time we had a buffet meal in hotel dining room. Pick up remaining gear and back to room for bed to grab as much sleep as we could. The mountains of our dreams beckoned.

Land of great cathedrals

The ‘circus’ at Everest Basecamp was non-existent on this bright and sunny morning in early November in the heart of the Himalayas. The still air was crisp and cool, and the midday sun pierced the iridescent sky, rays of warmth feeling good on the face.

No tents, no people, no cameras – the buzz of expedition fever had dissipated along with the changing weather. Just a few tattered prayer flags every now and then, breaking the ground-level monotony of grey rock and Khumbu ice. You can’t even glimpse the summit of Everest from this fabled ‘launchpad’, and so I wondered...

In the days approaching Basecamp we had learnt from other trekkers along the way that it was now ‘empty’, the last and unsuccessful summit expedition of the year having returned to Spain three weeks earlier.

For a trek that was billed ‘Everest Basecamp’ it was now something of a dilemma – it had been our big chance to fleetingly rub shoulders with those taking on the highest mountain on Earth. But the circus and its paraphernalia had left town.

Several hours back from Basecamp along a tortuous, zig zag route of rock and ice is the remote settlement of Gorak Shep, in the shadow of Nuptse. Here the trappings of Everest expeditions past and to come can be seen – neatly stacked aluminium ladders lashed behind huts for self-keeping and a compound of empty ‘gas’ bottles.

But we jump ahead. Back in September, the Lighthouse Keeper asked ‘How high is Everest?’ and promised to enliven the dark winter nights by marking the tenth anniversary a first visit to Nepal with a retrospective blog, re-living the journey in words and pictures – from the excitement and heat of Kathmandu to the extreme cold and wilderness of the lower reaches of Everest.

So, in the words of John Ruskin, our journey to these ‘great cathedrals of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars’, starts here.

Here comes the sun

It went largely unreported by the general media but late into the night of 22 November the UK's Daylight Saving Bill cleared another hurdle.

Parliament granted what's called a 'money resolution', procedural geekery but crucial for it to move ahead, which means it is now with a committee of MPs to thrash out the fine details over the coming weeks.

Business minister Mark Prisk stated the Government will support the bill - proposed by Conservative MP Rebecca Harris - aimed at moving Britain's clocks forward by an hour all year round so long as amendments to the legislation are agreed.

Evidence for the positive effects of shifting the clocks forward by an hour has mounted in recent years, with the latest academic research showing that the change could save over 80 lives and at least half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year.

Knock-on benefits of reduced electricity bills, improved health and a boost for the leisure and tourism sector mean that lighter evenings now have a wider range of supporters than ever.

From tourism trade bodies to road safety campaigners, and from sporting organisations to serving government ministers, a new and diverse movement for lighter evenings is growing day by day.

Meanwhile opposition to the change is melting. Today, the old arguments about milkmen and postal workers needing early-morning sunlight to carry out deliveries look exactly like what they are – arguments from the 1970s.

The National Farmers Union, which had been a vocal critic of earlier proposals, recently announced that the reasons for farmers' past opposition to advancing the clocks had been ‘lost in history'.

With the next big Parliamentary vote just around the corner, the 10:10 Lighter Later campaign I stepping up its efforts to argument right across the UK by funding coalition meetings in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Its £5,000 fund target for the next phase was surpassed in just a few days and Lighter Later is now hoping to raise £7,500 to support its lobbying efforts.

Daniel Vockins, 10:10's campaign manager, said: "This is an idea whose time has come. All we need now is one big push from the British public.

"We commissioned research into a whole host of policy measures through which government could rapidly and painlessly reduce UK emissions. Reforming daylight savings hours came out top because of its substantial energy savings and a whole host of co-benefits."

Unfrozen planet

Whilst much of the world is in the grip of a financial, economic and industrial crisis, the remorseless growth of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming continues unchecked.

New figures on global carbon dioxide emissions for 2010 from the US Department of Energy make sobering, not to say chilling, reading.

The headline figure is that world carbon dioxide jumped by its largest ever amount in a single year, from 31.6 to 33.5 billion tons. However, close scrutiny of the data from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory reveals other patterns that are just as disturbing.

The key one is the explosive and seemingly unstoppable growth in emissions from China, which leapt by 9.3 per cent over the year to 8.15 billion tons of carbon dioxide. The Chinese are now producing 24.3 per cent of global carbon emissions and have firmly overtaken the US the role of the world's biggest polluter.

Polar scientists also warned this month that Earth's frozen ‘cryosphere’ - from the Arctic Sea in the north to the massive Antarctic ice shelves in the south - is showing unequivocal signs of climate change as global warming accelerates the melting of the planet's coldest regions.

A rapid loss of ice is clear from the records kept by military submarines, from land measurements taken over many decades and by satellite observations from space. It can be seen on the ice sheets of Greenland, the glaciers of mountain ranges from the Andes to the Himalayas, and the vast ice shelves that stretch out into the sea from the Antarctic continent.

The effect of the melting cryosphere will be felt by rapidly rising sea levels that threaten to flood coastal cities and low-lying nations, changes to the circulation of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream, and possible alterations to the weather patterns that influence more southerly regions of the northern hemisphere.

One of the greatest threats is the melting of the permafrost regions of the northern hemisphere which could release vast quantities of methane gas from frozen deposits stored underground for many thousands of years. Scientists are already seeing an increase in methane concentrations in the atmosphere that could be the result of melting permafrost.

"The melting of the cryosphere is such a clear, visibly graphic signal of climate change. Almost every aspect is changing and, if you take the global average, it is all in one direction," said Prof David Vaughan, a geologist at the British Antarctic Survey based in Cambridge, England.

One of the clearest signals of climate change is the rapid loss of floating sea ice in the Arctic, which has been monitored by satellites since the late 1970s and by nuclear submarines since the beginning of the cold war, according to Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University.

Sea ice is retreating faster and further than at any time on record and this year it probably reached an all-time record minimum in terms of volume and a close second in terms of surface area. On current projections, if the current rate of loss continues, there could be virtually no September sea ice as early as 2015, Prof Wadhams said.

The illustration below, based on NASA satellite data, shows how minimum sea ice extent for 2011, reached on 9 September, declined to a level far smaller than the 30-year average (in yellow) and opened up Northwest Passage shipping lanes (in red).

Italian hospitality

While the politicians of Rome were combusting, if not actually burning, this week, the medieval town of Lucca in the heart of Tuscany was a pretence of calm and polite political dialogue.

In the heart of the walled town, the ornately decorated Palazzo Ducaleis - adorned inside with monumental paintings and wall murals - was the focus for a very different kind of political forum, the Third International Conference on Space Exploration.

Representatives from 28 countries, the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA) met for what was described as the first high-level ‘international space exploration platform', which in itself sounds rather like it could be an orbiting satellite.

The organisers shipped in 15 or so journalists from the far reaches of Europe - including Poland, Latvia, Finland and other seemingly unlikely space-faring nations - to help get the message out.

For the rookie space writers among them you could say news was a bit thin on the ground because this wasn't a conference about bold new space projects but more of an attempt to create a new forum where the politics of future space endeavours can be discussed and agreed upon - with the aim of bringing about greater degrees of international cooperation in the future.

Apart from the noticeable absence of anyone from India, all the major space-faring nations - and many who have aspirations in that area but don't really do much at present - were represented at various levels of authority.

Britain's space minister David Willetts, for example, apologised for not being in Lucca in person through his representative Keith Mason.

His opening gambit described the UK as being "well-positioned and very interested" in developing nuclear technology for powering future exploration spacecraft.

Mason also emphasised that lowering the cost of access to Earth orbit was becoming increasingly important.

"We are backing technology to reduce this cost by an order of maginutude," he said, hinting at but not exactly naming the Reaction Engines' Skylon spaceplane project.

"We see exploration as means of stimulating economic advance and developing wider international cooperation, broadening and expanding human horizons."

The conference went on to endorse the ‘Lucca Declaration' and recognise the benefit of a continuing dialogue on future space exploration ‘to help identify potential areas for international cooperation'.

Essentially the government representatives committed to begin open, high-level policy dialogue on space exploration at government-level for the benefit of humankind. The United States offered to host the next get-together in 2013.

China's delegate Jianalin Cao was proud to trumpet recent Chinese successors and highlighted the country's slow but steady progress in taking up the space mantel.

I asked him whether China had aspirations to take its involvement with Europe's long-delayed and woefully over budget Galileo satellite navigation system further?

Speaking through an interpreter - despite his seemingly perfect command of the English language - Cao stated that his country was "starting a new cooperation" with Europe on satellite navigation.

But other than confirming that problems with equipment compatibilities and frequency spectrums were being overcome, little else was forthcoming.

The question of whether China might soon dip into it's pockets and become a major part of Galileo must remain conjecture for the time being.

Tuscan delight

An unexpected turn of events. I find myself on BA’s midday flight from London Heathrow to Pisa, Italy. The Airbus 320 is packed to the rafters and I have to settle for a middle-of-the row seat between two Italian ladies.

Soon we have left the murky British weather of recent days far below and are flying at around 35,000 feet in clear blue skies and sunshine, probably somewhere over Paris.

I’m heading out for a first visit to the medieval Tuscan town of Lucca, one of the most quaint and beautiful towns in this part of Italy, about 30 minutes’ drive from Pisa and maybe an hour from Florence.

As it happens, the Lighthouse Keeper and his then young wife visited Pisa and Florence in the early 1980s. The towns were stopping off points on one of those quite popular (in that decade) 'overland treks' by minibus.

The visit to Pisa was particularly noteworthy because it was in the days before serious ‘health and safety’ rules and regulations had blighted most of Europe and elsewhere.

It meant that, for a few Italian lira, tourists could climb the leaning tower’s ancient stone steps and peer precariously out over the flimsy metal balustrade from very near the top.

Of course, we had no digital cameras or mobile phones in those days to photograph the experience, though somewhere we have faded colour prints and a few precious colour slides as a record of our adventure.

This year’s Tuscan visit to Lucca was prompted by attendance at the grandly titled ‘Third International Space Conference’, thanks to sponsorship of a dozen or so European media people by ESA and the European Commission.

There’s a bit more on the conference to come later but in the meantime here are a selection of photos I managed to shoot whilst getting lost in the streets of Lucca for a couple of hours on a sunny November afternoon.