Day 1: Fly to Lukla, sleep in Phakding (2610m)

As mentioned in the previous blog post, the flight to Lukla is one of the most dangerous in the world. At an elevation of 2840m and built into the mountainside, Lukla is the highest airport in the world. It's not easy to land a plane at that altitude with less loft from an elevation that high compared to a landing closer to sea level. Oh yeah, the runway is only 1.5 Tiger Woods drives long at 550m, meaning a slope of 12 degrees is required to stop the plane and to get it up to speed on takeoff. 

There's only one commercial plane that can land at that airport, holding 15 passengers and looking like this. 

Kathmandu airport is a strange airport where metal detectors and bag scanners are for show only. People also bring a lot of luggage.

All of your luggage is weighed to the exact kilo. And so are you. The captain has a chart that tells him the take of and landing speeds necessary, accurate to 500 kilos. It's the yellow chart in the photo.

The flight itself is fairly short but we get extremely close to the mountainside and get some excellent views of Himalayas if you sit on the left hand side.

And sitting right behind the captain, I had an awesome view of the landing, which looks like your about to crash straight into a building.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata_player&v=VyrgPdHJ3XU&rdm=xsd1m6uq&client=mv-google&guid=&gl=US&hl=en

Here's what a 12 degree slope runway looks like.

After the flight to Lukla, we took off for an easy trek to Phakding, perfect for your first day. The trek only took 2.5 hours and we arrived by 1 PM. To help build endurance and fight altitude sickness, we trekked up 250 meters and 1 hour to the Riminjing monastery. 

We got back and the people of the monetary showed up to our guest house. They were blessing all of the guest houses and owners were donating large sums of money, close to $350. They did some group singing and dancing, which I happily participated in.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata_player&v=QhvdxXkjJkY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQhvdxXkjJkY%26feature%3Dyoutube_gdata_player

And here's what the main room of a guest house looks like at the Kalaphatar Lodge. 

Rooms are $2 for a single bed and garlic soup is $1.80 and veggie and egg fried rice is $3. A full battery charge is $2. Garlic is the Nepalese Diamox, with properties that help fight altitude sickness.