Today we once again woke up at 4:30 for attempt number 3 to get to Lukla, this time hopefully we would actually reach the tarmac. As we repeat the steps of the previous day, we managed to get all the way to the waiting area overlooking the planes on the tarmac, there as we waited for the sun to rise we saw our bags get further than they had the day before, this time the bags actually made it into the cargo hold.
As time went on we saw some more promising flags, a flight attendant boarding, a pilot boarding, the engines starting and finally we heard our plane being called and all hurried out onto the tarmac to board our little plane.
Once on the plane we saw all the other planes going to Lukla departing ahead of us, and joined the queue for the runway, our flight attendant (slightly overkill in our tiny plane) gave us our safety briefing and our plane accelerated down the runway. Once in the air and above the clouds down int he Haley, on our 20 minutes flight, the flight attendant served us candy before pointing out Everest peeking through the clouds. As the plane got closer and closer to our destination you could see the hills getting closer on either side of the plane as it veered and turned towards this tiny strip where miraculously it was able to land uphill and on a tiny runway.
after making it to the end of the small runway for small planes, we turned into the tarmac and were escorted off our plane whilst they reloaded the plane as fast as they could for it to depart once again and pick up more people for the mountain. once through the terminal we watched our plane take off again, knowing we would have to face this in a week, we then walked to the centre of Lukla where we had breakfast.
At breakfast our guide gave us 2 options, either take a helicopter and skip a 10 hour hike, or as soon as breakfast was over we would be doing what should have taken us 2 days in a day to catch up the time we had missed out on due to our missed flights. most of us decided to take the hike so as soon as we had finished eating we got to meet our porters and our assistant guides who started our journey.
We first walked to the end of the village into the path that would bring us to the Sagarmatha (Everest) National Park entrance, making sure we had our tickets. We walked through the sunny valley for 2 hours slightly downhill until we reached a little restaurant with a terrace overlooking the valley, there we had our first of many Mint teas. Next we continued down into the valley crossing our first hanging bridge until we reached the hotel we should have stayed overnight. There we grabbed lunch and I managed to get some Momos (vegetarian of course).
After lunch we continued our trek through the valley, this time going slightly uphill, crossing bridges and crossing little villages for about 4 hours, until we reached the valley where you could see the Hillary Bridge the tallest hanging bridge we would be crossing on our journey. from then on our journey would take us uphill for the next 3 hours, an hour to reach the bridge which we crossed without any issues and then another 2 hours to reach the city of Namche Bazaar as the sun set and we had to start using our head torches to see.
As we got to the city in the dark, we managed to quickly buy some prayer flags to add to our backpacks before heading to our hotel for dinner then straight to our cold bed to catch up on sleep before another long day tomorrow.