The Himalayan village of Namche Bazar is 3,480m above sea level. It is built on the slopes of a mountain. Getting anywhere is a steep walk down great sloping ancient stone stairs, or a steep walk up great sloping ancient stone stairs. The houses are wood and stone, double-storey, with triangular sloping tin roofs. Everything is topped with wind-whipped, colourful prayer flags.

The surrounding mountains are solid rock, covered with ice and snow, dotted with hardy scrub. By moonlight the snow peaks show over the silver clouds, glowing orange-yellow against the black night sky.

It is my first day here, and I can barely breathe from the altitude and cold.

The afternoon sun has not melted the frost still thick in the shadows. Our guesthouse is at the top of the village, further up the mountain than most, which means the weak autumn sun reaches us first, and lingers here longer than it does in other parts of the valley. I sit out on a patch of recently thawed grass on a natural terrace overlooking the myriad tin roofs. I cherish the warmth of the sun.

Next door is Namche monastery. It is an eerie, awesome feeling to know it is the same monastery where Edmund Hillary and Norgay Tenzing stayed as they prepared to establish base camp in 1953. Back then, Namche Bazar was just a monastery, a market and a few houses. Today it is a town of stone stairs that make alleyways to link lodges, trekking shops and souvenir stalls.

Not that it is easy to get here. This is what astounds me as I watch another scraggle of weary-looking tourists trek into valley. Namche Bazar is a days’ bus/jeep ride and then an eight-day walk from Kathmandu. It’s a hard slog of climbing up one mountain only to descend another, braving freezing temperatures, frost, snow, altitude, bush snakes and 50m-long steel suspension bridges that sway nauseatingly in the fierce, piercing wind.

I shiver as the mountain wind rounds the walls of the monastery and blows through my layers of thermal and wool clothing. In his autobiography, Hillary was rather disparaging of the conditions here. He walked from the India/Nepal border with 300-odd porters and a handful of fellow explorers. It took him weeks. There were no paths, no maps, no bridges over the chasms of gorges. A typical description of this part of his trip is something like, “well, it was hard slog in the wind, bitterly cold, uphill most of the way, but we made it”. I think him quite mad.

The route from Kathmandu to Namche is fairly straight-forward. We caught a bus to Jiri, a small non-descript village. The road from Kathmandu ends in its market square. From Jiri we walked to the villages of Shivalaya, Bhandar, Sete, Junbesi, Nuntala, Bupsa, Surkhe and Phakding. We then braved the long, steep, zigzagging uphill climb to Namche Bazar. This part of the world has not been fully mapped, so the idea of distance is relative. Between villages can be anything from 10km to 20km, most of it up mountains.

My mind is numb from the physical exertion of it all, from the sheer effort of walking up mountains for eight to 10 hours every day. I consult my notes.

Day one, “the view as we walk is spectacular. Below us are green terraced rice fields, the occasional wooden house, the white bend of a far-off river. There is total silence. There are no electricity poles, no telephones, no vehicles. The space is immense.”

That first day, en route to Shivalaya, I was exhausted. “I am beginning to believe that Shivalaya does not exist. We ask the occasional porter on the trail. We are told “one hour”, always “one hour”. After a few hours of this we are told “15 minutes”, with a smile. This I believe. It is another hour before we see Shivalaya… I have never been so glad to be anywhere in my life.”

Day two, “the view is, again, spectacular. A fine grey-white mist soon covers the bright green of the mountains. Then it starts to rain.” Cold and wet and miserable, I am overtaken on the trail, which is nothing more than a muddy, littered donga, by an elderly Nepali woman, grey-haired and wrinkled, jabbering away on her cellphone.

We reach Bhandar utterly exhausted. Our guesthouse, the Ang Dawa, is next door to a monastery. Old, weathered stupas rise against the deep blue sky. I can barely walk up the stairs to our room, nor down the stairs again to the dinning room. My feet are killing me. I am painfully aware that my knees exist. I stink. I have four blisters.

The trail to Namche Bazar is physically exhausting. We walk more than eight hours a day. We reach the flower-filled Sherpa village of Junbesi on day five and have an enforced rest period to take stock. I have six blisters and my feet are red and swollen. Alison, my partner, gently bandages her swollen feet.

Junbesi is filled with flowers, apple trees and monasteries, surrounded by dark green mountains. It is freezing cold. It is a wonderful feeling to know we have walked this far and survived. We are half way to Namche Bazar.

Day seven, we walk to the small, cold village of Nuntala. “I cannot remember much of today but a hard slog, beautiful mountains and few people on the trail,” I write in my notes. “We walked over the 3,071m-high Trakshindo La (pass). It was freezing. We arrived in Nuntala (2,250m) at 4pm absolutely exhausted, having battled the late afternoon trail traffic (donkeys).”

The window of our hotel room has a magnificent view of the snow peaks surrounding the village. 

Day eight, we walk to Bupsa. I think the trail is finally getting to me. Every village of single-room wooden houses we pass, I find myself clucking back at the chickens, bleating back at the goats.

At first the going is beautiful, easy on my blisters, stunning vistas of mountains and dark green forests. We cross the Dudh Khosi (“khosi” is a river) via a swaying steel bridge at an elevation of just 1,480m… The trail is a donga of falling-apart stone stairs through pine forests. It zigzags up and up and up, all the way to a pass. I am absolutely exhausted.”

We walk up to Bupsa, a cluster of wooden houses overlooking a tiny monastery. I duck tape my aching feet.

From the small, beautiful village of Surkhe to the mass of guesthouses that make up Phakding. “It’s all uphill by 8am. I don’t seem to be able to move.” I write this on the 10th day, but it is a feeling I have come to know well this past week. “We pass villages of giant colourful prayer wheels and walk beneath the white arches of stupas. Look up in these short tunnels and you see beautiful squares of mandalas, painted in intricate, colourful detail.”

Nepal has surprised both of us in this: we never thought it would be so beautiful.

“It’s a long, long, long uphill climb to Namche Bazar,” read my notes for day number 11. “We cross the Dudh Khosi on swaying steel suspension bridges three times. This means going up a mountain and down a mountain to the river, crossing, going up a mountain and down a mountain to the river, crossing, going up a mountain and down a mountain to the river, crossing. So, technically, it’s just like all the other days, only without the long, long, long, long ascent to Namche.”

We cross the longest steel suspension bridge we have seen yet, the Sir Edmund Hillary bridge, strung with the yellow, green, red, blue and white of prayer flags and kurtas (long white silk scarves). The Dudh Khosi swirls 200m below us. The piercing cold wind buffets us as we struggle across.

We ascend more than 1,000m to Namche. The altitude starts to take affect. Walking is a slow, conscious effort of placing one foot in front of the other.

Sitting in the warmth of the sun overlooking Namche, it feels good to have made it this far. The next stop, Tengboche, lies at the end of a well-worn dirt path up the mountains. But tomorrow is a rest day. Tomorrow we hike up the mountains surrounding Namche to get our first view of Mount Everest.

(Accepted by the Saturday Star, December 2008)