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Lukla is a town in the Khumbu region of eastern Nepal where most people visiting the Himalayas near Mount Everest start their journey. Lukla, at 2,860 metres (9,380 ft.), contains a small airport where most people begin and end their adventure in the region. Although Lukla means place with many goats and sheep, one is not likely to see many roaming around these days.


Looking across the township of Lukla, with the air strip of Lukla Airport in the foreground.Somewhere between 90-95% of the foreign nationals who reach Lukla will arrive by a ? hour flight from Kathmandu. The remainder will mainly trek in from Jiri, about a seven to eight day walk. On organized treks, most of the Nepalese guides and kitchen staff will also walk from Jiri to Lukla, albeit in about half the time unless clients are also with them. When Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary made the famous first ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953, that expedition also walked in from Jiri.

Lukla has a variety of shops and lodges where one can have basic western style meals and pick up any last minute items for the trekking or climbing ahead. If one cannot find required items in Lukla, better luck can be had in Namche Bazaar. There are a couple of good climbing shops (e.g. Mountain Madness) in Namche where one can rent carabiners, helmets, ice axes, jumars and harnesses. However, plastic mountaineering boots and crampons are best rented in Kathmandu if they are needed.

From Lukla, most trekking groups will take two days to reach Namche Bazaar, a nice easy pace to help in altitude acclimatization. Distance wise, this segment is doable in one long day (~8 to 10 hours) but not advised due to increased risk of altitude sickness. If not in a formal trekking group, one should double-check tickets with the airline before leaving Lukla. Empty seats on flights between Kathmandu and Lukla are a rarity during the prime seasons and people being bumped off their flights is not uncommon.

A fairly wet cake which should have been heavy but was light; cheese balls which should have been light but were very heavy since they were soaked in something and pau-bhajee with paneer tikka on the side. The catering guys got the colours all wrong, too much brown, actually everything brown. They got the contents all wrong, too, this was the kind of food I got on the old Alliance Air flight from Delhi to Pune in the good old days when there was nobody else on this route.

Another thing - the juice from the paneer tikka leaked from below the bhaje container into the teeny weeny bread roll, which then dripped on to my shirt. I expected to pop a dry piece of bread in my mouth, what emerged was a very wet crumb which disintegrated on realising it was going in.

This is where I miss the cloth napkin from 9W. With Jet Airways, the napkin is free, but the ticket costs a lot more. Should I pilfer a few napkins from 9W and wear them on IT till they get the message, you think?

I just chose the airline I will use til I have a collection of napkins with buttonholes in them for use on all flights. I certainly like to eat my food with abandon, stopped wearing ties for that reason, and enjoy dribbling on to napkins. I challenge anybody to dribble on to a small square of tissue paper, though.

I was lucky that I stuffed myself in the Kingfisher Lounge before departure, and burped as well as dozed my way through to Pune.