Trek to Everest base camp: the impact of climate change is undeniable

Deep in the Himalayas, I’m Gonna Be by the Proclaimers is playing through a Bluetooth speaker. A total of 13 Irish hikers are singing along, their trekking poles rising and falling like the call-and-response chant that is soundtracking their journey.

Finally, we arrive at Ramechhap airport. If it wasn’t for the arrival and departure of planes you would struggle to convince me that this small, rundown building is, in fact, an airport. Our flight to Lukla is due to be one of the first out that morning. There are enormous crowds of people with heavy bags.

Eventually, our head guide Gyaltsen Sherpa decides to book us into accommodation nearby, realising our flight would not be leaving that day. Though we appreciate having somewhere to lay our heads, the area is not touristy by nature and there were some unexpected rodent and reptile room guests. Trips like this are all about who you meet along the way.

Here, on night one on the trail, the card games began. Sitting around tables with a heater in the middle of the room, we drink tea and play card games.quite undulating, but the second day felt steep. Don’t look up, we told ourselves, but you could always tell when someone did from the quiet moan of desperation they would release.

We are advised to go vegetarian for the duration of the trip, which means as a result we eat a lot of carbohydrates: vegetable fried potatoes, vegetable fried rice, vegetable fried noodles and vegetable springrolls feature heavily throughout.By the third or fourth day, we have already begun to fantasise about the KFC we intend to consume in the airport on the way home.

But that doesn’t detract from the sense of achievement or enjoyment. You see only the summit of Everest from Base Camp, but you do get fantastic views of the Khumbu icefall, a wall of ice that is often considered the most dangerous part of attempting to summit Everest. In all, it is 13 days of trekking, though ours is cut short by a day due to the initial travel disruption. This meant we have one extremely long day on our descent, being on our feet for 10 hours straight. You can overhear the whispers ‘Why did we decide to do this again?’ among the group.

We decide against telling them the reason for our smile is knowing the end is near and we can shortly put our feet up.

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