Lukla

Lukla was a modest Sherpa settlement of fields and grazing on a shelf above the Dudh Koshi until the middle of the twentieth century, its people part of the farming community of Chaurikharka on the slopes below. The valley's traffic ran north to south on foot, between the high Khumbu villages and the markets of the lower hills, and a walk from the Kathmandu road took the better part of a week.

That changed in 1964, when Edmund Hillary, whose Himalayan Trust was building schools and clinics in the Khumbu, arranged the construction of an airstrip here to carry materials in. He bought the land from local Sherpas, who helped build the strip, and the surface is said to have been levelled by villagers stamping it down. The runway is 527 metres long and rises at a gradient of nearly 12 per cent, ending against the mountainside; it was paved in 2001. In 2008 it was renamed Tenzing-Hillary Airport after the two men who first climbed Everest.

The airstrip turned a farming hamlet into the gateway of the Everest region. Trekking grew through the 1970s and 1980s, and the single street filled with lodges, shops and agency offices; by the busiest autumn mornings the airport handles a steady stream of small aircraft and helicopters. Accidents and cancellations have given it a reputation for difficulty, and repeated attempts to spread traffic, including seasonal transfers of flights to Ramechhap, have changed how visitors reach it. The 2015 earthquake damaged buildings in the district and briefly halted the trekking season, and the town rebuilt quickly.

Lukla is a Sherpa town on the Tibetan Buddhist side of Nepal's religious map, and the marks of that are on the street itself: a carved arch at the top of the village, mani walls with the mantra om mani padme hum, chortens, a gompa and prayer flags strung from the rooftops. Walkers pass these on the left, and monastery ritual follows the Nyingma tradition, with Losar in late winter the main household festival and the Mani Rimdu dances at Tengboche the best-known public one.

It is also a working town of the trekking economy, and its culture reflects that. Guides, porters, lodge keepers, pilots, helicopter crews and rescue workers pass through in numbers, and the conversation on the street is about weather windows, loads and flight manifests. Many of the staff are seasonal migrants from the lower hills and the Rai and Tamang districts to the south, so Nepali is the common working language alongside Sherpa, and English is widely spoken.

Manners are those of the Khumbu: understated hospitality, tea offered to visitors, quiet reserve on first meeting. Climbing has given the area a strong sense of its own record, and memorials to Sherpa climbers and to those lost in the mountains stand in the district. Visitors who make an effort with a greeting of namaste, ask before taking photographs and treat porters and staff with respect are met warmly.

A few thousand people live in Lukla and the surrounding Chaurikharka area, within Khumbu Pasanglhamu Rural Municipality. The rhythm of the day is set by the weather and the aircraft: flights come in from first light while the air is calm, the street fills with arriving and departing groups through the morning, cloud closes in around midday, and by late afternoon the town is quiet with lodges cooking for the night.

Almost every household depends on visitors in some way — lodges, shops, bakeries, portering, guiding, airport work, freight handling. Farming continues below the town, with potatoes, barley and buckwheat and some cattle and crossbred yaks, and families run both at once. Schools and a health post serve the area, and serious cases are flown to Kathmandu.

The town is busy for perhaps six months of the year and near-empty in the monsoon and deep winter, when many workers go home to lower villages or to the capital. Electricity comes from small hydropower schemes and solar panels, and supplies arrive by air or on the backs of porters and animals. The shared worries are the reliability and safety of the air link, the cost of everything that has to be flown in, waste disposal, and the effect of a changing climate on snow, glaciers and the trekking seasons on which the valley depends.

Meals in Lukla are trekking meals. Daal bhaat is the mainstay, a plate of rice with lentil soup, curried vegetables and pickle, served with refills, and it is what most guides and porters eat twice a day. Sherpa dishes appear alongside it: thukpa, a noodle soup with vegetables or meat; shyakpa, a thicker stew with hand-cut dough; riki kur, potato pancakes eaten with butter; and momo, steamed or fried dumplings. Potatoes are the local crop and turn up boiled, fried and in soup.

Lodge menus also carry the familiar trail list of fried rice, spaghetti, pancakes and wood-fired pizza, cooked for foreign appetites and useful for calorie loading before a long walk. Lukla's bakeries are known for apple pie, cinnamon rolls and espresso, and their windows are a fixture of mornings spent waiting for a flight. Yak and nak cheese from valley dairies is sold in slabs and used in sandwiches.

Drinks run from masala tea and ginger with lemon to the Tibetan butter tea, salty with churned butter, drunk in Sherpa homes. Chhang, a cloudy beer of fermented barley or millet, and raksi, a clear grain spirit, are poured at festivals and in lodges, though alcohol is unwise for anyone about to gain altitude. Boiled or filtered water is the norm, and refill stations exist in the valley to cut the number of plastic bottles carried up and left behind.