I waited three hours before finally boarding the Yeti Airlines Twin Otter. The lumbering machine, with lots of incomprehensible but serious-looking warnings stenciled in Russian around the interior, shudders, shimmies, and rolls and, eventually, actually becomes airborne. We rattle and roll and vibrate big time through the thick haze of low-altitude Kathmandu pollution toward the clouds and the mountains in the distance.

We were was lucky to land at Lukla about two minutes before heavy gray clouds descend to obscure the sharply angled air strip there. We landed safely but the machine is marooned by the lowering overcast.

It takes the Sherpa staff hours to get all the gear off-loaded, sorted into yak and porter loads, and assembled for the treks. It's a dreary walk that begins in a drizzle, but rhododendron blossoms and wild flowers dot the hillsides as we contour around through Choplung. At Ghat there are two large prayer wheels, some really soaring prayer flag poles, and a couple of huge boulders brightly painted with the Buddhist mantra: OM MANI PADME HUM. It starts raining in earnest.

Finally we descend to Phakding, which at 9,000' actually a few hundred feet lower than Lukla, where a long suspension bridge (guyed out at its mid-point to keep it from whipping about dangerously) crosses the Dudh Kosi. I cross the swaying span in a driving rain. A large French trekking party has pitched tents in the yard of one of the lodges. For us there's no thought of camping in the wet, so we file in and find rough accommodation at a tea house. It's good to be out of Kathmandu, but the excitement of finally being in the mountains is muted by the fact that we've been walking through a wet cloud all day.

The tea house scene, too, is an acquired taste. Like a lot of Khumbu travelers, I generally prefer to camp. The tea houses along the long Khumbu route are full of sick strangers, tired trekkers and wigged-out hippies, coughing and talking nonsense. You can encounter some cool people, for sure, but there's just no telling what or who you're going to find.

Click here to see an enlargement. Most independent trekkers who don't have the resources of an organized trekking or climbing group use the tea houses. These lodges/restaurants are a thriving and important local industry in the Khumbu because they make travel relatively easy: with just a sleeping bag and a few rupees, one can travel and eat and sleep throughout the area, all the way to Everest — although the quality of the accommodation and food declines at the far end. Even expeditions such as ours make use of these lodges, particularly lower down, although our own kitchen staff prepares all our meals. These feasts, by the way, eventually are brought to our table in the tea house dining room and become the focus of envious stares from less pampered travelers. After dinner we retire to our shared "rooms," tiny plywood cubicles with hard benches for beds, where we climb into sleeping bags and fire up headlamps and Walkmans to read and listen to music as the sounds of the tea house lodgings — and in the Khumbu that's not unlike the noise of a TB ward — reverberate through the thin walls.

Another acclimatization day was fitted in the itinerary at Pheriche. From here, we hiked to the Nankartshang Gumba for views of Makalu (8463 m) - the fifth highest mountain in the world. Click Next