The landing at Kathmandu (VNTK) will actually be one of the easier ones in terms of landing strips. The runway is over 10,000 feet and wide enough to take a decent sized jet. The approach, however, is a totally different story. There's lots of turbulence in the hills around the airport, the kind that takes little Cessna's and turns them into twisted lawn ornaments if you aren't careful.

Switching gears just for a second, I hear Peter and Bob have made it to Iceland. I made a call to my friend in the State Department to see if they could get the same kind of help we did.

Now... on to the flight to Nepal...

Flying directly into the sun is not high on my list of fun flying activities. Next time, I'm going to consult the almanac before making a flight plan. According to the big map, we are now more than halfway around the world. We might make it home in less than a month, after all.

I've got a thing for snow-covered mountains. It's too bad this plane doesn't have skis on it. We took some great pictures on the flight while we were over Nepal. It was a good thing the weather was clear. I'm not exactly sure where we'd be able to go if it wasn't. One downside was that it was cold. We hadn't had a problem with cold temperatures yet, even at 13,000 feet. It was never anything some polar fleece and a wind breaker couldn't handle. Maybe the warm weather in India had thrown us off. The worst part is I don't remember packing anything heavier for the flight. You'd think that would have occurred to me given that we'd be flying around Alaska in mid-November. We shivered our way further into Nepal. We got the tower on the radio about 25NM out. The runway at VNTK is at 4,390ft. We started to descent to 6,500, and watched as some of the mountains got higher than us, we went to turn on final approach, and saw that we were indeed lower than the ridge between us and the airport. We had plenty of momentum, so climbing over the ridge wasn't a problem, but the turbulence was. We were tossed around pretty hard as we flew over the lip of the ridge, and it didn't ease up much as we descended towards the airport. It wouldn't have been a problem if there was an ILS approach, but we didn't even have that. Being frozen didn't help much, either. I thought this plane had a heater, but either it doesn't, or it's not working.

We landed safely on runway 2 a little over 2 and a half hours after leaving New Delhi. Tribhuvan International is actually fairly busy, and has a good service area. We taxied the plane over to see if they could have a look at it. There was no one else waiting for service, so the mechanic could get to us right away. We left the plane to him, and went to find a store that could sell us some parkas.

We found a climbing outfitter in town, and got those parkas first. Then, we went through our mental inventory of cold weather survival gear. It was a quick check, because we didn't have much. We picked up some supplies, and stopped for some breakfast. There was a lot of excitement from the prospective climbers in town. There was a really rare stretch of good climbing weather that had just set in, and everyone was itching to go. There were several charter planes that were booking up quick to take people out closer to Mt. Everest.

It was about 90 minutes after leaving the plane at the shop that we got back, to find it sitting on the tarmac waiting for us. It was an easy fix, said the mechanic. A cable had come loose with the heating system. He tightened it up, and checked everything else out for us. When I offered to pay him, he refused, saying he hadn't spent enough time on the repair to justify billing us. His young son was around, though, so I slipped the kid an American 20. I don't know how much it's really worth here, but I guess it's something.

We loaded all of our new cold weather stuff into the plane, and hauled out a couple days worth of empty chip bags and water bottles. We still had over a half a tank (or I guess half of two tanks) of fuel, so decided against gassing up before flying to Mt. Everest.

We were able to get out shortly before everyone else did. They charter planes were actually on their second trip of the day, having already made an early morning run before we had even arrived. At the north end of runway 2 is a big hill. We had to lift off, climb quick, and turn to the right. The Caravan has a service ceiling of 22,800 feet. That's great for 90% of the world, but not here. We would have to slalom through some valleys as we climbed up to 22,500.

There was one major flaw in that plan. At 22,500 feet, there really isn't any place to go but down, and any mountain high than 22,500 tends to have a lot of ground near it below that altitude, too.

We only had one close call as we twisted through the peaks. We cleared a ridge by less than 400 feet. But once we did, we could see Mt. Everest off in the distance. We were going a lot slower than normal at this altitude, even under full power. It seemed to take forever, but we finally got there. We snapped a couple of pictures, and looked down below us for climbers and the yeti.

After a much too short visit to the top of the world, we turned around, lest we enter Chinese airspace, and headed back to Kathmandu. The trip back was fine. We stayed at altitude until clearing the snow capped peaks. That left us really high for our approach on runway 20 at Tribhuvan. I cut the throttle and aimed the nose down, and lost 6,000 feet in about 2 minutes. The same problem that exists on departure from runway 2 is there for arrival on runway 20, a big hill at the end of the runway. I was able to extend the flaps and slow us down a bit, and we follwed the contour of the hill down. It still left us a bit high, but that's the nice thing of having nearly 2 miles of runway to work with. We set down about halfway down the runway, and taxied back to parking for the day.

LEG	Start	Start Time	Land	Land Time	Distance	Trip Time	Fuel Used
1	VIDD New Delhi, India	01:30 GMT	VNTK Kathmandu, Nepal	03:03 GMT	435 NM	2 hr 22 min	144 gal
2	VNTK Kathmandu, Nepal	5:30 GMT	VNTK Kathmandu, Nepal	7:15 GMT	160 NM	1 hr 45 min	64 gal
Day Total					595 NM	4 hr 7 min	208 gal
Trip Total					8856 NM	63 hr 31 min	3058 gal

Looking back at New Delhi	The foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal
Kathmandu should be over that ridge.	It was a bumpy ride all the way down
The snow covered Himalayas in the distance	Flying through a valley on the way to Mt. Everest.
Mount Everest in the distance	Flying by Mt. Everest

Where we've been so far