Flying Off Everest (15 page)

Before they left, Lakpa and Babu hired a porter to trek with the paraglider and meet them in Lukla a full day after they left. “If anyone asks you about it,” Lakpa said, “tell them it’s a foreign trekker’s.” They weren’t sure if they would have any more trouble with the military, so they decided it would be for the best if they didn’t actually have any evidence of their flight off the mountain with them. It would be hard to explain away a paraglider if they were carrying one.

Babu and Lakpa walked to the south with the sun setting behind the mountains. The air was cool but not yet cold. They reached a high ridge in a canyon on the outskirts of the village where a wire suspension bridge crosses the Dudh Kosi. A group of soldiers was waiting for them. “They had guns,” Lakpa says. The park ranger’s superiors in Kathmandu weren’t pleased with Babu and Lakpa’s flight off Everest either and wanted them arrested again.

None of the soldiers assigned to bring them in had ever seen Babu or Lakpa before, however. Without the paraglider as evidence, and with every person in the Khumbu Valley being named after the day of the week on which they were born, the army had no way to be sure which Lakpa they were dealing with.

Lakpa told Babu, “Let’s go. Let’s go. This is my place. We didn’t kill any people, you know? We are not like robbers, you know? We keep going. This is my village. Let’s go. Don’t talk with them.”

When they reached the bridge and the soldiers standing in front of it, they were asked to stop. “Why?” Lakpa asked. “What’s the reason? Who gave you the authority to stop us?” The soldier was slow to respond and looked confused, as if the answer were obvious, and perhaps it was. “Give me a reason,” Lakpa demanded again. “Any reason. We have to go farther. We have to be in India, not Nepal.” At this, they kept walking. Leaving the soldiers befuddled behind them—and Shri Hari filming the whole exchange with his camera.

By the time Babu and Lakpa reached Lukla, almost everyone in the valley had heard about the two Nepalis who had flown off Everest. And they wanted to meet them. “When we got there, all the people started gathering because they had heard what Babu and Lakpa did,” Waters said. “We had some beers and then those guys disappeared, because everyone wanted to talk with them.” That was the last time Waters saw either Babu or Lakpa. He caught his flight back to Kathmandu early in the morning the next day, not knowing what would happen to them next.

That night, Babu and Lakpa reunited with their wives, as well as David and Wildes, all of whom were ecstatic to see them. Conversation was lively. The house was full and warm, everyone laughing, proud of what had just been accomplished.

The Coupe Icare (Icarus Cup) is the world’s largest paragliding and hang gliding festival, held each September in Saint-Hilaire, France; it includes the Free Flight International Film Festival. David and Wildes—who prefers to be called by her spiritual name, Mukti (meaning “one who brings liberation”)—had plans to make a movie of the expedition, but it was going to be different than the movie Babu, Lakpa, and Shri Hari were working on. Unlike Babu and Lakpa’s all-Nepali-made
movie, David and Mukti’s movie would be made by Westerners, for a Western audience, in time for the film festival.

“I pushed to do the movie, because I know if we do it in Nepal, it will never go out,” David says, making the observation that most media produced within Nepal never leaves the country. “I made the movie for the festival, because I know they will not get it done in time. It would not fit with the standard of doing outside of Nepal. Shri Hari would make a good film, but it would not be what people want to see. We know what people want to see—people doing sport.”

Babu and Lakpa still had to paraglide across the Himalaya and paddle to the ocean before Shri Hari would even begin working on editing the footage from their journey. And the Coupe Icare film submission deadline was only two months away.

So the morning after Babu and Lakpa’s celebratory night, Mukti and David unpacked their own video cameras, gave Babu and Lakpa some more beer, and started recording. Mukti had a handwritten series of statements she had prepared the day before, which she now wanted Babu to say in front of the camera. “A script,” she called it. “I am going to read for you. You tell me if you agree with what I am saying. If you agree, we speak about this. Then I turn on the camera, then you speak about this if you agree.” Babu agreed.

“David and I are close to Babu,” she explains. “I know Babu like a brother. And we share these feelings, and I know what is inside this story, and I try to put this in the movie, because the movie is giving emotion.”

David pulled Babu aside while they were at Lakpa’s parents’ house. He told him that he wanted the photos from their cameras so he could get them to newspapers and magazines, to help promote their expedition. He also asked Babu to give him the memory cards from the GoPros they had used to film with while on the mountain, convincing him that submitting a short film to the Coupe Icare about just the climbing and flying portion of their expedition would be a good teaser for the full expedition film whenever it did come out.

“Babu came and stole two tapes from my home—of the flight,” Lakpa says. “And used it without my permission, with his boss, David.” Lakpa and Babu had both agreed before starting out that Lakpa would have all the film rights to the expedition and that Babu would have the rights to the still photos, which they hoped could eventually be sold to magazines.

In the yard, beneath a partly cloudy sky, Mukti helped Babu recite his lines before recording them with the camera. “Our goal is not only making summit,” Babu repeated as best he could in his halting English, his face sunburned and peeling, his demeanor a little buzzed from the beer. “It is to see what’s possible. Nobody has done it before. We want to show this.”

Babu and Lakpa continued to evade national park authorities in Lukla for four more days, recovering from their climb and subsequent flight off Everest. On the fifth day they once again said good-bye to their family and friends. Their wives, along with David (carrying the memory cards containing the footage from their climb and flight), Mukti, and Shri Hari, boarded a plane at the Lukla airstrip back to Kathmandu. Later, Shri Hari would join the three-man Paddle Nepal support crew, who had driven nine hours to the capital from Pokhara and, at this point, supposedly had the team’s kayak. The four men would then travel four hours north to Dolalghat, put in on the Sun Kosi River with Babu and Lakpa’s kayak strapped to the back of the support raft, and paddle downstream approximately 20 miles of Class II-IV whitewater. If everything went according to plan, Babu and Lakpa would be waiting for them on the riverbank somewhere near the confluence of the Dudh Kosi.

The fact that the Paddle Nepal support crew actually had a shiny new 12-foot, 1-inch orange tandem whitewater kayak in their possession was a bit of a miracle. Babu’s friend Pete Astles, back in the United Kingdom, had ordered the kayak directly from the Jackson
Kayak factory in Tennessee. It was then flown, via a standard commercial passenger jet, to Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, under someone else’s name. It had been the only even remotely feasible way to get the $1,500 boat, which was barely within the length restrictions for the plane, into the country on such short notice. It was also the most difficult way to get such a large, obvious, big-ticket item through Nepali customs.

“If you bring any foreign goods into Nepal, the customs department is very difficult to deal with,” Mahendra Singh Thapa, Babu and Astles’s mutual friend and owner of the Kathmandu-based outfitter Equator Expeditions, says. “Importing anything in Nepal is very tricky. Taxes and customs for foreign goods cost almost 200 percent. I know how to deal with customs, because I’m importing goods all the time. So I told Pete, ‘OK, you send the kayak in my name, and I will deal with the customs.’” Thapa, a strong, deep-chested man whose outfitter is one of the largest and oldest in the country, walked out of the airport with the kayak (as well as all of the additional paddling gear Astles had stuffed inside of it), having paid some money, but not in taxes. And it wasn’t nearly 200 percent of the retail price of the boat.

From there, Thapa put the bright yellow kayak on a truck along with the Paddle Nepal support raft and wished good luck to the three-man crew, which consisted of two of Babu’s good raft-guiding friends, Madhukar Pahari and Resham Bahadur Thapa, and his younger brother, Krishna. All of whom had volunteered their time, without pay, to help Babu and Lakpa down the river portion of their journey. The trio picked up cameraman Shri Hari and headed north, into the mountains. Four hours later, as they put on the river at Dolalghat, they still had no idea whether Babu and Lakpa would actually show up at their designated rendezvous point just south of the Dudh Kosi confluence 20 miles downstream. There was no Plan B if they didn’t. They strapped the tandem kayak onto the back of their raft anyway and shoved off the riverbank.

Babu and Lakpa walked together south, back toward Lakpa’s parents’ home in Chaurikharka, where they spent the night. The next morning they picked up their paraglider, still hidden in its black backpack, and continued walking the trail south along the Dudh Kosi, just under two hours to the small mountain village of Kharte, climbing to the top of a western-facing ridge just to the north of town. The two men stopped on a small, grassy clearing overlooking the river several hundred feet below and unpacked their wing. They looked south. The mountains were no longer white and black, covered in ice, snow, and rock, but a dense green now, covered in either rice terraces or dark, leafy jungle. Smaller in scale, less jagged, but more remote and isolated. According to their GPS track log, they were at an elevation of approximately 10,100 feet, nearly 19,000 feet lower than they had been just a week earlier.

Babu and Lakpa had no tent, no provisions. Nothing but the clothes on their backs, the shoes on their feet, and their paraglider. Babu and Lakpa also had no map, and the goal of landing within the week on a small sandbar on a remote mountain river that was still over 40 miles away. In front of them was a series of deep gorges and canyons no one had ever previously thought to pilot a paraglider through.