New York. Frankfurt. Layover. Frankfurt. Doha. Layover. Doha. Kathmandu. The longest 48 hours of my life. I slept about 2 of those hours; I was hallucinating. However, there's no debating that it's all worth it for the last 40 minutes of the last flight from Qatar: the plane is coasting just above the cloud layer, so that you're skimming the tops of them & looking at a blue sky. You look out the window at dawn and swear you see a faint triangular shape just sticking out over the clouds in the distance. As the plane comes more fully into Nepal from India, and you travel along the middle latitude of the country towards the east, the little triangle becomes an 18,000 foot glacial mountain peak. Over the next 30 minutes, you ride just above the clouds only about 40 miles from dozens upon dozens of the most massive, majestic snow-covered peaks imaginable. I was nearly brought to tears. There is a world in the peaks of the Himalayas that is unknown to us here - it is easy to understand why generations of people have believed that the gods dwell in that shocking, surreal place.
After 2 days of travel, 1 1/2 books, 1 shower, 2 bad movies, 3 episodes of Friends, 3 security checks, 2 tarmac landings, then 5 days of jetlag, I would gladly fly to Nepal again just to witness that scene through the tiny airplane window one more time.
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