By 3 o’ clock we’re sitting in a small jeep, cruising through the maze that is Kathmandu. The first thunder rolled in while leaving the hotel and by now we’re treated to a nice light show. After a stop to pick up our local guide, we set cruise for Ramechhap airfield. It’s a 4 hour drive and almost the entire route we drive in complete darkness. Only every now and then a lightning lights up the place and shows the mountains surrounding us. There’s quite some traffic on this unpaved road and it looks ridiculously dangerous.

By 7 we arrive at the small airfield of Ramechhap. It’s just a small building surrounded by small shops that make their money off what tourists buy. There’s an apron with room for about 6 planes and a short runway. It’s still early, but it’s already crowded with tourists who are eager to get to Lukla before the afternoon showers arrive. Our guide goes and gets the tickets, but while we’re waiting slowly all groups board and leave. New people arrive, but they also come and go. Eventually we’re pretty much alone for a while. Apparently, weather in the past few days didn’t allow any flights and everyone with a ticket from the previous days gets priority. It’s still only around 10-11 in the morning so we don’t really care. We’re just enjoying the activity on the field and watching the people come and go.

The security guy checks our boarding passes, pats a little on our pants and T-shirts and asks what’s in our pockets. He just asks because he has to, but he couldn’t care less about the answer. He asks if we have a lighter or a knife. He doesn’t care for this answer either. He stamps the boarding passes as ‘security checked’. This is by far the strangest airport security experience ever.

By now it’s noon and the first raindrops start to fall. We will be on the next flight of Tara Air, so the excitement is slowly growing. Then, everything comes to a halt. All flights are cancelled due to bad weather on the way to Lukla. There we are, next to the apron for the next 5 hours. It doesn’t rain anymore, there is only some haze. Halfway the afternoon the weather even clears and it’s getting really hot. Slowly, as the afternoon passes by, tourists are leaving the airport. We’re sticking around trying not to die of boredom. We watch a crew changing tires on a Summit Airplane that will crash a few days later. But then around 4, after 9 hours of waiting, there’s some action again. We get the news that flying will start again, but only a couple of flights. First the two other companies start flying, but eventually Tara Air airplanes are coming and going again. Even though we were supposed to be on the ‘next’ flight, we end up going on one of the last flights of the day.

The flight to Lukla is only about 20 minutes, maybe even less. We had the luck to be seated just behind the cockpit. The flight itself isn’t all too spectacular. Where it gets interesting is the landing. After some turning between the mountainsides, we can see the runway lined up. We slowly approach runway 06 and as soon as our landing gear is over the concrete we slam into the ground. Not exactly a smooth landing, but ‘necessity knows no laws’… We slow down, but at the end of the runway we go into a steep right turn and the pilots seem to be using the apron as an extension of the runway. Engines still running, we exit the aircraft and make our way to the airport exit. We are at Lukla, we see the Himalaya and more importantly, we’re safe and sound! The 10 hours wait payed off.

Our hotel is located only a couple of meters from the runway. While going to our room we hear the last planes passing by.

The restaurant area of our hotel was filled with flags and t-shirts of groups that had reached base camp of the Mount Everest. Most of them had inspiring quotes or thank you notes. One said: ‘I came, I saw, I shit, I spew’. And that is exactly what one of our crew members (we’re not going to say who ?) was doing the day we had to leave Lukla. In case you are not familiar with the toilets of Nepal, picture a hole in the ground. After 7 hours of waiting we were done! Our guide decided to book a helicopter instead.

The helicopter platform is on the other side of the airfield but there is a small path that leads around the runway to the helicopters. We just sat there for a while, watching helicopters come and go. Our ride arrives, we get in, fly over the runway and head towards Kathmandu. We think back on the past few days and one of the things we can agree on is that Lukla is a special place, but not as deadly or dangerous as it is often portrayed. On busy days there’s constant flying and there are also a lot of helicopters coming and going. An accident every few years doesn’t seem to be too extreme.

The next morning at the hotel breakfast we hear the news that a plane crashed in Lukla. Slowly pictures start to appear and we see the plane of Summit Air that we saw at Ramechhap earlier. The one where they were changing the right tire. It apparently just skid of the runway on take off and flew into the helicopters that were parked at the spot we were standing 12 hours earlier. 3 people died, including some police officers who are stationed next to the runway. The same guys who had let us take some pictures on the field two days earlier. (They actually grow crops and have goats in the grass strip right next to the runway.) All of sudden our Lukla experience got a new dimension. Maybe it was more dangerous than how we perceived it. Maybe we dodged the bullet thanks to a sick crew member and a caring guide. No matter what, another one to tick off our bucket list.

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