Flying Off Everest (22 page)

Back on the beach, they asked the man in the loincloth to take their picture. He clicked the shutter once, handed back the camera, and then wandered off. Babu unpacked the mobile and called Phinney in the United States. He told her they had made it to the ocean, but that they were going to leave now, because there were “strange scorpions” on the beach. He would learn later that the scorpions he had seen were actually just harmless crabs. Regardless, they were all ready to be done. It was just after 1:00 p.m., just under three months after they had set out from Kathmandu for Everest.

After a brief conversation with Phinney, Krishna snapped a few more still photos of Babu and Lakpa sitting on the tandem kayak next to the ocean. Before they left, he took a short video of them dunking themselves into the ocean. Then the three of them got back into their kayaks and paddled inland, retracing half of the distance they had already paddled that day, 10 miles back to the town of Kakdwip, where they got a hotel, had a few beers to celebrate the end of their journey, and fell asleep.

They had spent only about thirty minutes on the beach that marked the end of their journey, about half the time they had spent on
the summit of Mount Everest. It was the end of what they had dubbed “the ultimate descent”: the first complete, continuous, nonmotorized descent of Mount Everest.

Phinney updated the blog:

Babu and Lakpa sit side by side on a low berm covered in dry, brown grass. Rising up behind them, the Annapurna Massif stands out starkly from a clear blue sky like an enormous white shark fin. Little yellow flowers cover the hillside around them, scattering the otherwise brown landscape with random bursts of color. The bright red, green, and yellow crescents of paragliders circle overhead, rising and falling through the air over the darker blue of Phewa Lake, over 1,000 feet below. The city of Pokhara forms a haphazard grid along the eastern shore.

Lakpa and Babu are both wearing neon green and black long-sleeved shirts emblazoned with the paragliding company Niviuk’s logo—the same company that made the wing they used to fly off Everest almost eight months earlier. The company does not officially sponsor them. Niviuk just sent them each a free shirt. Each is also wearing a new khaki-colored Sup’Air baseball cap—sent by the company that manufactured the harnesses they used to fly off Everest, and that Lakpa used for climbing it. Similarly, the company doesn’t officially sponsor Babu and Lakpa. They had just sent them free gear to use on the expedition, and now the hats.
*

Four people stand in front of them: Kimberly Phinney; David Arrufat’s girlfriend, Mukti; a Kathmandu-based British ultrama-rathon runner/reporter named Richard Bull; and Alex Treadway, a London-based cameraman for
National Geographic Adventure.
The air is cool. Everyone is wearing jackets, except Babu and Lakpa, who sit slightly hunched in the grass, cradling themselves against the light winter winds of the Himalayan foothills in order to show off their new shirts during their film interview.

Treadway, a tall thirty-seven-year-old with a buzzed head and kind brown eyes, stands slightly off to the side, about 10 feet in front of Babu and Lakpa, in a black hooded sweatshirt. Immediately to his right is a video camera attached to the top of a black tripod. He has flown with it from London and taken the nine-hour bus ride to Pokhara from Kathmandu in order to film the two men in front of him for the magazine. Mukti, dressed in a light blue jacket and wool stocking cap, sits immediately in front of Babu and Lakpa, holding a large microphone. It’s covered with a wind muffler that makes it look a bit like a small gray dog. She holds it up to their faces, just out of the camera shot. Bull and Phinney stand just to the right of Treadway, arms crossed, looking at Lakpa and Babu. Phinney has just flown a red-eye over 7,000 miles from her home in San Francisco, at her own expense. It’s the second time she has come to Nepal since Babu and Lakpa completed their Everest expedition—the first time, she was the only one interviewing them. Bull, a friend of Treadway who was asked to help with the interview, is holding a sheet of paper with a series of questions written on it that he has been asking Babu and Lakpa to answer for the camera for the past twenty minutes. Phinney has been coaching them on what to say, occasionally asking questions in addition to the written ones.

“And so my dear Babu and Lakpa,” Phinney says, “how does it feel to be National Geographic Adventurer of the Year 2012?” There is a moment of silence. Babu and Lakpa look at her, obviously puzzled.

“Both of us, honestly, we don’t know,” Babu tells her, making sure to keep the smile on his face. “We are always far from other media,
and this is new…. We don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know what
National Geographic
is. We are still confused, what this is. We want to know.”

Babu and Lakpa had just won possibly the most prestigious prize for outdoor adventure athletes in the world. Each year since 2005, the Adventure branch of the US-based National Geographic Society has nominated ten of the world’s best outdoor adventure athletes to compete for the title of Adventurer of the Year. It is ultimately chosen by popular vote on
National Geographic
’s website, which receives over nineteen million unique views per month. That year, over 72,000 votes had been cast, and Babu and Lakpa had won in a landslide, despite garnering hardly any media attention after actually completing their expedition. They beat out professional Western athletes with highly organized and highly marketed social media campaigns, without even trying. Or even knowing what the award was that they were supposedly “competing” for.

The other nominees included the American climber Corey Richards, who had summited Pakistan’s 26,358-foot Gasherbrum II, the thirteenth-highest mountain in the world, without supplemental oxygen or the help of porters, in winter; an Austrian woman named Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, who was the first woman to summit all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen or the help of porters; and an American named Jennifer Pharr Davis, who hiked all 2,181 miles of the Appalachian Trail in forty-six days, eleven hours, and twenty minutes, averaging 47 miles a day. Just to name a few.

Babu’s friend Erik Boomer, the twenty-seven-year-old American kayaker and photographer who had taken him off his first 40-foot waterfall when he was nineteen, was also nominated that year along with his expedition partner, then sixty-five-year-old Arctic adventurer and writer Jon Turk. They had become the first people to circumnavigate Canada’s Ellesmere Island, a 104-day 1,485-mile route, which they did mainly by pulling their gear-laden boats over ice on skis. A polar bear ripped through the side of their tent, and they nearly ran
out of food. When they finished Turk was immediately hospitalized. His kidneys, along with a good number of his bodily functions, had just stopped working. “Doctors tell me that in that wonderland of sea and ice, my body was on the brink of collapse,” Turk would later write in an article for
Canoe & Kayak.
“And [my] brain said, ‘Not yet, old friend. We’re in this together, you and me, brain and urinary tract. Hang on. You can shut down after we get to town.’”

“Being nominated for that award was one of the greatest honors I’ve received,” Boomer says. He hadn’t even heard of his friend’s Everest expedition until he saw Babu’s name mentioned in the list of fellow nominees. “I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I couldn’t think of a better person to win it. As much as I wanted to have the award, I definitely didn’t want anybody else to have it but Babu.” So Boomer went online and cast his own vote for Babu and Lakpa.
*

Previous nominees for the award had included such notable outdoor adventurers as Alex Honnold, who in 2010 climbed both the iconic 2,000-foot Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome and the 2,900-foot Nose route up El Capitan in California’s Yosemite Valley, solo, in under twenty-four hours;
^†
Dean Potter, who in 2008 BASE jumped off Switzerland’s 13,025-foot Eiger in a wingsuit, setting the record for the world’s longest BASE jump ever; and Colin Angus and Julie Wafaei, who spent nearly two years walking, cycling, skiing, and rowing around the world, covering nearly 26,000 miles.

In simplified English, Bull says, “Many people voted. You know? Because you were on one website with ten other people, all these big mountain climbers, these famous people doing other big journeys, but many people, they chose you, they selected you. They thought you were the number one adventurers in the whole world—the WHOLE
world. They thought you were the best ones. You were the best adventurers in the world in 2012. What do you think of what people think?”

Babu and Lakpa don’t quite know what to make of it. They are still a bit confused as to where this supposed big award actually is. No one has told them that they aren’t being given anything tangible. No cash prize. No trophy.
*
No certificate. Just a title. And that means absolutely nothing to them. They have just been awarded one of the highest honors an adventure athlete can receive, and they don’t care.

Treadway interjects patiently with a light British accent, “I mean, you’re very popular. Everybody is very inspired by what you’ve achieved by your ultimate descent. So everybody has chosen you as their favorite adventurers of the year. How do you feel?”

“Just a minute,” Babu says. “I’m confused. I’m not really clear. I’m confused.” Lakpa stays silent, looking at the ground.

“Well, Babu,” Phinney says, “
National Geographic
isn’t going to tell the world until February 28. So you need to keep the secret as best you can. Only for you. Not for David. Not for Blue Sky Paragliding. Nobody can know this. You’re first place, out of everybody who got looked at in the world. You guys are number one to the world!”

“Wooo! Now I understand,” Babu says, not really understanding. “Before, because questions coming, and I still confused. What is question?”

“Let’s try this again,” Phinney says. “So Babu and Lakpa, the world has chosen you as Adventurers of the Year. What would you like to say to the world?”

Lakpa suddenly chimes in. “Thank you very much, all over people.” He says it slowly, enunciating every syllable. His English isn’t as good as Babu’s, he thinks, so he has chosen to speak as little as possible during the interview.

“And thank you to the people who give the opportunity to us to share our dream all over the world,” Babu says. “Our thanks to our
Hanuman Airlines
team, Kimberly and David, and most thank you for
National Geographic
, sharing our experience and our dream all over the world. And thank you to everyone who supported us. All of our friends who supported us in the kayaking part and the climbing part and the Nepalis outside of the country. Now maybe we did something interesting for people all over the world.”

As she has done throughout the interview, Phinney asks the same question again. She told them at the beginning that if she did this, they needed to shorten their answer.

“Uh, thank you very much for all the people, and all the friends, and everyone who supported us,” Babu says hastily. “Thank you. Thank you very much. We don’t have anything more to say. We say thank you very much. I don’t know….” He and Lakpa bow slightly toward the camera as he says it, hands pressed together in front of them.

“Just as the tape is running out,” Treadway says, glad to have an ending he can actually use. He has been recording for fifty-eight minutes. The final video of the interview eventually will be cut down to two minutes, twenty-six seconds. “That’s fantastic,” he says, and cuts the camera.

On July 2, 2011, Phinney once again updated the expedition blog:

It had been four days since Babu, Lakpa, and Krishna had actually finished their expedition. Leaving the town of Kakdwip, they had strapped their two kayaks to the top of a hired jeep
*
with some rope and
driven back to the India/Nepal border. It took two days. It had taken them three weeks to paddle the same distance. Phinney needed to wire them additional money through Western Union in Kakdwip to pay for it.

At the border they found David Arrufat waiting for them. He had driven the Blue Sky Paragliding van all day down from Pokhara to pick them up. They couldn’t bring an Indian vehicle into Nepal, so they needed a ride from someone with Nepali plates.

“He brought beer,” Lakpa says. They got drunk and sang all the way to Chitwan, about a four-hour drive from Kathmandu, where they stopped and spent the night. The next day, Lakpa was reunited with his wife, Yanjee, and his four-year-old son, Mingma Tashi, at their home. He had been gone three months, but he had kept his promise to come back alive, for which Yanjee was grateful. Arrufat, Babu, and Krishna had to wait an additional two days before they could make it back to their homes in Pokhara, where Babu was once again reunited with his wife, Susmita, and his son, Niraj. A landslide had taken out a large section of the Prithvi Highway, blocking the only road in or out of the city from the east.

Lakpa and Babu’s friends and families welcomed them home as heroes, but not many people inside or outside of Nepal actually knew what they had just accomplished. Aside from the short blogs posted by Arrufat on APPIfly.org and the one
Cross Country
magazine posted on its website, XCmag.com, the day after Babu and Lakpa had flown from Everest, there had been very little coverage of their expedition in the media at that point.
*
There had been absolutely none whatsoever
in Nepal. And it wasn’t for lack of trying, at least on Phinney and the Arrufats’ part.

“We worked twenty-four hours a day to share information [about the expedition],” David Arrufat says. “And nobody took it.
National Geographic
… all the magazines. We wrote perhaps one thousand e-mails to everybody, all the listing of media in the world. We wrote to the newspaper, we sent the information. Nobody took it.”

Phinney, likewise, was ferociously sending e-mails to media outlets in multiple countries, but received little response at first. She had even gone so far as to fly over to Nepal immediately after the expedition to record an interview with Babu and Lakpa in Pokhara, which she then used to provide quotes to the few magazines she did eventually hear back from. The only success they had initially in spreading the story came in the form of a 266-word article on
Australian Geographic
’s website, which wasn’t posted until August 22.