Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
Arrival at Kathmandu. Very nearly lynched by mob of protestors getting out of airport. I get away from them as fast as my artificial hip and asthma can carry me, which isn't very fast at all.
I locate the exchange shop in alleyway. Chetana Sherpa is waiting for me there. She is very sweet and relaxed, with the air of someone who has done this many times. When it comes to her expectations, she is brief but firm - $8000 paid now (I hand over the cash), one summit attempt (if it called off for any reason, I cannot try repeatedly), no unnecessary risks (the whole thing is an unnecessary risk, I'm tempted to point out), and no 'funny stuff'. I splutter at the idea but she is insistent. A fossilised man like me is far too old for any 'funny stuff', I tell her. "Soon you won't be," she replies.
I didn't feel an ounce of remorse when I pushed past the protestors but now, seeing the real human woman whose body I'll be wearing and placing in peril for the next four months, I experience guilt for the first time. I ask her why she does it. She replies that it is more money than she can make in 5 years and that she has children to feed. "Besides, it isn't me who is taking the risk," she laughs. I ask her if her children will be confused by their mother’s new identity of a geriatric american man. “They’re used to it,” she shrugs.
A man takes his own sizeable cut of the $8000 and starts rigging us into the exchange machine. The scruffy headsets look as old as the mountains and the exposed wiring doesn't inspire confidence, knowing I'm about to be faxed along it. I'm considering changing my mind when he flicks a switch. And that really changes my mind. No fuss. Just a click and I’m Chetana.
It's so anticlimactic, yet so overwhelming, that it throws me. I stand there, swaying, staggered from the sensory input, while Chetana in my body is bundling her climbing gear onto my back. She wheezes as she moves my old body.
"The taxi is coming to collect you," she tells me as she straps the backpack to my foreign anatomy, tightening straps beneath my breasts, the overwhelming stimuli nearly causing me to pass out. "It will take you back into the city where you will find further transport. It is 10 days to base camp. That will give you time to acclimatize to the air, and to me. Do not talk to authorities on the way. What we did here was not entirely legal."
“I… I don’t think I can walk…” I gasp as she pushes me out the door. I am walking like a drunk toddler. My hips feel loose, practically dislocated, like they want to wiggle off my torso with every swaying step. She is far more comfortable as me, having done this before with many men like me. The bustle of the street hits my eyes, ears, and nostrils simultaneously.
“It will take a few days. By the 10th day, you will be a natural. Good luck. No risks.”
She shoves me into a taxi. As I'm bustled out of Kathmandu towards the Himalayan trail, another protestor - a plump canadian girl - pushes a pamphlet into my hand, warning me in slow, patronizing English against the exploitative practice of unfit westerners renting out Sherpa bodies for Everest climbs. She equates it to no better than prostitution. If I'm approached by any such nefarious people, she instructs me, then I’m to report it to the police, and that there are women's refuges available if I - a vulnerable Nepalese woman - need them. Her lecture is passionate enough that I’m unable to get a word in, which is fortunate as I know none in Nepalese, and I’m able to scurry away, her mistake unnoticed.
It's only once on the bumpy bus ride into the mountains that I finally take stock. The long, slow deterioration of age had dulled my senses subtly but profoundly, for the sudden return to youth has been a shocking overload of sensation. Not just the vividness of the country, but of the foreign jostling of my female body. I sit staring out of the bus window, amazed by such little things as the individual leaves rippling in the breeze. For what must be decades, my failing eyesight has reduced trees to green blobs atop brown sticks without me ever realising it.
Even the rumble of the old diesel engine beneath my seat is overwhelming. My face is flushes red from embarrassment. I cross my legs against the stimulation, biting down on the collar of Chetana's shirt, and praying the wrinkled old lady sitting next to me doesn’t notice my quiet, stifled moans.
(Note to self: My family will be reading this journal when I return, I should keep such details to myself.)