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until we dropped into the clouds, the beginning of our landing in Kathmandu.
    My good friend Ang Karma Sherpa was waiting for us at the doors to the airport terminal. Eager porters wheeled our carts down the middle of the road to the carpark with taxis honking and minibuses spewing out black smoke. Chaos and confusion is a standard welcome to Kathmandu, but there was something different about the journey back to Karma’s house.
    â€œWhere’s all the traffic?” I asked.
    â€œThe Maoists have declared a strike,” Karma explained. “They threaten that anyone still doing business will get their shop blown up. And they bombed some stores. The only vehicles they let on the road in a strike are tourist vehicles. That is why we have the sign.”
    He gestured to a large piece of paper taped to the windshield. From inside I could make out the word Tourist. The sign obscured some of the driver’s vision, but because of the minimal traffic on the roads today it was not an issue.
    We went directly to Ang Karma’s house on the outskirts of Kathmandu, not far from the airport and the Tibetan Buddhist epicenter of Boudhanath. We were warmly greeted in excellent English by Karma’s wife, Kunga. I cast my mind back to when Barbara and I first met Kunga. Dylan was a baby at the time, and Kunga, pregnant with their first child, was too shy to speak more than a few words of English.
    In the twenty-five years since we had met, Kunga had shrugged off her shyness, and with better English had come an understanding of our Western mores and values. Meanwhile, Karma had done well for himself. His family now lived in a substantial house, which they had built in stages. When money became available, they added another story. The last of the five stories was a rooftop level with a large balcony, and from there ladderlike steps led to a vertical pole at the apex of the building. Lengths of strong cord were strung from the pole’s tip across to trees growing on the slope rising behind. Stitched to each cord were Buddhist prayer flags in five bright colors, each of symbolic significance in Tibetan Buddhism. The cords were like permanent clotheslines, but with the clothes replaced by timeless prayers. As the flags flutter in the wind, Tibetan Buddhists believe, prayers are dispersed across the land and into the cosmos. Most common among Ang Karma’s flags was the prayer of the wind horse, in honor of which he had named his business.
    The strike imposed by the Maoists had been for only one day, so Kathmandu life returned to normal, which meant busy roads and, in the old part of town, crowded, cobbled alleyways. Karma had work to do, so I showed Barbara and the boys my favorite haunts and restaurants. Singapore was not a good place to buy clothes for winter in the Himalaya, so we wandered from one trekking store to the next in search of the few extra items of clothing that they would need to keep warm at 17,000 feet.
    We were keen to get up into the mountains. The air in the deep valleys of the Everest region is more turbulent in the afternoons, and so the flights to Lukla are always timetabled for early in the day. Kathmandu’s morning fog in winter often meant the cancellation of the Lukla flights, but on the day that we flew, we were blessed with clear skies. Soon enough we were sitting in the front of the eighteen-seater Twin Otter aircraft, with the propellers roaring as we taxied down the runway. The flight to Lukla is only fifty minutes, and the views of the rugged Himalayan foothills are breathtaking. The middle hills of Nepal are too rugged for roads. The steep terrain limits all agriculture either to narrow terraces covering entire hillsides or to alluvial flats on the floors of deep valleys. Tiny villages nestle in the valleys or on ridge-tops. At the highest pass, between forested mountains, the aircraft was only a few hundred feet above the ground, and we saw children walking along a narrow dirt path