Embedded Files
Home Itinerary Mount Everest Gear Links
05.12.16 Departure Day
In order to get to Everest Base Camp, you must first fly into to Kathmandu, Nepal, and then catch a shuttle flight to Lukla Airport - it's 10-12 days on foot from there. Since there are no direct flights from Atlanta to Kathmandu, Kimberly and I had an interesting decision to make. As it turns out, it's just as fast to fly west over Southeast Asia as it is to fly east over Europe and the Middle East. Here are some actual itineraries out of Atlanta: 1) California/Hawaii/Beijing/Kathmandu or Chicago/London/Dubai/Kathmandu. We opted for a third choice; Atlanta/Amsterdam/Delhi/Kathmandu (see map below).
It was no accident that we finally settled on this flight schedule. As it turns out, there's a pretty cool place near Delhi called the Taj Mahal - you may have heard of it. Kimberly and I built a few extra days into our trip to visit the Taj so we could experience one of the Seven Wonders of the World (man-made, modern, honorable mention) - Mount Everest is also one of the Seven Wonders of the World (natural, classic, first team). Actually, after a bit of research, there appears to be about 70 Wonders of the World - effectively making the Earth one order of magnitude more wonderful than was first suspected.
Squeezing in the Taj required some fairly intricate planning. It involves landing at Indira Gandhi International Airport at 1:35 a.m. on Saturday morning, and getting through customs as quickly as possible. We have a chauffeured SUV picking us up and driving us to our hotel, the Leela Palace, where we can hopefully get a few hours of sleep before leaving for Agra/Taj Mahal in the same car at 7:00 a.m. We had considered taking the train, but opted for the hotel's transportation for convenience. Apparently, driving in India is an extreme sport in and of itself - so renting a car was not really an option.
The Taj Mahal: A shrine dedicated to Mumtaz Majal, wife of Shah Jahan -1653. One of the seven wonders of the world and the iconic symbol of love.
It's a 3.5 hour drive from Delhi to Agra and after touring the Taj Mahal, we'll take in a few other sights before returning to the Leela Palace for a late dinner and some well-deserved rest. The following morning, we pack up and head back to the airport for our flight to Nepal. There we will meet up with our Sherpa and finish our preparations for the harrowing flight to Lukla's Tenzing-Hillary Airport on Monday. It looks like the weather is going to be nice on Saturday (107 degrees and sunny), so I hope to have some good pictures to post this weekend. If you're counting, our flight time to India is about 21 hours - 17 in the air with a four hour layover in Amsterdam. Add in 9.5 hours worth of time zone changes, and even though we leave at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, we don't arrive in Delhi until Saturday morning.
Geek Notes
One thing we like to do on Zero Latitude is dig a little deeper into scientific/historical curiosities and trivial tidbits that catch our eye. I had considered omitting Geek Notes from this installment, but a couple of things jumped out at me and I wanted to point them out. First, wtf is up with a 9 hour and 30 minute time zone change? During our planning, I noticed that Nepal had an even more odd UTC +05:45. Most sane countries just round off to the nearest hour, but apparently Central Asia likes to be very precise with their zoning. There are only a handful of countries on Earth that have fractional time zone offsets, and we're traveling to two of them. If you're curious, here are those places with UTC noted:
India (+05:30, otw)
Nepal (+05:45, sys)
Newfoundland, CA (-02:30, cool place, been there)
Norfolk Island (+11:30, South Pacific)
Afghanistan (+04:30, psycho)
Iran (+04:30, psycho)
North Korea (+08:30, bonkers)
New Zealand (+13:45)
Myanmar (+06:30, psycho)
Lord Howe Island (+10:30, who?)
Australia has a few too, but the list got a little longer than I thought and I'm getting sick of jumping back and forth between websites to comprise a list that nobody cares about. So back to the discussion at hand...
Before clocks were invented, it was common practice to mark the time of day with apparent solar time (also called "true" solar time) – for example, the time on a sundial – which was typically different for every settlement. When well-regulated mechanical clocks became widespread in the early 19th century, each city began to use some local mean solar time. Apparent and mean solar time can differ by up to around 15 minutes because of the non-circular shape of the Earth's orbit around the sun (Eccentricity) and the tilt of the Earth's axis (Obliquity). Mean solar time has days of equal length, and the difference between the two averages to zero after a year.
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established in 1675 when the Royal Observatory was built as an aid to mariners to determine longitude at sea, providing a standard reference time, even though each city in England kept a different local time.
Local solar time became increasingly awkward as rail transport and telecommunications improved, because clocks differed between places by an amount corresponding to the difference in their geographical longitude, which varied by four minutes of time for every degree of longitude. For example, Bristol is about 2.5 degrees west of Greenwich (East London), so when it is solar noon in Bristol, it is about 10 minutes past solar noon in London. To drive this point home, Boston and New York City used to be temporally dislocated by 23 minutes. The use of time zones accumulates these differences into longer units, usually hours, so that nearby locales can share a common standard for timekeeping.
By about 1900, almost all time on Earth was in the form of standard time zones, only some of which used an hourly offset from GMT. Many applied the time at a local astronomical observatory to an entire country, without any reference to GMT. It took many decades before all time on Earth was in the form of time zones referred to some "standard offset" from GMT/UTC. By 1929, most major countries had adopted hourly time zones. Nepal was the last country to adopt a standard offset, shifting slightly to UTC+5:45 in 1986.
So why are some cities 30 or 45 minutes off? That has largely to do with the politics in each of those places and the "rules" for establishing your offset - in particular, the 15 degree meridian rule. Since there are 360 total degrees of longitude, if you were to divide the planet into 24 identical zones, one for each hour, they'd all be 15 degree wide. So just pick your closest 15 degree meridian and adopt the corresponding offset. But it just so happens that in New Delhi, India, they found themselves halfway between two 15 degree meridians, and therefore decided to split the difference, as opposed to adopting one time or the other. Nepal's central meridian was offset 7.5 degrees from New Delhi, so in 1956 they said to hell with it, and adopted the +05:45 zone.
Also, even though India’s expansive regions cross two time zones, all of India carries the same time. Even quirkier: All of China, which spans an impressive five time zones, has the same time, which is UTC +8 hours. That means that in some areas of China, they have dark mornings and light nights. And there you have it.
Archives:
05.15.16 Kathmandu
05.16.16 Lukla/Phakding
05.17.16 Namche Bazaar
05.21.16 Gokyo Lakes
05.25.16 Gorkashep
05.26.16 Everest Base Camp!
05.29.16 Kala Patthar/Tengboche/Namche
05.30.16 Lukla
06.01.16 Kathmandu: Final Thoughts
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse