The New Adventures of Indiaaron Jones: Mountains and Monkeys

Two days ago I began to type something pithy and esoteric about last Saturdays adventure. In the last two days I have managed to misplace my train of thought so I will scrap the initial idea and just give you the straight dope.

My dad bought us each a "mountain flight." This is a flight in a small plane from Kathmandu, along the Himalayan range, to Everest. There are 5 companies that offer this service and we chose Buddha Air for ours. It has the newest and safest planes, so I figured that was as good as reason as any to choose them. There are 2 flights a day, one around 6:30 am and the other around 7:30 am. We opted for the 7:30 because the decision to fly would be made by the earlier flight. We didn't want to be the guniea pigs. We ended up at the airport early so we were on the first flight anyways! There was some apprehension at first because none of the other passengers were being told the correct bus to get onto. We were joking that we might end up in Pokora! The staff kept telling us the wrong bus to get onto and it took them several minutes to get it straightened out. Once the problem was solved we drove to the plane and the 20 of us filed onto the plane. It was a small, twin prop aircraft. There were single seats adjacent the windows and a single aisle down the middle. Pretty cozy. While taxing we could see the peaks of a few mountains in the distance. This was exceptional as this is monsoon season. We have only seen mountains once before in the month that we have been here! This was a great sign.