Wow! An amazing trip of a lifetime – made extremely smooth and well catered to by the team at Ace the Himalaya. Right from the onset about 8 months ago, when we contacted the admin staff, we were very warmly communicated with and everything was explained succinctly. Be it our million questions via email to securing and organising the final dates in sept end – oct. Being our first time on such a long trek,quite obviously we had a lot of prep to be done but they patiently answered our repeated questions without any hesitation and quite promptly at that.
Finally, when we arrived at Kathmandu, we were warmly received by our trek guide Nirajan, who made us feel at ease at once. We had missed the Pre trek orientation in the morning as we arrived only the afternoon before the trek but Nirajan filled us in with the details to be aware of and settled our butterflies. It took only a day for us to be comfortable with him as he has a very easy going personality.happy to help with anything and everything and make our journey memorable. Right from guiding us to buy a local sim at a reasonable price, the right place to buy last minute accessories, a great restaurant to eat to packing the only necessary essentials to keep our luggage to under15 kg for the flight to Lukla -he was spot on.
Then when the trek started he always used to debrief the day before about the route, time and difficulty to be expected on the ensuing day. Always went out of the way to cater to any specific needs – be it food requirements, water availability, walking with the slowest person bringing up the rear and keeping pace with the rest of the group or simply allowing as many breaks to be taken on long hard days as necessary.
Not an easy job to manage 22 people all with varying degree of fitness and trekking pace. But I think Nirajan did a fabulous job at that always with a smile on his face. As he used to say,to quote ‘ we are here to give you great customer service and make your journey as comfortable as possible’.
I think his real test and at higher altitudes with people falling prey to altitude sickness, with a few having to be airlifted from 5100 mts due to severe altitude sickness. It all happened so suddenly in a matter of 2 hrs and he managed to get them out quickly. If that wasn’t enough, one of the trekkers had a severe asthma attack while descending in the middle of nowhere – about an hour away from Namche Bazaar. With her condition rapidly deteriorating, he and his assistant guide Gopal (20 yr old ) in turns decided to carry her on their backs for almost 30-45mins to get her to the hospital in Namche asap. It was not an easy day with already 8 hrs of walking done and then to do that was a Herculean task. Together with his efforts and of one of our other trekkers who is an ED nurse, who were heroes in my eyes,they managed to save a life in a tricky situation.
My respect and admiration at what he does, grew abundantly by that act!
Otherwise the trek was quite well organised and went smoothly, barring a day stuck in Lukla due to bad weather. Even then Nirajan managed to get half of us in a unscheduled chartered flight early next day to get us in our way!
I would highly recommend Ace the Himalaya for an EBC trek with Nirajan as your trekking guide! 5 stars to him