We trekked in Helambu about 50 miles for a week in march 1986. The next month after 4 months in India and Nepal we returned home to California in the U.S.

We took buses from Kathmandu to the last dirt road that a bus could drive on. the very last bus had no windows much so you couldn't see outside. There were no seats they just enclosed us in sort of like a smaller Uhaul truck van body with skylights and that's all. When we reached a river on the last dirt road available then we disembarked with our guide and my family. My wife and I were then in march 1986 both 37 years old and our children then were 10, 12 and 14.

This was like being on another planet where there were no roads for a week and porters carried everything from wood to nails to food, to aluminum pieces of roofing across suspension bridges fro hundreds of miles of Himalayan trails to little villages with no roads to at all because monsoons would just wash them all away during the summers. So, walking then was the only way to get anywhere unless you owned a helicopter or rented one. It's still that way though I here there are now heliport pads for helicopters to land on a lot of places so so many people don't die of broken ankles or other sicknesses for hundreds of miles in Helambu so they don't die without any medical help like people did then when I went.

In Kathmandu they had many many pictures while we bougth trekking permits (20 or 30) on the wall of dead westerners who died from exposure or broken ankles because they did something stupid. People might think they could be rescued but mostly that wasn't possible then. So, trekking for a week like we did we knew if anyone got hurt or injured or died in our family we knew we would either have to carry them out ourselves or hire people to do this to the nearest bus or taxi to get them to a hospital in Kathmandu. This was just how it was in 1986 then in Nepal in the Himalayas in Helambu district then.