Day 1- Morning - Flight to Lukla

Rose today @ 4am. Took the taxi/bus @ 5:30am. Arrived at the domestic terminal of the Kathmandu airport and walked into an absolute madhouse. There was maybe 500 people and their mountains of gear attempting to shuffle their way through the archaic baggage scanners and up to the 4 or 5 ticket counters. It appears that no one knew what was going on, or where to go next (including the airline staff). Thanks to Loyd's assertiveness, he was able to worm his way up the counter to get some direction.
Our flight was for "6:30am" the first flight out, but we were immediately bumped to the "7:30 am" flight. They finally took our bags onto the conveyor belt. I was worried that I would never see my gear again as it disappeared into the little tunnel.
Our 1 hour wait turned into a 3 hour wait. There we no reader boards at the gates (all the gates were clumped together - perhaps to avoid the perception of order at the gates as well). Occasionally someone would yell in deeply accented English the flight number. We saw the need to place ourselves as close to the yelling airline personnel as possible in order to interpret the flight number.
They eventually bussed us over the runway to a big twin prop. Then more delays. They let us rest on the bus for another half hour.
Then we were stuffing cotton in our ears (in theory to protect us from the noise of the engines) at about 10:30am preparing for take-off.

The flight was relatively calm. Kind of bumpy as we neared Lukla, but apparently not bad considering the late hour. Planes rarely fly after noon because of the danger of strong winds that spring up later in the day. It was hazy as we flew. You could only see the ridges that were closest to the plane as we flew up the high valleys.

As we landed, the trekkers broke into applause. I'm not sure if that was because they were excited to be on their way to Everest, or out of relief that we had survived the flight through the mountains.

We were greeted with the shrill of whistles being blown by the Nepali police as they herded us quickly along the fence to the terminal. At the terminal I was surprised to see what must have been 100 plus porters pressed up against the chain link fence, apparently hoping to secure positions as porters in one of the expeditions. A man met me at the baggage claim pushing his business card into my hand. I didn't want to take it because I was afraid he had a limited number of cards and our porters were already hired.