Everest Base Camp in Tibet: The Himalayan Bangkok?

As we recently noted, the Chinese government is building a 67-mile highway to Everest base camp in Tibet, paving over a rough path, allegedly so runners will have an easier time carrying the Olympic torch to the mountain. That new road, writes Michael Kodas in the New York Times, is going to “turn Mount Everest into the first arena, and profit center, of its Olympic Games.”

More dispiriting is the grim picture he paints of the camp as it exists now.

“During my last visit, in 2006, more than 80 large tents spread out like a tenement at the end of the road to base camp, all of them filled with Chinese and Tibetans offering liquor, bunks, meals and gear,” he writes. “Prostitutes and pimps openly propositioned Western mountaineers, and Tibetan pony carts, like colorful, miniature stagecoaches, offered rides to the monastery at nearby Rongbuk. Doctors told me that in addition to the traditional frostbite and altitude sickness, they now treat plenty of venereal diseases and wounds from base-camp brawls.”

Outside magazine just called the base camp on the Nepal side of Everest “the Himalayan version of Burning Man.”

This base camp sounds more like the Himalayan version of Bangkok.

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