Setting off for Everest

Jane Hughes: Heading for Everest base camp

The BBC is retracing the footsteps of the first team to successfully climb Mount Everest 50 years ago. Jane Hughes is keeping a diary of the journey.

Day One: Flight from Kathmandu to Lukla, trek to Phakding.

So much has changed about trips to Mount Everest since John Hunt led the 1953 British expedition, but as our small team prepared to leave Kathmandu 50 years after they did, it felt as if we had more in common with the original expedition than might be expected.

The 1953 team left Kathmandu in two long caravans - each made up of hundreds of porters, carrying huge loads of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

We set off, heading down the valley towards a fast-flowing, glacial blue river in the dazzling morning sunlight, with the snow-topped mountains looming over us Jane Hughes

They were taking with them the equipment and supplies to launch a siege-style assault on the mountain that would take several weeks - considered the only likely way the expedition stood a chance of putting two men on the summit.

Our ambitions are more modest - to get seven BBC staff to base camp, along with a TV satellite dish, two radio satellite dishes, and accompanying equipment, to report on the anniversary, and the changes the area has witnessed in the past half century.

But to do this, we have had to transport over two tonnes of equipment and fuel.

That meant marshalling dozens of boxes, bags, cases, generators and petrol tanks in Kathmandu - getting some on to a flight up to Lukla, 40 minutes by air from the Nepalese capital, and arranging for the rest to be helicoptered two days walk down from base camp - the air is too thin for it to be taken any higher. Yaks and porters will carry it.

Terrifying flight

But the advantage we have over the 1953 expedition is that we were able to fly the first leg of the journey, while they took over a fortnight to walk from Kathmandu.

Not that the flight was one any of us would like to repeat. The landing at Lukla was the most terrifying I have ever endured.

The 28-seat Twin Otter plane descended into the precipitous valley, apparently with nowhere it could hope to land, until at the very last moment, it dropped on to a tiny and steeply sloping runway on the edge of a hillside.

It was some time after the plane had stopped that my stomach came to a halt.

The target: The world's tallest mountain

And then, after the sherpas and porters shouldered their loads, we set off, heading down the valley towards a fast-flowing, glacial blue river in the dazzling morning sunlight, with the snow-topped mountains looming over us.

As we walked, heavily laden Yaks, their bells chinking, and their owners urging them on, passed us by.

From time to time, we paused to turn the Buddhist prayer wheels which line the route.

Unchanging lives

At one point, we stopped at a tiny Buddhist monastery perched on the edge of a cliff, and watched as the caretaker lit lamps, blew a conch and banged a gong; part of a daily ritual.

The 1953 expedition was equally enthralled by its first glimpse of the sherpa culture.

"We found the people and their simple livelihoods a daily interest - the laborious hand tilling of the soil along narrow strips of terrace carved into the hillsides," John Hunt wrote.

Though the tourism generated by the expedition has altered the lives of many sherpas, basic life for others in the villages has not significantly changed since then.

From here, Hunt's team continued to Namche Bazar, the main sherpa town, and that's where we will be heading too, when we leave our hillside camp site at Toktok tomorrow morning.