Waking up we were excited to see clear blue skies and situation by 8:45am we had packed, eaten breakfast and secured our spot in the check in queue at Lukla Airport. We were booked to fly out via Tara Airways 16th flight of the day (over 40 flights were scheduled) which was supposed to be at 10:30am.
After hours of waiting, being told "come back in 45min" and watching countless angry/bewildered foreigners we were finally presented with our boarding pass and told to go through the security check post.
We got through the check post, handed in our luggage for the plane and headed to the departure lounge. After about 45min it became clear that the weather was not looking good. An hour or so into our lounge stop a man came in and told us that "all planes had turned back to Khatmandu but that the flights were not cancelled yet".
We knew what that meant... The long walk to Jiri was probably our only chance to catch Aaron's flight back to Australia on the 5th.
When flights are cancelled in Lukla you go into a "waiting list" this list goes behind the flights that were already scheduled on any given day. As there had already been two days of cancelled flights this meant that we would roughly be on flight number 50 out of Lukla (which could take anywhere up to 2 weeks to get to). The walk was inevitable.
We got our baggage back, had some food, bought a map and then hit the road. We had decided to walk to Surke (just an hour or so from Lukla) as we were running short on daylight.
Surke was a beautiful town and had a great big river running right through the middle of it. Huge vegetable gardens surrounded the town and immediately we could tell that there was going to be a lot less foreigners around over the next few days.
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