Cybercafe planned for Mount Everest base camp

By Binaj Gurubacharya
Associated Press

Nepalese Sherpa Tsering Gyalzen is pictured on the roof of his office building in Katmandu, Nepal. Gyalzen plans to set up the world's highest Internet cafe at the base camp of Mount Everest. Associated Press

Besides freezing temperatures and storms, there is no electricity or plumbing at the site. There aren't any permanent buildings, either.

"The Internet cafe I am planning will be in a temporary shed built with stone walls and covered with a tent," said entrepreneur Tsering Gyalzen, whose grandfather was one of more than 100 Sherpas who carried equipment and supplies in the 1953 expedition.

Gyalzen said he is forced to build a temporary structure because the base camp sits on a glacier that moves a few inches a day.

The cafe will open only during the spring and fall, when hundreds of mountaineers come to climb Everest and surrounding mountains in the Khumbu region.

"If we have Internet access on the base camp it would be easy to call for helicopters to airlift injured or sick mountaineers and also check on weather forecasts," said Ang Tshering, who operates a trekking business.

To relay the Internet data, Gyalzen is building a second hut in the Kalapathar area, about a two-hour trek below the base camp, for satellite equipment that will transmit signals through radio links to the Internet cafe.

"There are 19,000 to 50,000 trekkers that come to the Everest region every year. They would want to send a line of e-mail to their friends and family back home," Gyalzen said.

Since Everest was conquered by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay on May 29, 1953, more than 1,200 people have climbed the mountain and nearly 200 have died on its unpredictable slopes.

Gyalzen, like most Sherpas, lives in the Everest region. His family owns a hotel at Namche village.

He operates an Internet cafe at the 11,280-foot-high Namche village, also on the Everest trekking route.

He hopes the new cafe will be ready by spring, when more than 100 mountaineers are expected to attempt to scale the 29,035-foot Everest, celebrating the golden jubilee of the first conquest.

"It is a very a challenging project, both technically and when it is operational," he said.

First he must battle the Nepalese bureaucracy to get a license to import the satellite signal relay equipment from Israel. Then he has to airlift the equipment to an airstrip at Lukla and have it carried to the base camp on yaks, which takes about a week. Gyalzen said he was still not sure how many satellite dishes or what kind of transmitters and receivers he would be allowed to import.

The proceeds, he said, will go to the Sagarmath Pollution Control Committee, which educates local Sherpas on the advantages of keeping the mountain clear of garbage and pollution. The committee also forces trekkers and mountaineers to take their trash away with them and has imposed a ban on glass bottles on Everest.