Monday, February 24, 2003		Feature

Hi, Dad! I am en route to Mt. Everest
Sudeshna Sarkar

TECHNOLOGY is now set to climb Himalayan heights. Soon one shall be able to chat up online while scaling the world’s highest peak, Mt. Everest. Next month Tsering Gyaltsen Sherpa, grandson of Tenzing Norgay, is to inaugurate a cyber café at a height of 5,300 metres, en route to Everest.

Norgay, along with Edmund Hillary, climbed the 8,850-metre-high peak on May 29, 1953, in the first successful Everest expedition.

Sherpa, 32, will make the assault on the mountain to inaugurate the café a month before the golden jubilee of the first expedition.

The new cyber café, to be located on the Khumbu glacier, will be a timely replacement for the only other Internet café in the region that became inoperative after a Maoist attack.

Previously, Namche Bazaar in the Everest region had the sole cyber café, running on a transmitter. The transmitter was destroyed when the area came under attack from the outlawed Maoists this year.

Expeditions to Everest, reported to cost about $ 40,000, are expected to pay around $ 600 to use the transmitter. The money will be utilised to fund the Sagarmatha Anti-Pollution Committee, an initiative to annually clean the litter left on the mountainside by climbers. Sagarmatha is the Nepalese name for Everest.