Horacio and Horacio landed in Kathmandu after their stop in Hong Kong. Would-be-climbers have a mountain of paperwork to fill out before they can even set foot on Everest, and Kathmandu is the best place to do some last-minute shopping for food, gas and extra climbing gear.

 

Most mountaineers also meet with the legendary Elizabeth Hawley – record keeper and arbiter of all things Everest. If the Horacios make it to the summit and successfully complete a Breeze Banking transaction there, she'll be the one to put it in the books.

From Kathmandu, Horacio and Horacio took a twenty-minute flight to Lukla, where they landed at Tenzing-Hillary Airport, considered by some to be the most dangerous airport in the world. The runway sits on the mountainside at a 12% gradient, with high terrain at one end and a steep drop into a valley at the other.

"Landing was not for the faint of heart," said Horacio Galanti of the experience.

 

Climbing for Community

Lukla is sixty kilometres from Everest Base Camp. Climbers take up to nine days to complete the trek, slowly acclimatising as they walk higher and higher into the mountains. Along the trek, the Horacios stopped off at two institutions in the Khumbu region: the Khumjung School and the Khunde Hospital, both of which were set up by Sir Edmund Hillary's Himalayan Trust.

 

The story goes that in 1960, Hillary was in Nepal for an unusual expedition: he was looking for evidence of the legendary Yeti. One night over dinner, he asked the Sherpas how he could repay them for all the support and kindness they had shown him over the years, and they told him that the thing they needed most was a school for their children, saying, "Our children have eyes but they are blind."

Horacio and Horacio continued the tradition of mountaineers helping people in the region by delivering laptops to the Khumjung School and toothbrushes to the Khunde Hospital.

 

The laptops will do wonders for the education of children at the school. And as for the toothbrushes, Horacio Galanti had this to say: "We discovered that many families share just one toothbrush. They're so light and easy to carry – so it's a really easy way to increase the quality of life for people in the region."