Roll backwards. The Khumbu Pasanglhamu Rural Municipality has reopened the region around Mount Everest for mountaineers and trekking tourists. These are allowed to enter if they can show a corona test on arrival, which is not older than 72 hours and was negative, the authority informs me on request. In the morning the first plane from Kathmandu landed in Lukla again.
Last week, foreign tourists had arrived in Nepal for the first time in about seven months, including mountaineers who want to climb the 6,818-meter-high Ama Dablam near Everest. In Kathmandu they had gone into the mandatory one-week hotel quarantine.
On Thursday, the local government banned all flights into the Everest region until further notice after a COVID-19 infection had been reported from Namche Bazaar. According to the newspaper “Nepali Times”, a team of doctors arrived by helicopter in the hub of the Khumbu on Saturday and tested 123 people there. Nine young men were tested positive but showed no or only mild symptoms of the disease. They are now in quarantine.
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