Namche Bazaar Much like elsewhere I have traveled, and the more I do it, what I see are people trying to live life. Friends, family, food, job, the sky is blue, grass might be green. It has been odd to be almost undercover here, people see me for the most part as another tourist. When I travel in Nepal in times of low season it seems I’m less of a tourist and more among kin (however, that is part of the draw of Nepal! Tourists are treated well, like family and friends). Yet this busy season makes that hard, it seems I’m a cog in the hypertourism economic wheel. Even here in Khumbu last time I got significantly closer to lodge owners, guides, Sherpa. Like what Ortner posited (1999) It seems that tourists are kept at arm's length sometimes, given the show they want, keep them alive, earn a buck or two from them, and send them on their way.

Do the tourists intentionally fetishize mountains and culture alike? In some sense, the way a place is presented to tourists, yes. It is entangled in the material-discursive wanderings of Everest around the world - but there are different experiences and meanings of why people come here. Each with their own contextual influence of themes of Everest literature, motivations to travel here, and preconceived perceptions of this place.

There are universal reasons for traveling here. but also there are always differences, and the two work simultaneously, maybe on a continuum, maybe some more than others at different times. We are one, we are contextual, all at the same time. What makes it hard to pin down is, as Yoda said, always in motion is the future. If spacetime is always moving, then our lives and being always are as well. There can be no stagnation and permanence, thus the image of sameness and continuity is absent [absent presence?]. In this concept, what are the meaning of the Himalayan mountains? They are always in motion, always moving, and that is intently what they mean. They react and shift and move, the intra-act. Their meaning becomes in the dynamic intra-action of people, time, space – in other words, context. Simply because something does not move in a spacetime conception of a human does not mean they are not alive, with agency, and part of intra-active reactive relationships amongst humans and more-than-humans.