Everest fog strands tourists

A group of hikers is rescued from a mountain near Everest after cloudy skies left thousands of tourists stranded there for several days.
An Australian trapped by heavy fog for six days in the foothills of Mount Everest has told of his ordeal as he and fellow tourists wait to be rescued.
"I was quite frustrated by the fact that nobody knew anything. Our guides were also helpless. They couldn't do anything," Dicki Clark, 67, said yesterday.
Clark is among more than 2500 tourists who have been stranded at Lukla airport, the gateway for climbers heading to Everest and surrounding mountains, since authorities were forced to close the airstrip on Wednesday last week, grounding all flights in and out of the region.
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With continuing bad weather hampering a rescue, the trekkers - including Americans, Britons and Germans - have been sleeping at the airport and in tents and dining halls at Lukla hotels, with food fast running out.
Clark said tourists had been kept "in a state of limbo", with little or no information about what authorities were doing to rescue them.
"We are told that we will be flown soon but we can only hope," he said.
Air traffic control at Lukla's Tenzing-Hillary airport said flights had started again on Monday, with 350 tourists ferried back to Kathmandu by lunch time.
But many gave up waiting for the fog to lift days ago and headed out on foot to Jiri, a four-day walk away, to pick up buses back to Kathmandu.
"The weather is clear today and the rescue efforts depends on the weather condition in coming days," said air traffic controller Mahendra Humagai.
"But more tourists are arriving from Everest base camp. So, even if those stranded here are flown to Kathmandu, more are arriving here."
The army had hoped to deploy its rescue helicopter, which carries up to 40 people, but bad weather has prevented it from accessing Lukla, 135 kilometres from Kathmandu.
A few hundred trekkers have been rescued over the past six days by small private helicopters able to carry eight people at a time.
Tourists said private helicopter firms had been charging up to $US6000 ($A5800) to ferry people out of the area, about twice the going rate.
"It was a free-for-all and there's no government, no organisation to control the crowd," said Chris George, 51, from the United States.
The Nepal Tourism Board was not immediately available for comment.
Nepal, a popular destination for mountaineers and trekkers, has eight of the world's 14 tallest peaks over 8000 metres, including the world's highest, Mount Everest, at 8848 metres.
Thousands of foreign tourists visit the Everest region during the peak tourism season late in the year.
About 500 travellers fly in and out of Lukla on a normal day when weather conditions are good.
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smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/stranded-aussie-tells-of-ordeal-at-everest-20111108-1n4h2.html