The authorities in China have closed down the Mount Everest base camp for visitors those who do not have climbing permits. Owing to the serious issue of increasing human waste. The ban implies that tourists are only permitted to visit a monastery a little below the 17,060 feet i.e base camp level. Normally, Mount Everest receives a maximum number of visitors from the south of Nepal, but in recent times, more and more people from China are also visiting the site. The base camp in China, which lies in Tibet, is more convenient due to its accessibility by car. In comparison, the Nepalese camp can be accessed by hiking all the way up for approximately two weeks.
Mount Everest, the highest mountain peak in the world, has been grappling with the rising level of discarded waste due to the increasing number of visitors in the last many years. As per the Chinese Mountaineering Association, 40,000 people visited the base camp in 2015 and 45,000 people visited the Nepal base camp in 2016-17 according to the data revealed by Nepal’s Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation. Tourists can still visit the Rongbuk monastery, but going beyond the monastery has been banned for now for ordinary tourists.
Mountaineers having a permit to climb Mount Everest peak will be permitted to use the higher camp. In January 2019, the Chinese authorities declared that they would restrict the number of climbing permits every year to 300. In 2019, the cleaning drive will also include removal of the dead bodies of mountaineers who lost their lives in the “death zone” above 8,000-meter altitude. The dead bodies remain untouched not just for years but even decades.
