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Nepal\u2019s Everest region, home to the world\u2019s highest peak and one of the country\u2019s busiest trekking routes, is not only remote, it is also expensive; it demands time, energy and investment from the visitor.<\/h1>\nNepal\u2019s Everest region, home to the world\u2019s highest peak and one of the country\u2019s busiest trekking routes, is not only remote, it is also expensive; it demands time, energy and investment from the visitor.<\/h1>\nBut now the sights of the Himalayan region are now available on a virtual tour, thanks to Google Street View. Visitors to the website are treated to views of snow-capped mountains, dramatic waterfalls, and soaring suspension bridges.<\/p>\n
The tech giant Google partnered with Story Cycle, a Kathmandu-based start-up, and Apa Sherpa, an elite climber who holds the record of climbing Everest 21 times, to capture thousands of images of the region populated by the Sherpa community who excel at mountaineering.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur region is famous for being home to Everest, but it\u2019s also home of the Sherpa community and has been for centuries. The region has much more to offer than just the mountain,\u201d Apa Sherpa wrote in a blog post published by Google.<\/p>\n
\u201cA team from Google had a 15-lens \u2018Trekker\u2019 that mapped the trekking route while our colleagues with two DSLR cameras used a fish eye lens to capture panoramic images and stitched it together for the street view,\u201d Saurav Dhakal, the founder of Story Cycle told The Anadolu Agency.<\/p>\n
A team of 13 experts, including three from Google and a Nepali artist, trekked through the narrow mountain trails and spent 11 days in late March and early April last year.<\/p>\n
While the team with the “Trekker” — a special camera used for capturing Street View images — embarked on the trekking route to the Everest base camp, Apa Sherpa led the second group, which shot local lodges, schools and the climber\u2019s home and monastery in Thame.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal is to promote map-based storytelling. We spoke to 60 locals and documented a total of 1,000 map points,\u201d said Dhakal. They were accompanied by R.K Thapa, an artist who live-painted the scenes that were later used in the video.<\/p>\n
The Google Street View of Everest shows a spectacular multimedia video of the landing of an aircraft at Tenzing-Hillary Airport in Lukla, the gateway to Everest. The Everest Summiteers\u2019 Lodge, run by a relative of Apa Sherpa, has also been featured in the Google Maps\u2019 digital initiative.<\/p>\n
As the impressive mountains loom behind, a jocular Apa Sherpa talks about the hardship of life in the Khumbu Valley. \u201cWe can only grow potato and radish here,\u201d he tells viewers. \u201cEducation is important so that young men don\u2019t have to take risks (of climbing mountains),\u201d the 55-year-old says.<\/p>\n
Apa Sherpa, who now lives in the United States with his wife and children, has set up Apa Sherpa Foundation to support school education for local children in his home village of Thame, in the Everest region.<\/p>\n
Sherpa has donated laptops and furniture for a local school and paid the salaries for teachers of Sherpa language, according to Story Cycle\u2019s Dhakal.<\/p>\n
The spring climbing season, when hundreds of climbers attempt to scale the 8,848 metre mountain, runs between April and May (Anadolu Agency).<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nepal\u2019s Everest region, home to the world\u2019s highest peak and one of the country\u2019s busiest trekking routes, is not only remote, it is also expensive; it demands time, energy and investment from the visitor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,80,167,117,14],"tags":[2928,4384,26417,3005],"class_list":["post-56837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-breaking-news","category-technology","category-travel","category-world","tag-everest","tag-google","tag-kathmandu","tag-nepal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}