At 17,560 feet above sea level, where the air thins and silence settles over jagged Himalayan ridges, 28-year-old Divya Singh stood beside her bicycle, the Indian tricolour held firmly in her hands. For a moment, she let it all sink in — the exhaustion, the fear, the disbelief.

For Divya, a schoolteacher from Gorakhpur, this wasn’t just another trek to Everest Base Camp. It was history in motion. In March 2026, she became the first Indian woman — and only the second woman in the world — to reach Everest Base Camp on a bicycle.

“I was completely overwhelmed,” she says while recounting her experience to The Better India. “I stayed there for about an hour, just taking it in. I made videos for my family because I wanted them to feel that moment with me.”

But this journey didn’t begin in 2026. It began years earlier, in a classroom.

“I first read about the world’s highest mountain and Indian mountaineer Bachendri Pal when I was in Class 7,” Divya recalls. “That’s when the dream started. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew I wanted to reach there one day.”

And she did. Not once, but three times.

Her first two visits to base camp in 2023 and 2024 were on foot, like most trekkers. But during her 2024 trip, she stumbled upon a detail that would change everything: no woman had cycled to Everest Base Camp.

Carrying a 9-kg bicycle across........

© The Better India