ANN ARBOR - Moments after marrying Pem Dorjee Sherpa, Moni Mulepati phoned her parents to say she was on top of the world. She wasn't kidding: The call was placed from the summit of Mount Everest.
Mulepati, 23, and Dorjee Sherpa, 24, were wed May 30 atop the 29,029-foot-high mountain in their homeland of Nepal. They visited Ann Arbor this week to promote tourism in the tiny country tucked between India and China in south-central Asia.
Dorjee Sherpa said he believes he and his wife were the first to marry atop Mount Everest.
"People come from all over the world to climb the mountain and I knew of all kinds of records," he told the Detroit Free Press for a Tuesday story. "The first cancer climber, the first person to do it without a leg, the first blind man, the first person to do it without oxygen. I found out no one had been married on the mountain, so I figured that was the only record left. Why not? We're both mountaineers."
Indeed, before they loved each other, they loved mountain climbing.
Dorjee Sherpa, envious of the world travelers who came to Nepal to scale Mount Everest, signed up for an advanced climbing course in December 2003. He is a Sherpa, the ethnic group that lives mainly in the mountains and is known for its climbing skills.
Mulepati took a 10-day women's-only mountain climbing course in April 2003, then enrolled in a 45-day advanced class that December. She was one of four women in the class; Dorjee Sherpa was one of the 32 men. A relationship developed.
On June 18, they held a traditional Newari wedding.
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