Would anyone like to redress the balance and comment on my photo?
Yes.
I'm not particularly taken with the photo, but I also know how hard it was to overcome a flow of "wow" effects in Nepal and Tibet. There's just too much, and managing to find a subject and frame it, too, is really well done, IMO.
But that doesn't really explain anything.
I think I see five things that don't work for me;
1) The banners, which become an annoyance in the BW conversion.
2) The sky, which is dull in both the colour and BW versions.
3) There is too much detail in the mountains for a small web version, at the very least.
4) The complexity is too great; the foreground simplicity works well, but the background lessens the effect.
5) I don't think there's enough contrast for the BW conversion.
On the positive side, I like the following:
1) The geometry of the silhouette.
2) The geometry of the mountain edges, both repeating and breaking the pattern from the ridge.
So what would I try to do?
I've cropped to a square format, and I've applied a BW gradient map and a curves adjustment. (The effect is perhaps a bit exaggerated, the monitor I'm sitting at currently may be a bit too bright, but I don't have anything to verify that with at the moment.)
The idea is to simplify the image even more, and focus on the contrasts of geometry, light and tonality:
[attachment=2135:attachment]
[attachment=2136:attachment]
I quite like this, except that I'm not satisfied with the structure in the mountains, and I'd also wish that there was some interesting shadow structure to bring forward. Perhaps there is with the raw file. I'd lose the pole, but by now it's almost invisible.