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Well, I didn't win the race but more on that later.
Got up on Wednesday morning and had a leisurely breakfast while watching a lot of people just setting out to and returning from Base Camp. It was all very exciting. I then set out on my mini tour of Kathmandu, following the Lonely Planet walking tour to Durbar Square. I didn't achieve my objective of avoiding being spat on and got 2 lots on my bare foot from an upstairs window and another lot on my leg from a man on the pavement not looking what he was doing. I was also accosted by a number of 'friends' who wanted to know everything about me and show me their city. After about 20 minutes of being nice and polite, I resorted to pretending I was deaf!
Got back just in time for a Gorkha beer before meeting my group for the first time. Our leader is Bhim who is wonderful and there are 16 of us - evenly split male/female, 2 Brits, 2 Swedes, 2 Northern Irish and 10 Australians. The Irish were the ones that stole your place Mr Annable!! Everyone's really nice so far and a good mix of ages but mostly in their 30s/40s I think. I'm sharing a room with Karen, from Newcastle so we have a lot in common. She works in the cruise ship industry which sounds like fun.
The rest of the afternoon was a bit stressful. We were only allowed to carry 10kg on the plane in the hold. Well, by hold, I mean the back of the plane as were in a 15 seater. 2 of our group had to go separately. 15kg is not a lot when your rucksack alone weighs 3kg and your sleeping bag is almost 2 and you're expected to take several types of fleece, jackets, and clothing for every eventuality. Our hand luggage could only be 5kg and again, I've got a whopping great camera. I spent the best part of an hour running up and down the stairs weighing my bag and taking out essentials, or what I thought were essentials. I ended up going out to buy a genuine Northface holdall for about $6! Managed to get my bag down to 6.5kg so had to leave my supply of Australia-bought biltong and salami sticks in Kathmandu. Boooo! Lots of panicking that I wasn't able to take everything I thought I needed (and still at this point think I might need!).
After the stressful bag situation, Karen and I went out for dinner and it was ladies night so we got a few free cocktails. 4 cocktails later and a lot of screaming and squirming because of the lesser spotted white-headed cockroach running around the floor, we headed back to the hotel for 4 hours sleep.
Trek Day 1
We met everyone on Thursday morning at 5am. Was hilarious as even though the temperature was in the high 20s we were all wearing so many clothes and had stuffed our pockets with electronics etc to keep the weight of our bags down! We headed to the airport to catch our Yeti Airlines flying bus to Lukla. It was pretty cloudy and dusty (and I was, again, on the wrong side of the aircraft) so the views weren't as spectacular as they could be although we seemed to be very close to the tops of the mountains on several occasions. Suddenly, we took a nosedive and everyone started to get a bit worried. The engines got louder and the angle got steeper and the next thing we could see was the Tarmac flying towards us at incredible speed. This is, after all, the most dangerous airport in the world! We landed and made a sudden sharp right into the 'car park'. When we got off the plane, it was scary looking back onto the runway and how short it was. If they misgauge the distance, the plane smashes into a wall and then the mountain. Phew! The adrenalin was certainly pumping! You may have seen the runway on various TV programmes that have been on recently as there are often crashes. The last one was a few weeks ago.
We met the rest of our crew - Jambo, Nima, Shantaman and Tika (a woman). They are wonderful and spread themselves throughout the group to make sure we are all ok. We also have 7 Sherpas who carry our bags. They work hard. Ours are looked after as they are hired by Intrepid but there are some horror stories of many carrying over 60kg and only wearing sandals. Mind you, they're not stories, we've already seen them! Some of ours only look about 10 years old but I'm promised the youngest is 19.
We only walked around 3 hours today to warm up. It was good to start getting into the groove and I'm glad to report that my rucksack is incredibly comfortable and the boots are so far serving me well. I don't think I drank enough water as we are supposed to be averaging at about 5 liters. It was running straight through me! It also tastes horrible as we have to purify it so it tastes like a swimming pool. I'll need to get some flavoured stuff when we reach some shops tomorrow. We passed lots of Sherpas, donkeys and jockpeys, which are 50% cow and 50% yak. We have yet to meet pedigree yak. They all carry everything from gas to water to onions although they obviously didn't carry enough bananas, or dropped them over the edge, as there were none for breakfast. We arrived in Phakding for the night, had lunch and sorted out our bags. There away then a torrential storm so I felt like I was sitting in a Swiss chalet (a very cheap one!) on a day off from skiing. We were all wrapped up in our fleecy pants, longjohns, fleeces and jackets and watched Into Thin Air. Not sure that's the best film to watch when you're about to do a fairly dangerous trek and it was a bit cheesy in terms of its scripts and music. Anyway, after dinner (today is all about food and liquid intake!), we all ended up going to bed at 8pm. Party animals. It was like sleeping inside of an Ikea MDF wardrobe, the room walls were so thin. I went to bed wearing a fair few clothes plus my balaclava.....very sexy! The combination of the reservoir of water I'd drank and the side effects of the diamox (altitude sickness pills), I was up at 10.20 for the loo. I bumped into Katrina who thought it was 4am so as very disappointed to discover she'd only been asleep for 1.5 hours. Was also up another 2 times which is a pain when you're snug as a bug in a rug. All I could think of was how would my Evil Twin Michelle have coped with this as she goes to the loo an extraordinary amount of times on a normal day!
Up this morning for one of our toughest days apparently. It was hard going and we climbed 800m in altitude so starting to feel the effects now. Feeling pretty proud so far. Anyway, enough for now. It's 8.45pm and we have another early start tomorrow when we'll hopefully get our first glimpse of Everest. We're staying in Namche Bazaar for 2 nights for an acclimatization stop as we're already pretty bloody high at 3440m. I'll try and do another update tomorrow covering today's walk and tomorrow's and then that will be it for communication for at least a week (and showers, pooeeee!!!).
Obviously by sending this, you know I was nowhere near the avalanche. Awful, awful news, especially as all the confirmed dead are Sherpas so they didn't really choose to be there and risk their lives. Thanks to the 3 people who contacted me to check I'm ok! It's scary being so close and actually going to a place 300m from where the avalanche happened. Makes it all very real.
Til tomorrow hopefully........
- comments
Michael Crayon Clemons Wow, I just saw this for the first time. Can't wait to read more.
Steph Linda - how wonderful! Thanks for sending your blogs - you are quite the fatastic traveller and I am really enjoying reading about your adventure. You are right - cant really imagine what you are seeing. Stay safe and looking forward to hearing more when you get back down.