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Finally got some sleep last night! Went to bed around 8:30pm (earliest time i sleep since i was a baby!) and woke up around 6:45am. Feeling much than yesterday as i had virtually no sleep the night before cos of time difference. Resisted drinking any alcohol last night at dinner as we wanted to keep as much oxygen in our bodies as we could. But dinner was pretty good and the atmosphere was great cos we had about 20 drunk British trekkers in the dining room.
We also met a canadian trekker at dinner who told us that on the flight from Lukla back to Kathmandu, due to the short runway, the plane would have to drop off the cliff by 1,000ft before being able to take off. We'll see in 10 days time but frankly i think he was just pissed! :P i also caught a big book about the history of people's attempts to sumit Everest at dinner - very fascinating and inspirational. I also learnt from our guide Lakpa about some success stories: a sherpa summitted 10x without any oxygen tanks; another boy summited at the age of 15 and 8 months; and also one guy who is right now on Everest summitting for the 21st time (world record). We will visit his home village Thame (pronounced "tam mei") tmr.
Anyway, after a short (4 hrs) but quite steep trek up a nearby mountain, we reached the destination which is a town called Namche (3,850m; we came from Monju of 2,850m). We'll stay here for two days to acclimatise. Surpringly i feel pretty good about the altitude. In fact, i feel very normal. We were advised that people normally feel something from around 3,500m. Maybe that good sleep last night helped! Hopefully, i wont feel any sickness throughout the rest of the trip...
Acclimatising includes trekking up a few hundred metres and then come back down to sleep so your body adjusts ("go high and sleep low"). So we will do that tomorrow. If the weather is good we'll go to a high point and watch the Everest and surrounding high mountains at sun rise tmr morning.
During lunch (chicken sizzler, beautiful), we had a long and interesting conversation with Lakpa about Nepal. I saw Kathmandu and it reminded me of my home town Guangzhou about 20 years ago. Obviously, now GZ is completely different, with a good metro system and all, and i dont expect Kathmandu to have the transformation of the same scale. But from the trekking over the past two days, i saw how hard these warm-hearted people here work to make a living but are still desperately poor. Despite the one-party state nature of the government in China, i really feel that the Chinese are luckier than the Nepalese, at least because most Chinese have been able to experience the biggest social transformation in human history whilst in some countries, it doesnt matter how hard you work, you just dont get the same opportunity. I felt the same when i went to sharm-al shiek in Egypt last February. Lakpa told me that the Chinese are building highway roads better connecting Kathmandu to China in order to improve trade so hopefully it will help Nepal in some way. More roads would more likely increase foreign investments thus more factories to employ the poor. Fingers crossed.
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bhavni sounds very interesting and enjoy reading the blog... good luck ahead... bhavnixxx