Friday : sunny - over cast - raining

I received an early birthday present today, views of the highest mountain in the world for my bed!

I was awoken by the sounds of horns being played by monks. I was about to fall back asleep because it was only 5am. At 5:30 our tour guide came and knocked on ever ones door. Saying to look out their window, you can see Mt Everest!!

The clouds were covering the peak at first, but within 30min it was very clear. The mountains surrounding Tengboche all came out around 6am. I must of taken about 200 photos, it was a photo frenzy from everyone.

We were very lucky because the valley was building up it's fog, and by 7:30. All the mountains were covered again.After a potato charged breaky we started the walk.

Good walk today it's was a lot quicker paced, with less stops. So the group was slightly broken up and we weren't running into each other. We passed a few other tour groups too today, as well as going through a few nice quiet towns. Plenty of yaks too, lots of them were carrying loads, others were grazing all over the steep hills.

Good scenery today, the fog lifted exposing some big mountains no everest though. We did see Ama Dablam ( meaning beautiful mountain) and at a height of 6812 yes it certainly is.

We passed through forests, mangrove looking areas, rocky flats. After lunch it started to rain, the last couple hours of our walk was very wet. We rose up above the tree line today. We arrived at a town called Dingboche which is 4380m

This lodge is a bit of a rort. We were expecting the prices to rise the higher we climbed. But This lodge has a note on the bottom of the menu saying, if you eat elsewhere you will be charged 1500 rupees ($20). Ha Yeah right. The beds are timber boards too, and our only light in the room doesn't work. They still what to charge us $5 per hour to charge our batteries. But this place has no power itself, until 10am tomorrow, because it runs on solar power. It was a bit of a shock because the lodge looks pretty nice. The real shock is they want $6 a beer. Question?? I do except to pay more for items up here, because they get carried for days on the backs of porters, but there is no way in hell that any local can afford six bloody dollars for a tinny!! Hell they are charging $7 for a local dish! Locals would never pay $7 for curried rice with a side of veg. They are taking advantage of the tourist big time. Then wanting to charge us money if we eat somewhere wake that may or may not be cheaper is a joke. Its like we are in Vietnam again but a lot worse. Even then we never got taken advantage of at restaurants, even the real remote ones.

Anyways we have an acclimatization day tomorrow for my bday, which is nice. We have a big walk tomorrow were we plan to get over 5000m. Hopefully it stops raining for that tomorrow.

The dinner was fine, they really shouldn't have that note on the menu. We played cards until it was time for bed. Managed to get our wakeup call pushed back an hour for my bday too.