Battling On!

Namaste

Day 5 saw us continue trekking from Namche Bazaar to Tengboche, climbing over 500 metres to reach an altitude of 3980 metres. It was another long day involving 8-hours of trekking with a short lunch break in the middle. It’s worth me mentioning at this time that although I am trekking to Everest Base Camp, it’s not as straightforward as starting at the bottom of Mount Everest and climbing until we reach Base Camp. Instead, the Himalayas is the biggest mountain range in the world and Everest is actually rather inaccessible. In order to reach Base Camp, you need to trek along the Himalayas through a number of other mountains first. This is what makes it different to say, trekking up Mount Kilimanjaro (a single mountain peak), which by the way, I have already decided I will be climbing that one day too!

We arrived in Tengboche late in the afternoon with some spectacular views of Mount Everest, Lhotse and Amadablam peaks. Tengboche contains the oldest Buddhist monastery in Nepal and we were given the opportunity to visit it. It was a true marvel to see and certainly the most beautiful building I’ve experienced in Nepal. I learnt that while the country is mostly Hindu (approximately 65%), in the mountains, the majority of people are Buddhist. The most memorable thing about staying in Tengboche is that the tea lodge we slept in is owned by the family of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who first reached the summit of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary. It’s still argued today whether Norgay reached it before Hillary but that’s a whole different story. The lodge had an old scrap book with various photos of Tenzing and letters he had received from the Queen of England amongst others. The book was fascinating to look through and certainly something that most museums would pay a good price to get their hands on. However, I have no doubt the family of Tenzing Norgay will not part with this scrap book easily.

Day 6 was another early rise to start our trip to Dingboche, where we would reach an altitude of 4340 metres. It was another 8-hour trekking day with some incredible views of Mount Amadablam and Pumori. By now, the low oxygen levels in the air were becoming more noticeable. This was most apparent by us passing the final trees that we would see on our trek. From now on we would only be seeing rocks and ice. Many of the members of the group were now starting to suffer from the high altitude and low oxygen content. People started picking up mild headaches and finding it difficult to catch their breath even during the most unchallenging of tasks such as walking from one side of the room to the other. However we kept our spirits high by playing games and laughing in the evenings around a Yak poo fire.

Day 7 was another acclimatisation day. We followed the protocol of our previous acclimatisation day by once again training high and sleeping low, just as endurance runners do. We found a steep hill to climb up in the morning, reaching a height of 4750 metres above sea level before returning to Dingboche. The rest of that day was spent relaxing and recovering.

Day 8 saw us trekking 8-hours to Lobuche, reaching an altitude of 4980 metres above sea level. I was now at a greater height than when I skydived in New Zealand! However it’s hard to appreciate this when you’re in the Himalayas since while you continue to climb higher and higher the bottom of the valleys also increase in altitude so you never at anytime look down and think ‘Wow, I’m 5000 metres above the sea!’ This was by far the toughest day yet. Everyone in the group was ill by now with either a cold, headache, stomach ache or a combination of the three. I had even managed to pick up a slight headache from the high altitude and of course, I didn’t have any altitude medication so I just had to tough it out. That day, we passed through a memorial of climbers who had died while expediting to the summit of Everest. Amongst these I found a Jewish guy from Texas as well as the famous Babu Chiri Sherpa. Babu is an everest legend who holds the record for the fastest summit from Base Camp, as well as the longest time spent at the summit without any additional oxygen (21 hours!), which is pretty mental considering oxygen content is at 30% at Everest summit. He died on his 11^th Everest expedition, falling through a 200 metre deep crevasse.

Just as we left the memorial we saw the clouds begin to descend upon us. It was incredible to be so high up that we were right in the middle of the clouds. Unfortunately, it did make the rest of the trek rather cold to bare. We arrived in Lobuche later on to have dinner in our tea lodge, which was rather basic indeed. The higher up you get, the more basic the tea houses become, which is even worse when it’s also getting colder and more oxygen deprived as well. On top of this, the food becomes more and more expensive since it has to be transported further.

Anyway, I’ll look forward to telling you more soon!

Much Love

Sam