Everest Base Camp

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The ride to Everest base camp started at 8am in the morning. This was it, we were all nervous, tanked up on ams pills, but excited, really excited.

Before long, the scenery had turned from green lush mountains to snow ridden triangles in the distance. We stopped to take few loo breaks and it was really weird to feel the crunch of snow under my boots when the day before I was getting sunburn. Every time we stopped, the Tibetan women selling goods started snowball fights with us. We stopped for lunch at some little hamlet, and after a meal of vegetable fried rice and a (luxury) bar of chocolate we, turned off the highway to Rongbo. The road was a crazy rollacoaster and sooo bumpy. For four hours we endured the up and down and left and right of the rocky, pot-hole road to Rongbo. We arrived around 4pm in the afternoon. We were staying in a guesthouse next to Rongbo monastery, which meant that we were sleeping at 5,000 metres tonight... eeek!

It was an 8 kilometre hike from Rongbo to base camp. Everything is so much harder at 5,000 metres, before you know it, you are tired and out of breath. That however, did not stop me from getting there! We trekked over road, and rock and beside a lake and eventually reached base camp, only disappointment was that that massive 9,000m Everest peak was hiding behind a heap of clouds, so unfortunately, I didn't get to see the peaks but I was there! On the way back, it rained, and real ams sunk in. I had no warm or dry clothes left, and I felt so spaced out, I could barely talk. In the monastery, the rooms were unheated, and basically just had beds in them. There was one main room, where there was a massive stove in the middle to keep the room warm, along with a thousand Chinese people. There wasn't really any food, I had a pot noodle with some hot water. I don't know how I made it through the night. The woman controlling the stove had her child strapped to her back Tibetan style and kept piling more Yak poop into the stove to boil water. The whole room was a wash with cold and chatter and yak poop smoke. If I didn't feel so ill, I'm sure I would have enjoyed the atmosphere.

The loo was a hole in the freezing cold and I prayed before I went to bed that I wouldn't need the loo during the night. I woke up several times that night, praying that it would be morning so that we could go to a lower altitude, but mercifully I did sleep some. In the morning, it was pitch black and there was no electricity so we had to pack in the dark, wearing our head torches. Everest Base Camp. Done.

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Comments

[Nishma]

Awwww
Awwww sooo cute!