Advertisement
Published: June 12th 2010
View back to Sinuwa
Clear skies early todayI am writing this from Annapurna Base Camp (ABC) the very place Chris Bonnington's succesful 1970 expedition to the South Face of Annapurna was sited. The rain is beating down outside although we can now at least see out of the window, the 'whiteout' seems to have passed.
The relatively easy climb from Deurali via Machapuchare (MBC) base camps took me about 5 hours. The views early this morning up to MBC were fabulous. Machapuchare stands at 6993m or just a fraction under 23,000ft and is regarded by the Nepali's to be a holy mountain. As a result no permits have been issued to allow her to be climbed since 1957 when a Jimmy Roberts expedition turned back within 50m of the summit.
2 hours after leaving MBC I arrived at ABC where visibility was diminishing rapidly After a revitalising noodle soup we both took a short walk beyond the group of 4 lodges here to a cluster of memorials to climbers who have lost their lives in the surrounding mountains. With swirling mist and cloud, light rain and distant thunder it was quite an eary atmosphere. Prayer flags are strewn all over the area connecting the chortens (Buddhist
MBC
Machapuchare Base Camp shrines). A pretty amazing place. ABC is the last stop on the line (unless we go climb a mountain) and tommorow we make a U-turn all the way back to Chomrong (the village before Sinuwa) and in another couple of days we will be in Pokhara where we plan to chill for 3 or 4 days, enjoy some nice food, hot showers and generally recharge the batteries after over 3 weeks in the mountains
Advertisement
Tot: 0.118s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0639s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
