Still Kathmandu

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Early rise. Jump into the prepared trekking clothes and boots, pack up the last bits of kit and down for a spot of breakfast. Shaleish appears to inform us it's raining in the hills so no flights are going out to Lukla yet today - more news at 10am. Slow down the breakfast rate and sit around exchanging stories before Shaleish appears to disappoint us again - still raining - more news at 11:30.

Mentally begin to prepare for not making it to the hills today. Flights usually only go in the morning as the Lukla airfield tends to fog over in the afternoons so we're fast running out of time for today. The lobby's sofas are full of disappointed faces - there are two other groups trying to start out today. To put our disappointment into context, they have a much bigger problem than we do. Our eighteen day trek has three "doubled up" days (days where we're due to overnight in the same location) so we can miss three days and still complete our planned route. The other two treks have no spare days - missing today means the Mera Peak trek won't make the summit and the base camp trek may not make base camp.

I don't mind missing the first doubled-up day in Namche (though it is supposed to be an acclimatisation day) but I really don't want to miss the next one at Chukkung - that's summit day on the highest point on this trek (Chukkung Ri). Hopefully we'll fly tomorrow.

So, still in Kathmandu. The others are off temple-sightseeing, which we did a fair amount of yesterday so I passed on today. I got next to no sleep last night so an hour's snooze has helped me feel a bit more human. Now I type from a corridor in a wee market in bustling, wet Thamel having dispatched a spot of lunch in a cafe round the corner.

Shaleish took us out to the famous 40,000and1/2ft bar last night. There's a pair of boards up behind the bar that bear the signature of every person who has summitted Everest from the Nepal side - there's a surprisingly large number of them. The walls are covered with cardboard feet signed by the members of every expedition. I read and read and read and felt like crying when I found one I recognized. I've met people in New Zealand who were close friends of Rob Hall - who died in 1996 along with so many others. Shaleish met Rob on the mountain a few times and, like everyone who met him, speaks highly of him. One thing is different when Shaleish talks about Rob though - there's an understanding in his AMS-dulled eyes (he suffered a bad attack of Acute Mountain Sickness a few years ago which almost cost him his sight so his mother said he's no longer allowed on the big summit expeditions, and you don't go against your mother's wishes 😉. Everyone else I've met and talked to about Rob simply fails to comprehend how such an experienced mountaineer got it so wrong. Shaleish says he understands it; "Rob had promised Doug's wife. Rob wasn't going to leave Doug that year, he wasn't going to turn back."

Shaleish has promised to take me to Rob's memorial near base camp when we get there. It makes me strangely emotional just thinking about it - and I'm not sure why. I never even met the man. Yet I feel like I knew him and lost him. I think perhaps, for me, Rob represented all that was good about mountaineering and now he symbolises all that is sad about mountaineering.

Strangely enough, Shaleish spent last November visiting a friend in Cyprus. "Cyprus is a lot like Nepal" Shaleish said this morning. I smiled and nodded. "Yes, but the mountains here are real mountains." Shaleish nodded and smiled. When Shaleish arrived in Cyprus, his friend took him to Limassol to spend a few days on the beach. Shaleish loved it but had a really bad headache for three days before his friend forced him to go to the doctor. "You have low altitude sickness" the doctor said. He sent him to the top of Troodos (the highest mountain in Cyprus) for a couple of days. The headache swiftly passed.

Kathmandu must be a truly dismal place to be for the vast majority of people here. Only fifty yards up the road from the plush hotel we're staying in children sleep on the dusty pavement in filthy blankets surrounded by mangy dogs and the discarded polythene bags from their day's glue-sniffing. This is not a Nepalese disease - we created it. By coming here, bringing money and giving it to begging street children we created this "opportunity" for them and now children leave their homes "by choice" to live on the streets where they can beg and buy tubes of model airplane glue with which to burn out their young brain cells. Like so many of these societal problems, there's no easy answer to this one. This society is now overwhelmingly dependent on travellers - there's little other industry left and the farmers are leaving the countryside in droves to head for the big city.

Pray for clear skies tomorrow - I can't wait to be away in the hills, away from all this concentrated human waste.

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