Orsho to Namche - The Hike for Hot Showers

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The day was greeted with much excitement. Today is the day we'd get our hot showers. Another day of pushing downhill at break(leg) pace. We would have covered another huge distance today and probably just as much vertical distance as yesterday, if not slightly more sense there was a lot of rise and fall.

Once again I tried to keep pace with the breakaways and ended up living to regret it. My chin splints and knees were wrecked by the time we made it to Namche in the afternoon. Keeping with the secondary train would have been the better idea.

Today we started off at Orsho and then hugged the river which drove us straight past Pangboche until we made it to Tengboche (4,000m) 3 hours later. Tengboche is where the "huge" buddhist monastery of this area is. Truth be told, it is small, but considering the altitude, it is a pretty solid effort. Unfortunately despite our huge walking efforts, the monastery was closed. We had some fun regardless with some Korean tourists who wanted photos with Johanna, along with some photo fun with a lion with some 'shikari' attributes.

After this we had a steep hour long descent to the river for our place of lunch. If I realized we were going to be travelling so far and for four hours I'd have had a bigger breakfast! I nearly collapsed and wrecked my legs multiple times as I was completely starved for energy by then. By the time we got to our lunch place by the river side, I was so hungry that I ate not only my meal, but when Mike said he couldn't finish his dish, I gladly devoured it for him.

After lunch we had an hour climb up plus another hour of straight walking. This wasn't as hard as I was expecting. We cleared this relatively quickly, plus we used this as an opportunity to chat up some more aussie travellers we ran into. Once the climbing was over, it was just a long walk which gave us an opportunity to have some long quirky chats all the way to Namche.

Once at Namche there was a great rush to use the hot showers, but as fate would have it, the water had run out. There wasn't enough water to flush the toilet, much less get a shower. Black was our despair at this point . In order to chill out we went down to try out the second bakery at Namche, where we came across the best hot chocolate ever. Our spirits were further lightened when after dinner, it seemed whatever system they use for water was fixed and most of us managed to get a nice how shower in.

Afterward we went to some Namche snooker bar to get in a few games before bed. By the time we came back, the hot water had been all used up however. Mark had put off taking a shower until after the snooker and he was pissed off. Of all the things he wanted to do, having a shower was definitely at the top of that list. Kala Patthar couldn't get him down, but man that hot shower. To be fair, that would have been a pretty big blow for any of us.

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