jamesd

Today was an acclimatization day thankfully. An opportunity to rest after the fairly hectic previous two days. We spent the morning walking up the hillside next to Dingboche to get used to the altitude. That hillside is over an 45 degree walk up over 400m in altitude which took us nearly two hours to climb. At the top it was wonderful however. Gorgeous views of the surrounds made the climb worthwhile. We could see Island peak all the way from here, which is the mountain that the American climber wanted to do. We took lots of photos from the top, including on an outcropping which everyone else jumped onto and which I crawled up on to. As usual the walk down afterwards was a piece of cake, if you ignore the murder you did to your ... read more

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 ... read more