DINGBOCHE TO CHHUNKHUNG and CHHUNKHUNG RI 31/6/10: We were up at 5:00am to witness the first clear view of Aba Dablam and its early morning sunlit peak. I raced to get ready, grabbing my coat, gloves, beanie, balaclava and camera. By the time I was ready, 5 minutes later, it was shrouded in mist, Doh! It pissed me off, but I needn’t worry too much about unclear skies. Breakfast, what will I have this time, oh I know packet noodles! We finished breakfast quickly and started to walk up to Chhunkung for our acclimatization day. We left our packs in the room and walked only with a day pack. Chhungkung was roughly 4730 high and took 2.5hours to walk up the shallow incline valley. It was great to walk without our big packs, it made a ... read more

NAMCHE TO PANGBOCHE 29/5/10: A great night sleep turned into a disastrous morning when the 19 Indians we met the night before decided to get up at 4:30am in the morning and proceeded to, all, go through their morning cleansing ritual. I have written about this in past blogs, especially through India but never thought I would have to live through it again in Nepal. In short it sounded like somebody was strangling a yak 19 times right outside our bedroom door. I still can’t understand why they insists on letting the whole of Namche valley know they are shoving there toothbrush halfway down to their stomach. A quick breakfast, again wholesome noodles with eggs we brought back in Kathmandu. Slowly we whittle away at my overweight pack. We started walking around 6:00am. The visibility was ... read more

START OF EVEREST TREK 27/6/10: Up at 5:00am to catch a taxi to the airport. All unnecessary baggage was left at Pilgrims Guesthouse. We went through airport security and somehow Jacinta managed to get a Swiss army knife through; oops. It was time to weight the bags, Jacinta’s came up to 15kg and mine came up to a massive 23kg due to all the food. It turned out we had 14.5kg of food for our trek which consisted of more than 60 packets of noodles, 2 packets chocolate éclairs, 2 packs of cookies, packs of dried fruit, 2 boxes muesli bars, 1kg of carrots and 30 hard boiled eggs that I boiled with a hot wand water element, costing around 2400NRS. The weight added up to a surprising amount and I was way off when I ... read more

19/5/10: Today was catching up on e-mails and letting our parents know we made it back down the hill in one piece. I was shocked to the Aussie share market crashed losing most of our travelling money to the share market and then the dollar went 10c lower than when we first started the trek 8 days ago. Feeling pissed off about this the day only got worse, our Steripen stop working so we couldn't sterilize water, that's $113 dollar we won’t see again; it was only five months old, then our hard drive crashed losing two months of photos. We should have stayed on the mountain!! Depressed about everything we decided not to hire a motorbike or go paragliding; instead we booked a bus ticket to Kathmandu for the following morning. We were lucky when ... read more

ABC part 1 11/5/10: The bus left at 7:00am so we were up early to sort ourselves out. The tickets only cost us 500Nrs/person so it was worth taking the bus. Because the trekking season was coming to an end our bus was more than half empty, this was great for us, we were used to being shoved in like sardines. It took 6 hours to complete the 200km or so journey, 45mins of that was spent just trying to get out of Kathmandu. The winding roads took us through some amazing scenery, most of the time we followed the river that snaked its way through the valley. The river would be awesome to raft down and you could tell it had a lot of power. We stopped twice at restaurants along the road too grossly ... read more