Everest Base Camp and beyond

From Shigatse we moved onto Sakya, a small village with yet another very important, very old monastery.

Like the Roman ruins of past trips, the monastries are all starting to look the same and losing their appeal,

They are always dark, incense-smoke laden and very crowded places.

At 4,200 meters, Sakya was another good test for the lungs clambering around the hills and rewarded me with another blinding headache, once again relieved with lots of water and lots of Panadol.

Our guide, Gopal, is constantly reminding us to “Drink, drink, drink”. Naturally he would prefer it was water we were swallowing, but even he has been known to join the group in substituting a Tequila slammer occasionally in the evenings.

We started out early next morning on the long and winding road to Everest Base camp – a 10 hour drive over several more high passes and a very rough and tortuous 4WD dirt road for much of the way.

Tortuous because like good troopers, after drinking our three litres of water, our full bladders were bouncing along on the rough terrain with rarely a tree or rocky outcrop in sight.

We arrived at the tent camp at 6pm at night and set off on the 4km walk to the base camp straight away.

It sounds a bit late to be starting out but just another stupid thing the Chinese have forced on the Tibetans is Beijing time, giving them daylight hours between 8am and 8pm.

We huffed and puffed our way to the base camp in time to see the sun set on the star attraction – Everest.

Despite being rugged up in all the warm gear we could still walk in, it was freezing and my finger nearly froze pushing send on the text message to those of you fortunate to get one before pulling my gloves back on.

We have been really fortunate with the weather and have had clear blue skies on all the days that mattered providing fantastic snow-capped mountain vistas.

After making the return trip to our yak-wool tent for the night, we were served a simple dinner of noodles and vegetables by our Tibetan tent hoteliers.

There are a number of tents roughly grouped together on the stony ground in a cold valley with a couple of long drop toilets. (Tibetan toilets is another story to come)

The tents are heated by dung-burning stoves and a couple of very thick quilts per person. Hoteliers are not permitted to accommodate more than seven tourists per tent and the authorities even came in during the night to do a head count.

We awoke to a very chilly morning at -5Celsius , a breakfast of pancakes and omelettes and another day of beautiful clear skies.

After stopping off at the Rhongphu Monastery we were back on the long winding road. Rhongphu is the monastery you generally see in the iconic pictures of Everest, but it was just another monastery in that freezing temperature with most us barely getting off the bus to inspect it.

Unfortunately I accidentally dropped my gloves in the long drop that morning so struggled to press the shutter on the camera and had to spend the first few hours sitting on my fingers to keep them warm.