Ok I will start at the beginning and see how far I get this morning as I am a bit busy and need to miss the early morning traffic.
The beginning is The Flight. So you get on this little mini plane that seats around 8-10 people and off you whizz over the hills that get bigger and bigger until they turn into mountains and all the time you seem to just be skimming the tops of them. And then you get to The Runway. So this is a 500m strip of concrete built into the slant of the hill with a cliff drop at one end (to aid take-off) and a stone wall at the other (to aid landing). OMG. Well I was pretty much screaming throughout the entire flight in both directions and the Air Hostess even came to sit next to me and hold my hand bless her.
Ok so after we had landed to be honest that was about enough adventure for one day for me - luckily it was just a short walk to Padking where we were staying the ngiht. It took us 3 days to walk to Thame which was going to be our home for 8 days and do our rock climbing. Thame is 3 days walk from Tibet and the Tibetan influence is really prominent in everything from the food to the decor. Thame often felt like the ends of the earth with its barren landscape and hostile climate. It should not have been as cold and cloudy as it was but there was still a late monsoon in the Bay of Bengal that was also affecting the weather in the mountains. So everyday we would wake up and at 8and trek over to The Rock, set up our gear and get climbing. I must admit that the half an hour trek over to The Rock was often a time filled with dread for me as I am not used to hanging off a cliff face attached by only a rope to another rope and trusting that my climbing partner (Jon) has done everything perfectly otherwise it is of course certain death.
We learnt various rescue techniques (all of which I must say are pretty clever as they only use a few bits of rope and they can pretty much rescue any climber from any disaster), multi-pitch climbing, lead climbing, various rope techniques etc. On the final day we climbed the entire rock face (240m) which was 4 pitches and then rapelled down. Jon and I did it entirely on our own so we were quite proud of our achievement. It was an amazing experience but as a novice I think for me I would have liked to just mess around on something easy for a few weeks rather than being thrown in at the deep end (as usual). Of course we had some little friends - some very cute tibetan kids who followed us to The Rock every day and would just stand and watch us for hours - every so often clambering up The Rock themselves with no harnesses or ropes to keep them safe - then we would all start screaming for them to get down and their huge red cheeks (from all the red blood cells)would retreat back to the grass!
We had one rest day in Thame where it was decided that a good rest would be to climb a little 5000m rocky peak just next to the village to help acclimatise (Thame is 3800m). So thats what we did which took about 7 hours so I was even more exhausted than when we started.
After 8 days we headed back through Namche Bazaar to Everest Base Camp where we were going to learn Ice Climbing for 6 days. It took us 5 days to trek there as we would be going up almost another 2000m and we needed to be careful - by this point we had seen numerous guides and clients being taken off the mountain due to AMS. As we went up the temperature went down.. down down down. By the time we reached EBC the temp would be around -10 in the evenings without wind chill factor. Our first night at EBC was pretty sleepless. We both had bad headaches, it was the coldest environment I have ever been in and basically we were both exhausted. Jon was suffering from the altitude more than we had thought or he was letting on. The next day he confessed that he had spent the entire night plottting to pack up his bags and run off down the mountain on his own.. which just shows you how your mind gets affected by AMS. After the second night we had all settled down and were sleeping much better. Although it is hard - basically at 5pm the sun would go behind the mountains and the temperature would immediately drop to below zero. At this point you would need to go into your tent because it was so cold and the sun was not to return until 8am - so you can see this is rather a long time to spend in a tent every day. We would devise many ways to stay awake and talk past 7pm so that we could actually sleep through until the morning. We even meticulously devised a pub crawl through London when we get back with travel routes, budgets, timelines etc!!!
All through the nights the winds would rage and blow all the icicles off the tent walls into our sleeping bags where they would promptly melt and soak us.. but it was all good fun!! We would wake up to Italian coffee and then head out onto the Glacier to Ice Climb - which was actually great fun whacking the Ice with your axes and crampons.. the only problem was that at 5400m everything is rather a lot more tiring than it is at sea level!! After 5 hrs of it we were thoroughly exhausted and would go over to sit with the guides of the Thai expedition on Everest (a reality TV show ha ha) and moan about how useless everyone was apart from us ;)
Ok so I have to dash now I will write up our summit attempt in a few days when I get back to an internet!
Only just over 4 weeks till we come home I cant believe how fast time is flying by - but hopefully see some of you when we get back (for the Pub Crawl)!!
Caroline xx
Our little mate all dressed up in our clothes - he actually followed us around for 3 days before he dared to speak to us! He would just wait outside the hotel all morning till we came out and then just follow 10 paces behind stopping whenever we did and standing 8in the freezing winds in his dads ripped trousers patiently waiting!
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