Namche Bazaar was our first taste of civilisation as we returned down the valley towards Lukla, and we finally had flushing toilets for the first time in over two weeks. There was still no hot water, but even a tap with running cold water was an improvement on recent nights. Waking up, it was great to feel warm enough that one didn’t have to put on every possible item of clothing in order to survive the next few minutes. Unlike Dingboche there was no ice on the inside of the windows, and none of the clothes left outside the sleeping bag had frozen solid.
I seem to be suffering from a weird form of jet-lag, caused by regularly getting up in the early hours for summit attempts and going to bed when it gets dark (around 8pm). Last night I had about 7 hours of great sleep, but woke up around 02:30 and haven’t really slept since then.
Yesterday evening was pretty quiet, even by our team’s standards. As soon as we’d got our drinking water/hot water bottles after dinner we all hit the sack.
Today began pretty slowly as everyone got to grips with our new lodge-based lifestyle, after the luxury of the Summit Hotel. Washing this morning was limited to a bucket of warm water on the wall outside the lodge, or the cold tap inside the building.
We had breakfast about 07:30 and after a certain amount of faffing we left at about 08:30. Having spent weeks walking with Klaas learning to improve my time-keeping to meet Dutch Army standards, I’m now sharing with Rich, who’s another ex-soldier. He’s ridiculously tidy and efficient, so we were both ready to go at 08:00 – tomorrow I may be a bit more relaxed!
