Wednesday 30 October 2013

Day 11 - Pangboche (3,940 mtrs)

The plan was to sleep in but I wake up at about 6 which gives me time to  catch up on this blog and read a bit before actually getting up at a more socially acceptable time of 8 am to organise my bags before breakfast. A long night's sleep seems to have done the group a world of good and there are much higher spirits as we head down the mountain - pleased that yet again we are the last group out of the teahouse!

We are having lunch at the teahouse in Dengboche where we stayed on the way up and whilst waiting for lunch meet the 3 or 4 year old son playing with a ball in the garden by himself as his sisters are clearly not interested. Feeling an immediate kinship, I join in the fun and introduce him to the joy of throwing the ball onto a sloping corrugated iron roof and then being surprised as to where it comes off. The kid has a decent arm and, despite the ball being made of rubber, it is not a surprise when his mother shouts at him (rather than me) to stop when he starts getting the ball up near the windows - hopefully Dad will be more supportive when he sees the new game!

I am quite keen on some non-fried food for lunch and whilst that proposition gets support I am not sure that veggie cheeseburgers and chips is quite what I had in mind. Still this seems to fuel the afternoon's walk down to Pangboche where a few of us go at a pretty decent pace which is great fun and good practice as the path is far from smooth and so good footwork is crucial. This wouldn't be Nepal without a few adventures along the way whilst overtaking yaks as well as trekkers, but a couple of new ones are dodging mountain goats as they head straight down the mountain that we are traversing (unfortunately the rest of the herd seem reluctant to follow having seen the near miss of the first few to attempt it so I can't get any footage which is a shame as the slope is very steep here and their ability to navigate boulders and shrubs at that speed is very impressive) and having to jump over a garden wall, much to the surprise of an elderly Nepali lady who is busy in her garden, when faced with two approaching yaks taking up the entire narrow path with their rather large horns at groin level!

Having dropped off my gear at the tea house I head straight to the Internet cafe to endure the agonisingly slow Internet speed to find out what has happened back in London since the 'tremors' had started last Saturday and was very proud to be able to tell the rest of be group that I had become an Uncle again. I felt that this deserved something a little special and so was pretty happy when I saw that the teahouse had some bottles of whisky; however, when the lady who owned the teahouse found out that we were heading off to Ama Dablam she refused to sell me saying that whisky on the way up was very bad but that whisky on the way down was very good and she looked forward to selling me a bottle then to celebrate both the birth and our success on the mountain!

More bad news was to follow when it turned out that the very late and heavy monsoon had left a lot of snow on Ama Dablam and that no one had managed to get far up the mountain yet and that groups were even heading back to Kathmandu realising that there was no chance of conditions improving sufficiently before they needed to fly home. This is a real worry as the monsoon ended over three weeks ago and it is hard to be sure that the next week or so will see a big enough change in conditions. Still we are going to head over tomorrow and have a look. 

The sad side of this is that we are saying goodbye to the local team who have been looking after us so well until now - especially our trekking guide Nir who is a real character. We have a little ceremony to hand out the tips and he provides the local tipple which is local wine mixed with coffee and honey - it is certainly interesting and I make the usual mistake (for me anyway as I don't like coffee) of drinking it and showing appreciation and so being given a refill at the expense of one if the locals who would have loved it. Suitably fuelled by the brew Nir makes (what appears to be) a genuinely heartfelt speech of thanks for how much fun the trip has been and how easy we have been - see all my above references to ordering the same food for all the group to make things easy for him and the teahouse cooks! He then starts to recollect how things went badly on a prior trip where he had one young lady as a client who took a shine to him and took his refusal of her advances (he has a wife and kid as he explained to her) very badly. By this time the whole of the teahouse is listening to the story as he continues with how he was summoned to Kathmandu to explain to his boss after she had complained about him - he had told her, then his boss and now us that this wasn't part of his job and the whole thing seemed to be getting really rather serious and a bit maudlin so I made a joke along the lines that this was one of the downsides that us handsome chaps had to put up with in life - quite luckily both he (and the rest of the teahouse) found this very funny and he was very proud of the underlying compliment so the mood lifted quickly and reverted to its more celebratory nature. 

After a few more speeches with each of us saying how wonderful everything and everyone was (this was after minimal alcohol!) we retired to bed, looking forward to heading off to AD base camp in the morning. 


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