into the clouds

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As you were all beginning your day I was walking into the clouds (it is just after lunch in Nepal), there I composed that sentence in my head as I slogged for an hour up a mountainside. It was very eerie and cold, but nevertheless amazing to be walking into the clouds. Today we left early for Lobuche, we knew it was going to be a hard day, although the morning was not too bad and the sun shone brightly.

We sat and ate lunch where we could gaze at the mountain we were about to climb, it didn’t look too bad but I knew from the last 10 days that appearances can be deceptive, and the effects of altitude which make walking so onerous do not show when gazing at the side of a mountain !! The climb up the mountainside was indeed extremely gruelling and I had to make frequent stops, by the time I reached the top the whole group was split up into several small groups and I was walking with only Lakpa (a Sherpa guide) for company. As we walked over the top we entered the field of remembrances where there are many memorials to Sherpas who have lost their lives in the mountains, generally while trying to help foreigners like us to navigate and climb them. It was indeed a very eerie place, exacerbated by the disappearance of the sun behind clouds and a cold misty haze. The rest of the day’s trek was like this and I couldn’t see another soul from the trek either in front or behind until I reached the lodge. We had now entered the land of glaciers, snow, ice and a frozen river, and to top it all it snowed again, still I did get my first view of Nuptse another mountain I had read much about. The lodge at Lobuche had the luxury of an indoor loo and you could actually sit on it, wow, but still no running water. Where water had been dripped onto the floor in the hallways it had frozen, this being particularly lethal at the bottom of the stairs which led to our room, especially at night when the ‘solar’ powered lighting did not work. Once again I was extremely grateful for my head torch. This lodge was an ‘eco’ lodge and as well as the solar power, yak dung was burnt in the stove with only a little wood, luckily this did not smell although the kerosene used to light it did. The communal room was lovely and warm thanks to the stove and the efforts of the staff to keep it burning, and we had quite a convivial evening sitting round the stove playing a game. The bedroom was quite spacious, but generally as cold and barren as all the others, but all I really had to do was sleep in it so it didn’t really matter. We are now at 4910 metres.