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Today’s walk was short but definitely not sweet as it was very cold, with no sun, snowed again and the undulating terrain was merciless. To give you some idea of the severity of today’s weather and the depth of the snow from previous days, the route to Everest base camp was officially closed off, luckily this had not been part of our trek, but a few of us who had hoped to ‘tack’ that on were a bit disappointed. En route to Gorak Shep we visited the Pyramid high altitude laboratory, here they record climate change, the movement of the mountains etc, this was a welcome and interesting diversion, and I was loath to leave the comparatively warm building. Although it was cold and the glacier was mainly covered by snow, the scenery was magnificent, unfortunately it was too cold for my camera batteries and no amount of rubbing them would bring them back to life so I was unable to take photographs after we left the Pyramid. We arrived at Gorak Shep for lunch, the lodge here is the highest in the world, which is about all I can say for it, as it was the coldest, most miserable place we stayed. The communal room was very large and the burner very small, and totally ineffective, added to which we had to fight to get it topped up, this was the only burner you could touch the side of and not get burnt !! This was a very large lodge and our room was an extremely cold walk down 3 dark corridors, the room was tiny and the snow lay on our windowsill where it had forced its way through the closed window. My nightly cup of water froze and I was unable to moisten my mouth that night, I should add that since we had climbed over the 4000 metre mark I woke up every night with an extremely dry mouth, nose and throat, which made it painful to breath. This was where many of us became despondent as we had nothing to do all afternoon, and the cold made it very hard to motivate ourselves to play games, or indeed do anything but sit around with our bodies screwed up as tightly as possible in an effort to get warm. We are now at 5140 metres.
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