My travel diaries
Monday 30 April, 2007 - Everest Base Camp, Tibet
At breakfast Bunter tells us that he's suffered a disappointment. He was on the internet last night and found out that Hull City had beaten Cardiff while Leeds United could only draw. This means that, barring a miracle, Hull will survive in the Championship at the expense of Bunter's beloved Leeds. As a Hull City fan I'm naturally delighted at this. Meanwhile Bunter is taking it well. He comes to breakfast armed with a joke.
"What do laptops and the Championship have in common?"
"No Leeds," I reply, mechanically.
Unfortunately this leads on to a series of breakfast brainteasers. I ask the one about which three English football teams have rude words in their names.
Tim replies immediately: "Scunthorpe United."
A short while later Mic thinks of Arsenal, but they struggle with the third.
"I'm surprised you've not got this one," I say. "We've just been talking about them."
More blank looks, so I tell them. "F---ing Leeds United."
Then Mark decides to ruin everything by asking us to name the only London Underground station which doesn't contain any of the letters of the word MACKEREL. This is terrible. It could ruin the whole expedition - we could be puzzling over it for the next three weeks, particularly if it's an obscure one. Luckily, less than an hour later, during the drive to Base Camp, I figure out the answer and am able to annoy Tim and Ian for the rest of the day with my smug expression.
We're on the road again at 7.30am, and very soon turn off the tarmacked Friendship Highway onto a dirt track which we follow all the way to Everest Base Camp. The road snakes up to a pass at 5200m, where a slightly closer panorama of the Himalayan giants Makalu, Lhotse, Everest and Cho Oyu - the 5 th , 4 th , 1 st and 6 th highest mountains in the world - greets us, though Cho Oyu is the only one not partially obscured by cloud. The road then drops 1000m to a broad shaley river valley which stretches for miles on both sides before turning a corner to the left. The valley is narrowing and I notice by my altimeter that we've climbed quite a distance without my noticing. Slowly it dawns on me that the mountain in front, dominating the road ahead of us, is Everest itself. Although the summit is in cloud, the West Ridge to the right of it is unmistakable: an angle of 45 degree rock descending to meet a much more horizontal ridge of snow. I've seen it so many times in photographs, but this is the first time I'm seeing it for real. This is the snow slope Mallory must have climbed during his Everest reconnaisance in 1921 to look down into the Western Cwm in Nepal, a feature he named after the beloved Welsh valleys he knew so well. He dismissed its jagged icefields, now known as the fearsome Khumbu Icefall, as impassable, but it eventually held the key to the first ascent of Everest by John Hunt's British-led expedition in 1953 (which, ironically for a British-funded expedition supported by Nepali sherpas, put a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, and an Indian, Tensing Norgay, on the summit).
We reach the Rongbuk Monastery and stop for a leg stretch. Our driver calls it the Rongpu Monastery, and describes it as the highest monastery in the world. I wonder at this, but his pronunciation is probably correct. All the classic mountaineering literature calls this place Rongbuk, but this is likely a result of the first western explorers mishearing the Tibetan pronunciation and calling it something else. Although I know I should, I hesitate to call it Rongpu: this sounds too much like a medical condition I may contract later if the Base Camp food proves a bit ropey. I stick with Rongbuk.
We reach Base Camp a few minutes later. The view is tantalising. We're camped in tents in the middle of a dry, rocky and wide river valley. There is clearly an enormous mountain right in front of us, but we can't quite see it for the cloud. This mountain appears to be the only thing around us covered in cloud, but that's to be expected, not because of Sod's Law, but due to a much more reasonable cause. The mountain is covered in snow, and as the sun warms it up as the morning progresses, the snow evaporates, producing cloud. I understand all this perfectly well, but I still wish it wouldn't do it. Fortunately, we have four days here at Base Camp, and early tomorrow morning we can hope for better views.
I spend the afternoon in my tent being lazy (known as 'acclimatising' in mountaineering parlance). I have no headache and appear to be acclimatising pretty well. I take a careful note of another important yardstick: the colour of my urine. It is important to avoid dehydration at high altitude by drinking more water than normal. This leads to a simple test known as "The Three Cs": clear, comfortable and copious. I'm happy, for mine looks clear enough to drink, though I resist the temptation. As I discuss this with my tent mate Mark, he questions whether having comfortable pee is a test of how well you are acclimatising, and suggests that I made this one up just to turn two Cs into three. While this may be true, I protest that after drinking several more litres of water than usual it certainly is comfortable.
I hear a strange strangled cooing sound right outside our tent.
"What the hell's that?" I ask Mark.
"It's one of those Tibetan snow partridgey things," he replies.
"A snow cock?" I poke my head outside the tent, frightening off two pigeons just by the doorway.
"They don't sound anything like the pigeons we have at home!" I say.
Mark starts to tell me a story about pigeons in Tibet. I feel sure he's about to say it's hardly surprising as Tibetan pigeons speak Chinese rather than English, but thankfully he doesn't. Instead he tells me Tibetans tend to leave pigeons alone because of an old story about someone eating a pigeon and becoming seriously ill, so they don't eat them. This makes them extremely tame.
Fascinating stuff, and with conversations such as these we while away the rest of the day.
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