My travel diaries
Monday 6 August, 2007 - Muztag Ata Base Camp, Xinjiang, China
Another rest day at base camp. It sounds like there is quite a lot of rain during the night, but when I wake up and put my head out of the tent I discover several inches of snow outside. I had intended to wash some clothes this morning, but won't bother now, if there's not going to be any sun today.
Dave has lent me two books by Richard Dawkins to read: The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion .
"What's this one about?" I ask, pointing to the second one.
"I don't know," he replies. "But make sure you've finished it before you go back to Islamabad."
A big base camp snowball fight
I spend the morning in my tent reading The Blind Watchmaker , but once again Geoff is leading a much more interesting existence out and about in base camp, and comes back with more stories.
"We've just had a big snowball fight, about 30 or 40 of us," he says, poking his head into the tent.
"Oh yes - Swiss versus Chinese, was it?" I ask.
"No, you just joined whichever team you fancied."
"And did you win?"
He looks at me like I'm an idiot. "It was a snowball fight. There are no rules."
By mid-morning it has stopped snowing and most of the thick layer covering base camp at breakfast has gone. By afternoon it's melted entirely and I'm able to sit outside in the sun. Geoff and Juliet are invited for coffee by a Chinese man from another group. Geoff watches them disappear, but when he leaves our tent to follow, he can't find them. He suspects Juliet was the person they were really after as she's a doctor and there's someone with an injury, and he just happened to be invited in passing.
I discover my jokes aren't so bad, after all
At dinner there is speculation whether Geoff just had problems with the language barrier. Perhaps he wasn't invited for coffee at all.
"What were his exact words again - 'Juliet, you come, Geoff, you f-k-off-ee'?"
This is a signal for the conversation to deteriorate still further in quality. David tells the one about the Chinaman arriving for a dental appointment at "tooth-hurty", while Dave tells the one about the Chinese foreman who was put in charge of supplies, so he hid behind a door and jumped out when someone was passing by, shouting, "Supplies!"Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 Next
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