Hozza's Horizons

My travel diaries

Tuesday 14 August, 2007 - Muztag Ata Base Camp, Xinjiang, China

Our final rest day

The final rest day before our summit bid begins in earnest. I decide to spend the day more actively than usual. In the morning I amble up to the cairn on top of the moraine mound above our tents, from where I have a bird's eye view of Geoff crawling over a large rock away from the tents, Orna chatting up the sherpas outside our mess tent, and Toby taking photographs on Marmot Hill.

After lunch I get into a slightly embarrassing conversation with Geoff, Orna and Ali, the young chef's helper from Kashgar. Geoff asks Ali all sorts of personal questions about whether he has a girlfriend, whether his girlfriend's parents like him, how they met, and what they did on their first date. He then asks whether Ali's girlfriend has an older sister and whether her mother is single. After he has exhausted this subject he launches into a story about a former girlfriend of his own who once went to a supermarket to buy a fresh knife to cut her wrists with because she didn't want to dirty any of the knives her family used for cooking. He has a slightly deadpan sense of humour and it's one of the many occasions when I can't work out whether he's joking or serious. Whatever the case, after this story I decide to slip away before I find any questions directed at me.

Orna puts our chef to shame

After lunch I go for another walk, this time up to the glacier which descends to the north of base camp. A big storm seems to be in full flow over Lake Karakul and it looks quite dramatic, but somehow it never reaches us here in base camp. When I get back to the mess tent just before 7 o'clock, I discover that Orna has decided to give our chef the evening off and cooked a lovely sheep and potato casserole for the whole team, including Abdullah and the sherpas who usually cook for themselves. It gives us a break from boiled cucumber and is by some distance the best meal we've had on Muztag Ata.

After dinner a joke telling session takes place. The jokes become increasingly dirty as the evening goes on, but I have a nagging feeling that the flood gates still haven't been opened on the worst of them.

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