We have a very comfortable setup here at Everest Base Camp, with all sorts of luxuries people camping for a couple of months beside a glacier have no right to expect.
Take our hot shower, for example. The blue barrel on the right contains fresh glacier water so cold that it frequently has ice floating on top. The red cylinder in the middle is the electric pump (recharged by solar power). You stick it in the barrel and it pumps the water out through the green shower head.
The icing on the cake is the magic red box on the left. This is a heater powered by a big red gas cylinder outside the tent. Once ignited it converts the ice cold glacier water into piping hot shower water within minutes. As they say in Yorkshire: champion!
What this photograph doesn’t show is the roar of the wind outside the tent. This is so noisy that it’s possible for the worst singers to drone on as loudly as they like without disturbing people in neighbouring tents (and believe me, we have some really bad singers in the Altitude Junkies team).
I would show you the toilet next door, but this is more rudimentary and some of you may be eating.
