Climbers on the south side of Everest have plenty of options if they want to descend for a few days to a place where the air is thicker. As snow falls in the Western Cwm many have decided to descend thousands of metres into the forest zone and are resting up in teahouses on the Everest Base Camp trail.
Here in Tibet, on the north side, we don’t have that option – we would need to drive for a very long way to get to a significantly lower altitude.
Following Thursday’s Base Camp party hosted by the Russians, team mate Ian Cartwright and I decided to get some exercise by wandering for an hour down the main Rongbuk Valley to the Tibetan Village, a tented camp of souvenir shops catering for the bus loads of sightseers driven into Base Camp for a nice view of Everest’s north face.
There’s a post office here, and Ian stopped off to send postcards with an Everest Base Camp stamp to his family. Normally he would be pictured with a Lhasa Beer in his hand, but we had one or two of those at the party, so yesterday a tin of Coke was enough for us.
