The plan was to sleep in but I wake up at about 6 which gives me time to
catch up on this blog and read a bit before actually getting up at a more
socially acceptable time of 8 am to organise my bags before breakfast. A long
night's sleep seems to have done the group a world of good and there are much
higher spirits as we head down the mountain - pleased that yet again we are the
last group out of the teahouse!
We are having lunch at the teahouse in Dengboche where we stayed on the way
up and whilst waiting for lunch meet the 3 or 4 year old son playing with a ball
in the garden by himself as his sisters are clearly not interested. Feeling an
immediate kinship, I join in the fun and introduce him to the joy of throwing the
ball onto a sloping corrugated iron roof and then being surprised as to where it
comes off. The kid has a decent arm and, despite the ball being made of rubber,
it is not a surprise when his mother shouts at him (rather than me) to stop when he starts
getting the ball up near the windows - hopefully Dad will be more supportive
when he sees the new game!
I am quite keen on some non-fried food for lunch and whilst that
proposition gets support I am not sure that veggie cheeseburgers and chips is
quite what I had in mind. Still this seems to fuel the afternoon's walk down to
Pangboche where a few of us go at a pretty decent pace which is great fun and
good practice as the path is far from smooth and so good footwork is crucial.
This wouldn't be Nepal without a few adventures along the way whilst overtaking
yaks as well as trekkers, but a couple of new ones are dodging mountain goats as
they head straight down the mountain that we are traversing (unfortunately the
rest of the herd seem reluctant to follow having seen the near miss of the first few
to attempt it so I can't get any footage which is a shame as the slope is
very steep here and their ability to navigate boulders and shrubs at that speed
is very impressive) and having to jump over a garden wall, much to the surprise of an
elderly Nepali lady who is busy in her garden, when faced with two approaching
yaks taking up the entire narrow path with their rather large horns at groin
level!
Having dropped off my gear at the tea house I head straight to the Internet
cafe to endure the agonisingly slow Internet speed to find out what has happened
back in London since the 'tremors' had started last Saturday and was very proud
to be able to tell the rest of be group that I had become an Uncle again. I felt
that this deserved something a little special and so was pretty happy when I saw
that the teahouse had some bottles of whisky; however, when the lady who owned the
teahouse found out that we were heading off to Ama Dablam she refused to sell me
saying that whisky on the way up was very bad but that whisky on the way down
was very good and she looked forward to selling me a bottle then to celebrate
both the birth and our success on the mountain!
More bad news was to follow when it turned out that the very late and heavy
monsoon had left a lot of snow on Ama Dablam and that no one had managed to get far up the mountain yet and that groups were even heading back to Kathmandu
realising that there was no chance of conditions improving sufficiently before
they needed to fly home. This is a real worry as the monsoon ended over three
weeks ago and it is hard to be sure that the next week or so will see a big
enough change in conditions. Still we are going to head over tomorrow and have a
look.
The sad side of this is that we are saying goodbye to the local team who
have been looking after us so well until now - especially our trekking guide Nir
who is a real character. We have a little ceremony to hand out the tips and he
provides the local tipple which is local wine mixed with coffee and honey - it
is certainly interesting and I make the usual mistake (for me anyway as I don't
like coffee) of drinking it and showing appreciation and so being given a refill
at the expense of one if the locals who would have loved it. Suitably fuelled by
the brew Nir makes (what appears to be) a genuinely heartfelt speech of thanks
for how much fun the trip has been and how easy we have been - see all my above
references to ordering the same food for all the group to make things easy for
him and the teahouse cooks! He then starts to recollect how things went badly on
a prior trip where he had one young lady as a client who took a shine to him and
took his refusal of her advances (he has a wife and kid as he explained to her)
very badly. By this time the whole of the teahouse is listening to the story as
he continues with how he was summoned to Kathmandu to explain to his boss after
she had complained about him - he had told her, then his boss and now us that
this wasn't part of his job and the whole thing seemed to be getting really
rather serious and a bit maudlin so I made a joke along the lines that this was
one of the downsides that us handsome chaps had to put up with in life - quite
luckily both he (and the rest of the teahouse) found this very funny and he was
very proud of the underlying compliment so the mood lifted quickly and reverted
to its more celebratory nature.
After a few more speeches with each of us saying how wonderful everything and
everyone was (this was after minimal alcohol!) we retired to bed, looking
forward to heading off to AD base camp in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment