Ok, had 3 power outages in 25 minutes, so will see how far this report will go, do not be surprised if it ends abrubtly..
Most people slept badly last night, altitude is kicking in. Had a headache myself, was not the only one. We are drinking plenty of water, so should be better soon.
This morning we read the email Alex sent us, most of it was already covered in Chris' previous post on this forum. It's amazing how close they were behind us when the attack happened. Were we lucky or were they unlucky? Hard to tell, but expeditions like ours in countries like these are much more than just simply climbing a mountain, that's for sure.
We hope to see Alex in BC in a week or so, will be great to cathc up again.
Today was another easy day, all we were planning to do was visiting the town of Xigar (Shegar). We drove up in the morning and hiked up to the wonderful ancient monastery built on a hill. It also had been destroyed by the chinese, but most of it has been rebuilt. We got a short tour through the inner monastery with many Buddha statues, oil lamps and miscellaneous interesting relics.
There was an old library, consisting of an open cupboard with old scrolls filled with holy texts. But the best thing was we could go underneath it and slowly walk under the cabinet, which supposedly will make some of the old knowledge rub off on us. We might need that the next few weeks :-)
Some of our group scrambled all the way to the summit, completely covered in prayer flags, I chose a lotitary peak nearby and made some nice shots of the town, Everest and Makalu, another 8000+m mountain. What an amazing country this is.
We walked around town a bit in search of an internet cafe, but the power was completely down all day. We were planning to hike the 7km back, but were not so sure when we felt the hard wind in the burning sun. I noticed a typical Tibethan vehicle, kind of a crossing between a lawnmower, pick up truck and a tractor, and whistled at him. He saw me and stopped and we negotiated 30 yuan for the ride back which was wonderful
We picked James up on the way and relaxed in the hotel the rest of the day.
Tomorrow the 14th we will make a huge jump in altitude, driving from 4300m to basecamp at 5200m! Hope to sent more updates soon. Meanwhile we managed to send the first pictures from Nepal to Romke, hopefully they arrive ok and he might be able to add some pix to previous stories.
All the best from a windy Tibet,
Harry
Discuss about the highest mountains on the seven continents
