Started off the day with a 4 hour drive to Sakya, Its a bit of a ghost town and I was feeling pretty rubbish from the night before in Shigatse. In hindsight I should have skipped the Yak Dancing Disco night but we all make mistakes.

Once we arrived our tour guide gave me the single room for the night, which was amazing considering we were doing Base Camp and our coldest night the next day.

The place was a literal ghost town. I went for a walk with Micheal and Kamal, but then skipped dinner and slept right through the night. Woke up just in time to get our leaving time and for Victoria to load me up with meds and pain killers, she was a life saver because I felt like shit and looked like death according to everyone else.

 

Base Camp day!

The day had finally arrived we are going to Everest. But all things come with a catch, it was a 8-9 hour bus ride and most of it was on unsealed roads fit for a Trophy Truck.

We stopped off at some little truck stop crappy town for lunch before we headed off on the rough road. Within 10mins James and I used one of the worst toilets yet, seen a dead dog and a pile goats heads, this place was a real bummer.

The road to Everest was pretty rough but we got some cool sights on the way. Mid afternoon everything was still frozen.

 

We finally got to Rongphu Monastery, the highest one in the world at 5000m above sea level. We get our first good photo of Everest.

 

The Monastery guest house was said to be our coldest night with outside temps dropping to -20 Celsius. The plan was to drive towards Base Camp and walk the last few km’s to get that sense of achievement. It wasn’t much of a walk but at 5000m it was a mission. Basecamp topped out at 5200m, just shy of our highest at one of the passes.

 

We had a local dog follow our group pretty much all the way. Why a dog would choose this cold waste land to hangout I will never know.

We chased the shadows pretty much the whole way and were going to be cutting it close for photos and it was starting to get very cold. But we got there in the end.

As per usual we had to have our victory snickers bars, the only thing some of us were wanting at that point.

Our guide told us it was about -7deg + wind chill when we were photo taking and it was suppose to get lower. We jumped in the bus and headed back, when we found that our guide had picked up some victory/warming up whisky for us. Well it worked.

We we got to our room it was very basic, with no light bulbs working and us all freezing we went to dinner.

Breakfast for dinner is where it was at, so I ordered up some omelettes and pancakes and the tea that saved the trip, Lemon Honey Ginger tea. Our room was bloody cold, but we had 4 blankets. Phil, Micheal, Kamal and I had already decided we were sleeping in our puffer jackets, beanie, gloves and double socks.

We survived the cold night, in fact if anything we were too warm. But in the morning the altitude got to everyone. Turns out most people including me woke up about 2am with a migraine and couldn’t get back to sleep so we just wanted to get out of there. Next stopped was Nyalam, at 3600m we all hoped we would feel better.