Second Acclimatization Day In Namche

May 20

Got up early again on Thursday (May 20) morning. The sky was quite clear after the storm last night. After breakfast, we had our first medical check. I’m doing fine -- pulse rate is normal and my blood pressure is lower than my last couple of checkups. Hmmm. Must be the clean mountain living.

A couple of the boys went for a run, but I don’t think that it’s a good idea at this point to run every day. You can do more harm and no good.

I decided to take a hike back up to the Shangboche airstrip and the Everest View Hotel and then back around through Khumjung.

At the airstrip, some sky divers were jumping and landing. It was quite a sight seeing the little planes taking off from the gravel strip.



The skies were pretty clear so I got magnificent view of the high peaks -- Island Peak, Ama Dablem, Lhotse, Nuptse and Everest. The scale of everything is so big it’s hard to describe or get on a photo. Nothing in the Rockies can really compare with how big the landscape is here. Even though we are at 12,000 feet, there is still a lot of vegetation unlike the Rockies or Alps at this altitude. The mountain peak rise up another 12,000 to 16,000 feet above where we are now.





I wandered through Khumjung a bit and took photos of the stupas and mani walls. On the way back, I counted the number of steps we will need to climb going over the last pass in the marathon (315 at about 15 inches per step). I won’t be running up that for sure.

I charged up my netbook this afternoon in the lodge at 150 rupees per hour. I was moving some pictures from my camera to the computer. A couple of sherpas came over and were looking through my photos so far. They liked the videos, especially one I got of a dog running across the Lukla airstrip as a plane was landing.

Tonight, we’ll be packing up for our trek to the Tengboche Monastery tomorrow. As we get into the higher villages, the goods and services available decreases significantly (and when available, the cost rises rapidly). I am not sure when I will be able to post again, perhaps not until the 29th or 30th when we are back in Namche after the marathon.