Thursday, 10 April 2014 – Lobuche, Nepal
We all seem to be carrying some sort of bug. Ian was wide awake most of the night coughing. I have a severe cold and have turned into a one-man snot factory. I’ve used up every square inch of my handkerchief and have to buy a whole extra roll of toilet paper just to sneeze into.
Phil left at 5.30 this morning to head up to Base Camp. One of our kitchen Sherpas, Karma Gjalje, has been sent back down to help at the lodge here.
We have a rest day in Lobuche, and I spend the morning walking along the ridge of moraine opposite the village. From the top I find myself staring down onto the Khumbu Glacier, dusted grey with moraine. There is a cold breeze up here, but in the moments when it dies, or when I gain shelter behind rocks, the air is still and I enjoy the total silence.
The scenery is too beautiful for words. For the next three hours I amble along the ridge towards Base Camp on my elevated perch, contemplating peace and solitude, and the wonder of the mountains. This truly is one of the most magnificent places on Earth. The white cone of Pumori, its wedge-shaped sister peak Lingtren, and smaller Khumbutse rise ahead of me. To my left a green valley divides me from rocky Lobuche East, with a vast hanging glacier beneath its summit. To my right I look across the silvery Khumbu Glacier to Nuptse’s citadel.
Lobuche East rises above the community of teahouses at Lobuche
Twice I stop in the shelter of a rock and think about nothing at all in this haven of the mountain gods. When I turn around and wander back, the view is no less magnificent. Taboche and Cholatse tower over me in walls of ice-crowned rock. The fluted pinnacles and ridges of Kangtega and Thamserku rise more distantly at the end of the valley.
It’s a dusty, sandy track. I have my buff pulled over my nose and mouth, but by the time I return to the Mother Earth Lodge I feel like I’ve swallowed a great many particles – whether dust or strands of my buff, it’s all the same. I may well remain ill for a couple more days, but there is plenty of time to recover at Base Camp. In any case, I wouldn’t have missed this walk for anything.
Subdued by illness, it’s a quiet team in the Mother Earth Lodge this evening. They are sitting around the stove in the centre of the dining room when I come down an hour or so before dinner. I creep to a nearby table to read my book, but Ian notices me and buys me a beer.
It takes me a long time to drink it, and I’m not sure it was what I needed. Earlier in the afternoon I bought Margaret a beer too, but she was also feeling ill and Edita told her not to drink it. The beer sat on the table for quite a while. Eventually I noticed Edita drink it herself. Not everyone is quite so ill then.