Last time I wrote about our way up to the base camp of Mt. Everest. We spent the night at the highest hotel on earth. In fact, they were just tents with electricity, but they were huge. Each one of them can accommodate about 10 people with a small kitchen at the back. The beds were lined up along the edge of the tent, one after another. In the middle of the tent there was a heating spot where the owner boiled some hot water for us and fuel, as you can see, were the dried cow dungs.
The tents
Todd was still hiking down with some others when I got here. The owner of the tent helped us make the beds. One thick layer of sheet and one heavy cover with an extra blanket. When I slid under the two layers of covers, I felt I couldn’t breathe, they were so heavy! My stomach was still bothering me so I took some medicine and hot water. Todd was perfectly all right, and he attributed this to his early years of hiking high mountains. There was a birthday party at another tent, we were invited but I was not feeling so good, Todd wanted to stay with me. So we went to sleep earlier. Well, not much you can do besides going to sleep early. Oh boy, that night turned out to be such a long night. I think I woke up every 10-20 minutes, either because of head/stomachache or the feeling of hard breathing. After numerous rounds of waking-up, falling asleep, it was finally dawn. Now here comes another problem. Where to use the toilet? The owner told me outside the tent….
This is how we tackled the toilet odor problem
That’s it. For the first time, I wished so hard that I were a guy.
Todd and a German guy decided to hike down to the monastery we would go to. My head was still bothering me but the stomachache was gone. It was exactly the same path back to the city as we came. Oh by the way, on our way back, the driver pulled over in the middle of nowhere to let us pay our water bills (Chinese way of saying answer the call of nature). Guys just by the river. Girls, hey we actually took some hike here.
Local folks
The rain’s coming
We were caught in the heavy rainfall during nightfall, the water steamed down from near mountains turned some of the road to small creeks. We were so nervous, but our driver, the Tibetan guy was so good, he was calmly navigating his way out.
We arrived at the hotel pretty late that day. Soon as we had our room card, the Singaporean girls were so thrilled to be back to civilization and yelled, and I quote “Now I can shit!”