Well here we are at the highest habitable place in the Mera Peak valley. I have to say, that once again the lodges are extremely well equipped, electricity, telephones, WiFi, it’s a pity none of them work. To be fair the owner of the only lodge open turned up two hours after we did. So the place has been uninhabited for four or five months. I’m sure that all the services will slowly come back online, just not in time for me to use them.

The walk up from Tangnag to Dig Kharka should have taken just a couple of hours, but because we were braking the trail for the section the climbing Sharpas didn’t do the day before it took us close to six hours. Exhausting is an understatement and following someone else’s gait is far from comfortable.

It’s definitely turned colder now we’re at around 5,000m and it seems that we’ll be taking a couple of rest days so the climbing Sherpas can break the route up to High Camp missing out Base Camp altogether , so it could be another four or five days before our summit attempt. It appears that I’m in for another couple of days of reading, drinking tea, taking a wonder (but not too far, I’ve been instructed), anyway, you get my drift.

Tshering arrived this afternoon and it turns out that his son has had appendicitis and was in hospital for four days……if that had been explained to me in a he first place, then I would have completely understood!!! COMMUNICATION.