I woke up at about 6am from the tent shaking (it had been all night) from the wind. At altitude, it’s rare to sleep all through the night but I slept beautifully. Our breathing rates slow down naturally, and with the limited oxygen, this is not good and we often wake up a lot. I have been taking diamox (tablet) which speeds up your breathing rate, which is helping me get enough oxygen when I’m sleeping.
It was EXTREMELY windy today (it still is as I am writing this). We had breakfast at 7:30am and even that short 30m walk to the dining tent without gloves, made my hands numb from the amount of snow blowing everywhere.
We have to leave parts of our tent open to stop our breath from condensing in the night and making everything wet, but even with such small openings, there was a lot of snow that had blown into the tent.
We had breakfast with the rest of the gang – which was porridge, and some eggs on chapati. It’s very important that we drink lots of tea, partly to stay warm and hydrated but also to thin out our blood, as frostbite is more prevalent if our blood more viscous.
Since I have been doing a bit of toilet talk in the past couple of posts, I will continue. So as I said in the last post, the Sherpas built a new and improved toilet tent with a barrel. However, I bravely stepped out of the dining tent, but the tent had been absolutely destroyed from the wind!! I was standing there in shock with Anastasia (really nice woman from Russia) and we were both laughing a lot! We spotted another toilet tent which was still standing (maybe from another camp 👀) and I dashed into that. This is skipping ahead a couple of hours, but the wind continued to be unbelievably strong and cold, and when I went to go to the toilet again at lunch, all toilets in sight had been destroyed by the wind. All we can do is laugh about it! I ended up going behind some other random tent! ✌️✌️✌️
We had lunch all together, and met up with more people who had left from base camp at the same time as us, but stayed in camp 1. They had to walk from camp 1-2 in this awful weather, and I was honestly so glad that we came here yesterday so we didn’t have to do that. Two of our friends had been hit with a flying tent on the way up to camp 2! They are both okay. We saw our friend who had been hit by the serac collapsing the day before. Her Sherpa had been badly injured and was taken straight to Kathmandu hospital. She was hurt but is doing okay so far, and has the right medication with her.
I raced back to my tent, in the (still) extreme wind. Even though it was insanely cold outside, it’s really only due to the wind, and it was quite sunny. So inside the tents it is nice and warm. I had some chocolate I brought from home, and some biscuits. I’m really happy that I’m not losing my appetite up here. Last time, I didn’t want to eat anything, and was eating straight peanut butter for extra calories.
We chilled in the tent some more – me: writing this blog, listening to music and texting mum via the satellite device, and dad: listening to podcasts and also texting mum. It was still EXTREMELY windy!!!!
We headed over to dinner at 5:30pm and the dining tent was a full house! We had soup, and some pasta with cheese. We’ve been really getting into drinking “Horlicks” which I had never heard of, but many said they used to have it as kids.
I tried to stay up, but everyone went to bed, and it got really cold with just Dad, Kristen and I in the tent. I then went to the nonexistent toilet – so I walked towards what was the toilet tent, and walked down, turned my head torch off and hoped nobody would see me… well look at me.
The wind had finally stopped! It was still freezing cold so we crawled into bed. I listened to some music and dad packed some of his stuff as he was leaving tomorrow morning, a day before me. My mum is coming to base camp, and she is flying directly there, so he wants to be there for her first night.
