High camp: 5132 m
Renjo La pass: 5402 m
Maralung: 4117 m
Distance: 11.3 km (72.4 km total)
The night at high camp was the toughest, as expected. Not only was it cold, but at about 3 am the wind picked up, buffeting the tents and generally waking everyone up. I had to go out to the toilet (an exercise that took about 5 minutes each time to get prepared for, with extra layers, socks, boots etc. needing to be put on) and the wind wasn’t as bad outside as what it felt like inside; maybe 50 km/hr max. It still managed to work open the zip on our fly, and blow down one of the porters’ tents. Amazingly, the toilet tent stayed standing, although using it felt like a particular scene out of Jurassic Park!
Dawn was again clear, with some cool clouds forming off Everest and Lhotse, which we could see from our tent. Breakfast was early, and not overly appetising: cornflakes, tasteless rice pudding, crepes, scrambled egg.
We all started walking at the same time, and Raewyn and I soon fell behind the main group. She was still feeling nauseous and spacey, so I carried her backpack for a while but was soon struggling and could feel a headache coming on. The ascent was very icy, snowy, rocky – and more than the 200 m we had been led to believe it would be. (According to the GPS it was more like 270 m.)
Finally we made it to the top. I wouldn’t have said the view was better from there than from Gokyo Ri. We had some group photos (although I was absent from some of them, answering the call of nature, which it pays not to ignore) and started the descent. If you can believe it, it was even steeper, icier, rockier, and had more snow than the way we had come up. We dropped about 300-400 m in the space of a kilometre. The views across the valley were amazing. We passed a few trekkers in twos and threes going up – pity the fools! As we descended, we had to stop every now and then to shed a few layers. Finally, we arrived at our lunch stop by a lake (Relama Tsho). Like the day before, it was a picnic affair. Out of the wind the sun was nice and warm, but the wind was pretty cold and you couldn’t afford to ignore it.
From our lunch stop we kept descending, passing yaks in open fields, heading down along a spur that gave us great views both north and south. Finally a village came into view, which is likely where the trekkers tackling the pass the opposite way from us had stayed previously. It would have meant they climbed 1000 m in a day – crazy. Equally crazy was a guy and girl we passed who were going in the same direction as us; she was wearing jeans.
Finally our camp for the night came into view. It was about 2:30, but felt later, with long shadows on the ground. It was situated essentially in the back yard of a lodge, and felt very strange to be sleeping in our wilderness tents, eating in a mess tent, and using a toilet tent, when all these facilities are literally right there.
Next day
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