Resting

I woke up at 6 am, and after 10 hours of sleep, I felt good. Best of all, my altitude headache was gone. I still got out of breath packing my bag, though. After a tasty "Swiss breakfast," cooked over a yak dung fire, I headed back up the trail two hours to Yak Kharka, where I slept the night before last. There were a couple steep climbs, which made the back of my head throb with pain on each step, but the headache went away with rest.

In Y.K., which isn't a town, but a collection of about five hotels, I picked up Mike, and our new porter, Rudra. Mike wasn't feeling that great, so he took a Diamox.

I swear, it's about to charge

We're limiting ourselves to 300 m a day now, which we should have done from the start. That means we only had a 30 minute walk up 150 (I went up 150 from Gunsang already) to Letdar. We're in Alpine territory now, so there are no trees, just scraggly bushes. And lots of rocks.

Letdar is another "town" of hotels, but only four this time. It will be our penultimate stop before crossing Thorong La. Lunch of potato momos, then we walked up the trail an hour, and maybe 300 m up, to aclimatize. One thing strange about walking in the mountains that I never realized, is the extremes of temperature you have to deal with. When the sun is shining on you, it gets amazingly hot, and you start taking off clothes. But the instant you step in the shade, or the sun goes behind a cloud (or sets), you're freezing your arse off. The main time of discomfort is sitting around before bed. Once I get under a blanket I'm fine, since I wear all my clothes (which I haven't changed for five days). Including wooly cap and down booties.