Everest Base Camp Trek – Day 10
Date: 21 November 2017
Walked to: Kyanjuma
Distance: 11.8 miles
Altitude: Sleeping at 3,600

Oh, the joy of losing altitude! Even though we actually climbed more today than we have for a week, we also lost a lot of height; it’s noticeably warmer (well, less freezing) back in Kyanjuma – to the extent that I’ve even had a shower. The bliss of clean hair – for me, and, no doubt, for everyone else. Oh, and that breathing thing is a while lot easier too!

Today was largely about retracing our footsteps, although the lovely walk through the rest of the Pheriche valley and the early part of the Imja Khola valley was a different route from the way up. We had a break in the village of Pangboche, where we had stopped before – not knowing at the time that the tea house was run by another Sherpa with a fine pedigree of climbing Everest, and whose cafe hosts a number of artefacts from the 1953 expedition. We had lunch in Thyangboche, home to one of Nepal’s famous monasteries (something I neglected to mention when I was moaning about the as the urine soaked toilet carpet I took such objection to in my blog from Day 5) before carrying on down – and then brutally back up, for ages, to get back to the tea house at Kyanjuma, where we originally stayed on the third night.

Coming back, the tea house seems incredibly posh. If my room were shown to me at almost any other time, I’d recoil in horror, but after ten days, a cold room with a mouldy ceiling, a bathroom and sheets that ‘almost’ look clean seems to be the height of class. The hosts played a documentary film about climbing Everest tonight. Safe to say, it didn’t inspire me to take up climbing at all. Those people are mad: I’ll settle for being mildly eccentric!