8th – Rest day

To underline the mayhem in the dormitory around midnight someone was getting ready to leave and decided to start blaring music on their tin can quality speakers. One of the group had woken up and yelled at them to turn it off (but in much less polite terms) which luckily had resulted in them quieting down. But the locals are apparently not used to others commenting on what they are doing – a hush had gone through the entire dorm everyone had quieted down, at least just for a short while.

During last night and early morning, we were hit by what sounded like a storm. But as suddenly it had started just as suddenly it ended again a few hours later. Apparently a group that had left early for the summit had gotten hit by it and had had to turn back.

When waking up around 0800 I hadn’t gotten the best start of the day; horrible sleep, nausea, lack of appetite and when starting moving around a headache started forming. And a rumbling tummy didn’t help.

This meant that breakfast at 0900 didn’t result in much being eaten. At 1000 we met up for a short acclimatization trek to 300m above the camp (because rest day in the mountains is acclimatization day). The climb was gentle and slow and only a bit more than an hour after departure we arrived at our destination. We had a 30-45 minutes break before returning to camp at 1300 and having lunch half an hour later. Luckily my appetite seemed to have (partially) returned at that point, and both headache and nausea seem to have disappeared.

The view from the 4500m point. You can just see the camp in the center.

There is nothing going on for the rest of the day where we gather our strength and ready ourselves for the summit day tomorrow. The wind has been picking up compared to yesterday’s afternoon but I don’t expect that it will be an issue for us later.