The Details of Kathmandu

What am I up to in Nepal? Mostly laying around my hotel room, but I'll certainly try to make it sound more dramatic and exotic and perpetuate the myths that surround Everest and me.

Friday afternoon we had a meeting at the Ministry of Tourism. That was interesting. A number of things have changed in the last year, and to be quite honest, all together they do not encourage future mountaineering tourism. That is all I will say for now. This is a developing story. However, I think the 8 kg of trash that must be brought down by every climber is a great idea. Also, somewhere on Facebook is an expedition picture of our group.

Dawa Steven Sherpa, my expedition leader's, TEDx talk. I know right?! I am quite excited to be on the expedition with him. We ate at his restaurant last night, Mul Chowk, and the pasta was really good with real strong parmesan. The five courses were a little overwhelming though. I tell people I live better on expeditions than I do at home, and last night was proof of that.

Andy Holzer is on my expedition. He is a blind Austrian climber. Just watching him walk around the hotel takes more effort than the rest of us, so it is inspiring to know he will be trucking it uphill with us. It's also interesting to see the total of six partner climbers and photographers that are along with him for the journey. It's a big operation. Two of the camera guys barely ate supper last night running around getting videos of everyone else eating.

Other expeditions I have seen around the Yak and Yeti are Alpine Ascents, Willi Benegas (may be the same as Alpine Ascents), NBC working on an unnamed documentary (probably Joby Ogwen), and a Japanese expedition.

In other news, Billi from the Himalayan Database interviewed me Saturday morning with some basic questions about where I was from, what my experience was, and welcome in general to Nepal.

Billi of the Himalayan Database Interviewing Me

Most of our gear, about 40 kilos of my 55 total kilos of luggage are traveling separately from us to base camp. This is done because it can travel faster than us with no need to acclimate.

Pasang Loading One of My Bags for the Separate Journey to Basecamp

Then we did a few hours of exploring. We went to I think a Hindu temple and then a Buddhist temple. I think this is a Hindu funeral ceremony we saw. They take the people, just a few hours after they have died, wash them in the river, wrap them in blankets, and then burn the body. On second thought, I'm not going to show that picture because you can see some dead guy's legs and a dead woman's head.

On second thought, I'm just going to show a picture of an alley. Nothing particularly interesting about it, it just seemed so symmetrical to me that I took a picture. There are a lot of alleys around here, most aren't this strait, but a fair amount are.

Random alley in the south part of Kathmandu

That's about it for today. My next blog post will probably be from Lukla or north of there, maybe all the way to Namche Bazaar. Turns out by the way, I might have enough bandwidth to upload videos...