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Asia - part IV (2)

Everest Base Camp, Yangshuo, Heng Shan, Wulingyuan, Hong Kong

Hector Yague
2005-10-08 20:30:25

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Everest Base Camp

During the last few days we'd been talking about organizing a few days tour to the Everest Base Camp, the base point used for professional climbers to summit the Mt. Everest. It's at 5200 meters altitude more less, and it requires two full days of serious driving across the Himalayas to get there from Lhasa. After some discussion back and forth between us regarding budget, schedules, availably and other logistic-related matters, we all four decided to give it go, and in order to ease down the cost of the car rental, we hung some notes around at the hostels's notice boards asking for a fifth member. We got lucky, as two days later we managed to recruit Jeff (from USA) for our expedition. Jeff, 25 y/o, was on a short two weeks holidays in China before returning back to his Business School in Malibu. The two of us ended up becoming good pals and we sure had a good laugh about it all. Overall, the five days expedition to the Everest Base Camp rounded up to 140 dollars each. That's renting a Toyota Land Cruiser 4x4 (with driver of course) and all the entrance fees to the National Park. By the way, if any of you incidentally happen to be thinking about taking this same trip, I recommend you the travel agency inside the Snowlands hostel in Lhasa and ask for a guy called Lhakba. Not only they quoted us competitive prices, but they also helped me big time booking my flight tickets once the tour was concluded. Nice people.

All right, so we woke up early in the morning and got on our 10 years old Toyota Land Cruiser, ready to follow the two days long trail that'd take us to the Mt. Everest itself. Well, from that moment on, what happened inside that car during those two days was sort of surreal. First of all, the road was way bumpier than we'd expected, our speedometer averaging at a striking 40 km/h for most of the trip. Also, having taken a fifth member along, we were quite ...