5000, then back down again. Now I'm aware that writing about eight days where all I've done is walk could easily slip into the realms of uninteresting. I mean if you wanted to hear about a big fat walk you'd watch Lord of the Rings, and we both know you're not going to do that.Anyway, eight days of trekking has just about broken me. My knees are shot, I don't seem to have full movement in my left ankle and I'm as sunburnt as I've ever been. Now that probably conjures up an image of day-glo pink skin that hurts if you breathe on it. Well that's how sunburnt my arms are. My face is a whole world more burnt than that. It started doing leaking. Which, in my limited experience of faces, isn't something they should be doing. I spent the first hour of yesterday picking crispy, yellow faceleak out of my beard. Even by my low standards of prettiness I looked positively leprous.
The burns evolved a bit since then though. I've now got "crone skin", somewhere between a sultana that you've found behind a cupboard and an over barbecued sausage. Definitely a healthy look for a ginger.
We've had a guide for the last week, Syangbo, he's come out with some great nuggets of wisdom - "why do you want to go to a base camp? That's rubbish. The clue's in the name. Base. It means bottom. Why would you walk to the bottom of something?" (fyi, that was the Learing Base Camp, he was way more scathing about Everest - "more of a queue than a trek"). Syangbo's been out to break us since we made him walk faster than he'd intended on the first couple of days. He ditched the itinerary and has been putting us through ten hours days so that we could see a glacier, climb a mountain and tease the Tibetan border guards.We've also had a porter, Ultimate Mo, who's hardcore as. The first day he took our ergonomic backpacks, tied them together then tied them both to his head with a bit of sack. That's the way he rolls. I appreciate that having a porter makes me softcore, but I have had clean pants everyday.
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