Unlimited Potential, Up to 8000m

Finally we are off to the Tibet border, leaving Kathmandu to Kodari in about 30 min. The trip in a small bus is going to take us 4 to 5 hours depending on the traffic. We are spending the night in a crappy guesthouse and we’ll wake up very early with the intention of being the first team crossing the border.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodari

We’ve just got the official numbers, and this year we are 7 teams climbing from North side, while 47 are attemting from the easy South route. We’ll be about 200 including climbers, sherpas and Base Camp crew, and 1200 in the South… One Ice Doctor Sherpa has already died in the Western Cwm, along with a trekker on the way to South BC. Now I know I’ve taken the right decission going on the cold and windy North route!

As off today our plan is to spend one night at Kodari, and after that we have decided to drive straight to Nyalam and skipping dirty Zhangmu who was our second stop in the initial plan. We’ll spend two nights in Nyalam and two more at Tingri before we get to our beautiful and quiet Base Camp. We are planning to relax for seven days more at Base Camp before we start moving up that big mountain.

I will be sending satellite updates before I get to Base Camp and from there we’ll work out some solutions to have a decent internet connection.

A million thanks to all my family, friends and sponsors for cheering me up from the distance all these days of standby at Kathmandu. The real adventure is about to begin!

Today I finalized all shopping: spare expedition mittens and headlamp, camping pillow, five different NF expedition bags, and snacks for the trip to BC. I’ve also managed to print out Marc’s photo I’ve got from Mikel yesterday 🙂

I’ve closed the day having dinner with Nelson, my climbing partner for Miami, and Markus the Camera Man from NY. The story about this two guys is very interesting.

Nelson is a top guy who already climbed Everest from South side in 2011 but had to turn back few meters below the summit due to a failure on his oxygen mask. Before starting the expedition only three of us shared emails, and one of the was Nelson. He has a Spanish girlfriend and is extremely friendly. The most interesting thing about Nelson is that he is the Memory Champion in USA. Yes, our memory man! Give him two bricks of poker cards and he will memorize them in less than a minute. There is a Memory World Championship and he is very close to its best mark. He started playing memory games as a hobby, and after he became the USA Memory Champion he decided to make this hobby a way of living. He is currently a “Memory Consultant”. He works with people and corporations delivering workshops on his techniques to store information. He also works for be biggest manufacturer of memory systems for mainframes. He runs demonstrations worldwide and participates in all sort of TV shows in the States. For this expedition he has some sponsors, and he will run an experiment to see how his ability to memorize things gets affected by the high altitude at Mt Everest. And the most exciting thing is that his experiment will be filmed and a documentary produced by a company in New York.

And this is where our Markus from NY comes into the story. Markus is such a cool guy! I wish he could make it with us all the way to the Top, but I’m not sure he has the required level of fitness 😛 Markus is a talented photographer and camera man, and he runs a company back home specialized in producing documentaries all around the world, and filming advertisements for top firms. Markus is happily married and we had so much fun when we asked him about his experience shooting for the top models of Victoria Secret, LOL. I won’t give any details since we were all under the effects of the Everest beer, and I have to respect the so called “professional secret”. His wife must be very proud though, since he always behaves and keeps a very professional attitude while at work 🙂

The initial plan for the documentary was to have a professional camera man joining us on the climb, accompanying Nelson all the way to the top. But due to late notice, Phil could not get another American in the Chinese group visa. Therefore the final plan is to have Markus training Nelson and two Sherpas that have just been hired for the specifics of the filming. Getting visa for two additional Sherpas was an easy task, and that brings a huge benefit to the whole Altitude Junkies Team. Phil has set a condition for these Sherpas to be treated as regular ones, meaning when they are not filming they will have to work on regular tasks with the rest of the crew. AND something very cool is the we’ll be have full disclosure of the footage for private use. I hope they film me when I’m about to reach the summit and while on the Top! This is such a great deal, Phil is a genius 😉

After we finished dinner we grabbed some drinks from a grocery shop, and headed back to the hotel to enjoy the last night Kathmandu. Nelson purchased a set of giant singing bowls that morning and he was so excited, like a kid with a new toy. Few hours after we illicitly occupied the bar at the hotel and switched from beers into all other forms of alcoholic beverages. Now we are proudly called the Altitude Drunkies 😀

I hope the Gods of the mountains protect us from all sort of dangers including the abuse of alcoholic drinks at the Chinese Everest Base Camp 😛

This is a test from the satellite laptop

Today it has not been a very exciting day. I spent most of my day hunting for a new set of cheap yet strong duffle bags to replace the ones I’ve been using since I climbed Island Peak in Nepal few years back. For this Everest expedition I have plenty of new climbing gear. We mountaineers and rock climbers are crazy about our gear, always haunting for new stuff to use up the hill. But at the same time we also have that old harness, helmet or shirt that we refuse to replace years after years, a kind of romantic fetichism 😛

It looks like the fake NF bags with decent quality are all sold out so I just wasted half of my day 😛

Then I spend a lot of time setting up my designated expedition laptop. Phil provide us with four of them at BC, and hopefully a reliable internet connection, as well as satellite phones and Thuraya Nova SIM cards, all for free! He believes on the importance of us to be in touch with our families and friends during the time we are resting at BC.

I’ve also worked on my blog and sending some emails and FB updates. Not a very exciting day but somehow productive.

Yallah, one more day in this nice hotel drinking Everest beer and we are off to Kodari to cross the border and start our trip in Tibet.

Last night we had a great time enjoying our Team Dinner in a nice local restaurant at the touristic Thamel district in Kathmandu, with plenty of beer and red wine. After that I had few more beers at the Cortyard Hotel, which has a gorgeous garden beautifully decorated and illuminated, the perfect place to scape from the noisy streets of Kathmandu. I finished the day with a glass of whiskey in my comfy suite. Unfortunately the Hotel gets quite busy these days, and we only have reserved two nights, meaning that we have to move from these luxurious rooms into basic ones, and sharing with someone from the Team.

I’ve got quite lucky since my designated roommate is Ole, a very nice guy from Denmark. He is becoming quite popular these days, since he is running amazing challenges all around the World. He just run 7 marathons in 7 continents in 7 days, isn’t that amazing?! Before that he crossed El Estrecho de Gibraltar in Spain very early in the season, with freezing temperatures, setting a mark of 4.5h and being the first doing it this season, almost a month before the second one. He also cycled Lake Titikaka in Peru and now he is ready to climb Mt Everest. He does not consider himself a mountaineer, because he has only climbed one peak in all his life, and what a peak, Mt Manaslu in Nepal!

He climbed it with Phil and some of the Altitude Junkies going to Everest this time.

This morning I’ve got a FB msg from someone who follows my FB page (Upto8000m) and we have a common friend, Francisco Jose Garcia Romo, the President of the Spanish Mountaineers with Cancer. The message was a bit socking I should say. Mikel just lost his brother Marc in a traffic accident three days back, and he is writing me to ask if I can bring a photo of his brother to Everest. Marc was a passionate climber and his family is planning to take his ashes to the top of the mountains he used to climb. Marc wanted to climb Everest one day, and now I have the mission to take his photo with some words from his family to the Top of the World. What a beautiful ask… I feel so honored and touched by the suffering of this family who just lost a loved one… Mikel and I had a phone conversation last year when I was looking for form a team to climb Passu Peak in Pakistan. We never met after that, and he just knew about my big climb because Jose made a mention on his FB wall. World is so small… Mikel and his family have to climb the biggest mountain this days, I hope they recover from the lost soon. Rest in peace Marc, we’ll climb this one together and get as far as we can.

Jose is a good friend of mine and every time I visit Madrid I go the shop where he works selling outdoor and climbing gear, and we talk about our projects and have good laugh. I love what his is doing with the AEAC (Asociacion Espanola de Alpinistas con Cancer), and I love his passion for the beautiful big mountains in the Pamirs. Every year he guides small groups to Peak Lenin, Pobeda and Khan Tengri. Few weeks before I left to Kathmandu I visited him in his shop in Ribera de Curtidores (he works there off season), and he told me about climbing Pobeda with a friend, nothing commercial, just a romantic climb. He was diagnosed kidney cancer when he was going through a medical check up right before starting his first expedition to that Peak, so coming back and climb it means a lot to him. Since I arrived to Kathmandu I keep thinking on my recent unsuccessful climb of Khan Tengri and my desire to come back soon. There are thousands of peaks to be climbed, but right now my dream is to climb Peak Pobeda and Khan Tengri both in the same season. It’s kind of funny that I’m thinking on that now that I have such a big task ahead, but that is me, always dreams and setting up new plans…

Today I woke up in a beautiful and comfortable suite in the Courtyard Hotel, I took a long warm shower and went downstairs to have breakfast and meeting my climbing partners. Right after that, we started our first team meeting, and Phil Crampton, our Expedition Leader, did an amazing presentation, very inspiring and motivational. Unfortunately the presentation started with some bad news. Our schedule to cross the Tibetan border has been delayed due to politics and we are now forced to spend few more days relaxing at Kathmandu. I must say I’m happy about that, since I’ve had the most hectic three weeks of my life before departing and so now I have plenty of time for relaxing, shopping the last pieces of gear and doing lots of pending task in the Internet (including some work related)

One of the members had a friend recording short video interviews of each of us. I must admit I’m terrible with this sort of things, but I don’t want to be the weirdo here refusing to be part of the game.

Tonight we’ll have our first team dinner in a nice restaurant in Thamel. Before that I don’t want to do anything productive, just going for lunch and beers with my new climbing partners and tomorrow I’ll see if I can get a nice expedition T-Shirt done from the local guys who do beautiful hand shedding in a shop very close to the hotel.

This is the final list of climbers in Altitude Junkies 2013 Everest Team

• Phil Crampton (UK/USA)
• Nelson Dellis (USA)
• Javier Fernandez (Spain)
• Christopher Goodwin (UK)
• Robert Kay (USA)
• Ole Mose Nielsen (Denmark)
• Edita Nichols (Lithuania)
• Markus Roth (Australia)
• Edward Searle (UK)
• Margaret Watroba (Australia)
• Holly Wright (UK)

We are pleased to have our regular crew of Sherpa and Tibetans under the directorship of our famous Sirdar, Dorjee ‘IMAX’ Sherpa. This years staff supporting the expedition are as follows:

Climbing Sherpa

• Dorjee Sherpa (Sirdar)
• Pasang Ongcho Sherpa
• Kami Neru Sherpa
• Pasang Nima Sherpa
• Chhongba Nurbu Sherpa
• Ang Gelu Sherpa
• Sangee Sherpa
• Tarkey Sherpa
• Jangbu Sherpa
• Fu Dorjee Sherpa
• Pemba Zyabu Sherpa
• Pasang Gelu Sherpa
• Lakpa Tenzing Sherpa
• Lakpa Dorjee Sherpa
• Kitchen Sherpa
• Da Pasang Sherpa (Head Cook)
• Pemba Ngtar Sherpa (ABC Cook)

Kitchen Tibetans

• Gelje
• Tashi Chusung
• Tenzing
• Tashi (1)
• Norbu (1)
• Kasang Dorjee
• Norbu (2)
• Tashi (2)

After few weeks of pre-expedition stress, packing stuff up to the last minute before my taxi arrived home (literally) I took a Flydubai flight to Kathmandu where my Everest 2013 Expedition from North Side is set to begin.

I had an awesome time with my friends on Tuesday night, thanks to my beautiful girlfriend, who organized a surprise farewell party at The Six Senses in the Palm Island. She did an amazingly good job contacting most of my best friends in Dubai, although she didn’t know most of them yet. I finished my last hipoxic training session (5800m) on Tuesday around 8pm and I just wanted to go for dinner with her and relaxing for few hours before resuming all preparation work. I parked my car at her place and first thing she did was opening a bottle of beer for me. Then she drove us in my car to that beautiful place and… surprise! Many of my friends were there. Some others joined us as I was getting more and more surprised. The following day I did my packing and she took me for a 90min full body massage at one of the best places in Dubai. What an amazing pre-expedition retreat. She helped me out the following day with my packing up to the last minute before we left to the airport. She has been extremely helpful, running some important errands that saved me a lot of time and stress.

Now that all stress is over, these are the lessons I learned these days:

– Get the ones you love to help you with logistics, you’ll save lots of time and energy and they’ll feel part of the Everest Dream

– Do not leave packing up to the last day. Even if you have everything ready and ticked in your packing list, it’s better to have the duffle bags loaded few days before. This will give you psychological relief and distress.

– Get 3 or 4 days off work before the expedition to run last minute errands calmly, and especially to share time with the ones you love the most…

Today I have arrived at Kathmandu Airport with no surprises. The flight was busy with so many young nepalis coming back home, but I went through immigration smoothly and all my luggage was delivered with not loses or defects. I had to pay around 700AED for 14kg over my 40kg allowance. Very disappointed that I was not allowed to pre-purchase more 😦

One driver from the hotel was waiting with an old Mercedes to pick me up, and I am extremely pleased with the quality of this small boutique style hotel in the middle of the Thamel district in Kathmandu. The lovely american couple who owns and runs the Cortyard Hotel greeted me with an Everest beer, and I was so happy that I did no even checked my room right away. I’ve just enjoyed the company, nice conversation and delicious stake that one of them personally cooked for me. Amazing service… now I understand why our Expedition Leader, Phil Crampton talks wonders about this place. After couple of hours chatting and drinking with them, I moved my tired butt to my room and I have to say that it looks superb, a traditionally decorated suite with plenty of space to even live there for weeks.

I have met few trekkers and climbers over few beers in the garden, but I’m still unsure which one is in my team. I will find that out tomorrow, and we’ll also hold our first Team meeting were I’ll see all of them. I’ve heard there are some issues with the Chinese group visa, so lets see what Phil has to tell us tomorrow…