At Everest Base Camp and Kala Patar

This is base camp and of course the famous worlds highest backery that serves the best apple pie and choc chip biscuits on the face of the planet (the altitude may have had something to do with it). Base Camp is basically tents sprawled out on loose rocks at the bottom of a glacier, and if their is a more unhospitable place on earth we don't want to know about it. Some poor bastards have to spend 3 months living between here an the various camps up the mountain to allow their body to acclimatise.
The guy between Ebs and Richo is named Leo, the first Phillapino man to ever summit Everest, a feat that he achieved last year. This year he was working as one of the support crew for a team of three Phillapino women trying to be the first women ever to traverse from the Tibetan side over the summit to the Nepalese side. Leo had us around for some tea and a chat, and turned out to be a really nice bloke..... good luck with the Ice Doctors documentary next year mate!

There was an Aussie bloke named Blair trying to summit, but was not in base camp when we were there (not all bad as the vegemite we were going to give him we got to keep).
This is base camp and the ice fall in the background that leads to camp one (apparently the most dangerous part of the Everest ascent).
Everest is the black peak that doesn't actually look like the tallest mountain. The spikey one at the foreground is Lupste or Nupste (we were never quite sure).





The shots at the bottom are the view at Kala Patar. We awoke at 4:30am, to climb pretty much 400 vertical meters to catch the best views of Everest and the surrounding range. Kala Patar is 5550m above sea level, and was the highest point on our trek. This two hour stretch was by far the hardest, given that we were both a litlle worse for wear at the time due to this section of the Himalayas having virtually no hygene, and the oxygen is not being forced into your lungs at half the force at sea level making everything just that much harder. We were pretty estatic upon reaching the top, our Everest equivolent for now.