New audio update from TA on Pumori.

This is the text of TA’s audio message:

Hi this is TA calling in from Pangboche at 3985 metres. We are in the land of yaks, our guest house is surrounded by oodles of yak pens, and we experienced our first yak jam today, at one of the suspension bridges.   We have passed into the part of the terrain where they start using yak patties, they gather up the yak poop and pat them into patties and place them on the stone walls so they can dry.  Then they pour kerosene over them and burn them in the stove, which we are appreciating tonight because its pretty chilly. 

We started with a warm spell today, clear skies, folks actually caught a glimpse of Everest  before it clouded over by getting up early.  By about midday we started to lose the heat and it started to chill up so we are all dressed really warmly tonight.  Had a wonderful time passing through the rhododendron forest, some deciduous forest with autumn colored leaves and that wonderful smell of autumn.

We are all happy to be here in Pangboche, we are separated from our trekkers for the night they are in Deboche.  We are here early so that we can go to our blessing tomorrow with Lama Geshe.  At the moment, folks are enjoying the sounds of Bob Marley in the dinning room.  We’ve all rehydrated with some warm tea, were going to have some pizza, and momo’s, and finger chips for our dinner, to replenish our energy supplies.  Tomorrow we will head on up to Dingboche.

I realized the other day that I didn’t tell you the story of meeting up with the climbing Sherpa from my 2007 expedition, hes guiding some trekkers and we figured out that we knew each other.  At the time we where doing our knots, I was showing someone a triple bowline and he’d never seen that, so here I was teaching a four time Everest Summiter a new climbing knots he didn’t know.  It was a wonderful little connection with him and had me feeling a little bit confident that evening.  Just thought I would share that story.  Things are going well, people are feeling good, and we will continue upward tomorrow.

Thanks for following along and we will talk to you from Dingboche.

TA