Home Sweet Home

My home at base camp - you can see the Khumbu ice fall behind me.

One of the reasons I was excited to get to base camp was because we each have our own tent and no longer have to pack up each night and pack up each morning to move somewhere new.

We arrived at base camp on Friday afternoon (8th April).  Within about two
hours I’d made home.  For those of you who know me this will come as no surprise, everything is now neatly folded/ordered and has its own place.  I don’t have a knickers drawer but I do have a ‘knickers area’ – top left side of the tent next to socks and neatly folded t-shirts/tops!

My tent is yellow, a colour I love, so that’s good.  The views from my tent are absolutely spectacular.  I have clear views of the khumbu ice fall, I can see most of Everest, Lhotse and all around staggering mountains, glaciers and crazy rock stuff!

A very neat tent!

You may have seen pictures of Everest base camp or indeed even been here but I wonder what your perception of it is if you haven’t seen it?  The first time I came here, two years ago, I was really shocked.  Mostly because I thought it would be flat and only covering a small area.  Base camp is actually on a glacier, a  glacier that carries with it lots of rocks and boulders..and there’s nothing flat about it.  It’s rocky and steep, crevasses running through it (there’s one just outside my tent!) and it covers a huge area.

A view of Everest base camp

We have two large tents in the middle of the camp, one is where the cooking
is done and the other is the dinning tent.  There’s also a toilet tent.  I say toilet, it’s rocks built up around a barrel, which once full gets carried out by porters (in recent years there’s been a big push to keep base camp clean).  And finally there’s a shower tent.  Every few days (if you’re a boy it tends to be weeks) the kitchen heat up about three litres of water
and we have a camp shower bag – simple but effective.
Base camp is 5,300m.  My resting heart rate is between 70-80bpm.  Just by doing very little up here I’m acclimatizing, my blood is busy making extra red blood cells to make the most of the oxygen available and my body is working extra hard just to do what it would normally do at sea level.  Up here it’s important to drink about 4/5 litres of fluid a day (which isn’t much more than my normal tea intake!).  And despite not always having much of an appetite I’m making myself eat lots.

I like base camp…  Good job really, being as I’ll be here for the next two months!