Mt. Everest 2010 #19 - Base Camp

Gabcast! Mt. Everest 2010 #19



Namaste everybody, from base camp. This is Lucille, and it's April 11th.

I just wanted to give you a little bit of an insight on what life is like at base camp.

Today was another rest day, and so we get up at around 8:00, and usually breakfast is ready for us. The sun hits the tents and warms things up nicely so that's always really nice. Cereal and eggs usually for breakfast and then we just kind of relax.

Lunchtime is usually around 12:00, and then we always have some soup, some potatoes, some meat, and then after that we usually do some washing up and laundry and walk around the tents that are at base camp here.

There are quite a few tents here, there's probably about three hundred or so tents, and not everybody is here yet, there's still about ten teams that haven't arrived yet. The bakery hasn't opened yet, but we're pretty excited about that. It should open in about a week. But the emergency room is open, I guess they're doing quite a business there, people just dropping in. It's staffed by two physicians. The team Domhnall is going with is hosting for the emergency room so that's great.

In the afternoon we always have tea and popcorn, and whenever we go visit some teams, there is always tea available for us, and we always sit down and have tea and chat.

Supper is usually around 6:30, and the highlight today was an apple pie, it was so, so good.

And then we usually go to bed at about 8:30, 10:00 or thereabouts. It's pretty cold, so what we do is we wear our touques and gloves, and then the kitchen staff always makes some hot water bottles for us, which is always really nice to put at the bottom of the sleeping bag.

So, everything is good here, I'm just fighting off a bit of a cold as you can probably tell, but I should be feeling better in a couple of days. The Puja is set for tomorrow, and then hopefully in the icefall the following day.

I will let you know how things are going. Hope everybody is well in Canada.

Love you all, Bye.