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• By Monika Paris
• Posted October 20, 2016

Day 4: From Namche Bazaar to Phortsetanga

After a solid rest day in Namche Bazar with a lot of food including a German “Apfelkuchen”, buckets of tea and even a massage, we set out this morning at around 8:00 am to climb our way up to Phortsetanga. We said goodbye to our newly found friends who had climbed Everest and sent us on our way with a lot of good advice. One advice was to continue our journey very slowly!! With that in mind, we changed our initial plan to hike all the way to Dohle today, and decided to sleep one more night below 4000 meters to give our bodies a chance to acclimatize better.

However, we had lunch at almost 4000 meters in Monjdanda. That was great as it allowed us to experience the higher altitude without completely committing to it yet. Lunch at a tea house with spectacular views of Amadablang, Thamsarku, and Khamthaga in brilliant sunshine at that altitude was a great teaser for what lies ahead of us.

Along the way, we learned how our very “smooth” trail was built. Don’t get me wrong, the path follows the Nepalese trail rule of constantly going up and down, but it’s surface was even and great to hike. This is accomplished by manually chiseling down the roocks to make the trail smooth. Donations are collected to support the effort and there is still a long way to go.

We also learned first-hand about Pemba’s Everest Marathon course as we had a chance to walk it. How anyone can run it, eludes us!

Tonight we are staying at the River View teahouse located right next to the Dudh Koshi the river that runs down from Everest. Steven could not resist the temptation to, at least, feel how cold the water is and if a quick swim might be an option. He realized quickly that it would not be a good idea as the water temperature was barely above freezing close to 2 degrees Celsius according to our Nepalese friends.

We had a great day and are looking forward to our next stage which will take us to Machermo tomorrow.