Trek Day 12 - Phortse to Namche Bazaar - 11/12/10

We woke up this morning to find that it had rained over night and we were surrounded by pea soup fog.  My cough had calmed down a bit and was back to the normal dry Khumbu hacking thing.  Three cheers for antibiotics and teacher-nurses!  After breakfast, we tip toed our around puddles through the village and then went down a steep slope to cross a river.  After that it was steep up for an hour.  It was a completely different atmosphere from any of the other days.  The fog was thick, water was dripping from the trees, and we had a few minor snow flurries.  At the top, we stopped at a little restaurant for tea and chocolate and then headed back to Namche.

When we got to Namche, the fog was so thick that you couldn't see from one side of the village to the other.  We got to our lodge and I had a piping hot indoor shower.  After lunch, I walked over the the Lord Buddha pharmacy and once again got my temperature, blood pressure, etc. checked.  They made sure I had enough amoxicillin to complete the cycle and also gave me some cough syrup to help me sleep. After that it was internet and apple pie at the Everest Bakery (the place is great, by the way, so I highly recommend it next time you're in the neighborhood).  Both of my caps had gotten stinky from all the trekking, so I bought a new one to sleep in.  It's a really nice, yak wool, knitted, lined cap skull cap with "Kalapathar" (misspelled) embroidered on it.  I couldn't resist.  And besides, I earned it.

The beginnings of the bazzar

Every Saturday in Namche there's a huge bazaar with traders coming from all over Khumbu and some from over the pass in Tibet.  It's basically a giant flea market where you can buy anything from clothing, to trekking gear to solar panels to produce.  Traders had been arriving all day and had been setting up for tomorrow, so I took a quick walk through.  It was cold and my hair was still wet, so I headed back to the lodge.


Since there's no way that planes are flying, we briefly considered staying in Namche for another day -- we'd rather be stranded here.  But after a discussion with Kopil, we decided it would be better to get back to Lukla so that we can get out when planes start flying again.