Everest Base Camp Day 12

I thought this marathon might be of interest to Matthew Hooton as he couldn’t make the Southern Lakes Half Marathon last month. He’s a great lover of the region and it raises a lot of money for charity so I look forward to viewing his registration.

The course is incredibly nasty. Apart from the cold, it has lots of rocks and uphill. The fastest time last year for a non Nepali was a bit over six hours!

As we headed down from Gorak Shep, we again saw the glacier.

I had a small fall on the way to Lobouche, where we had morning tea. I was okay, but as you can see one of my drink bottles did not fare so well. It’s quite annoying as it now only holds around 700 ml instead of a litre!

We’re walking alone the narrow trail, with the valley stretching below us.

Then you end up in the valley itself which is much easier trekking.

There is an area with scores of memorials to fallen climbers. This one is for Scott Fischer who was a famous guide and mountaineer who died in the May 1996 disaster.

You can see many of the other memorials lined up.

Then it’s more narrow trails to descend on, but with great views to look at.

Then we hit more wonderful valley walking with peaks in the background.

A baby yak. So cute.

We descend almost 1,000 metres over the day.

Two huge landslides as a reminder of the instability of the region.

We spent the night at Orsho, which is very small and not on most maps. Will blog more on that tomorrow.

Spent around six hours trekking today, but much more relaxing as it was mainly flat or downhill, and the wide valley sections are so easy. Just what we needed to recover from a pretty tiring previous day.

Despite the descent I still had a very mild headache from the altitude sickness, but almost inconsequential compared to previous days.