2007-05-20 Sunday Periche -> Lobuche altitude 4940m

We started at 07:45 and arrived by 14:00. It was a very hard haul, with the last part of the trek being exacerbated by the lack of oxygen - I was certainly noticing it, and I think many of the group were too. I arrived with an extemely severe headache that lasted four hours; had a sore throat; eustachian tube problems and a dose of earache. I saw the doctor here, and he reckoned I had an ear infection, and prescribed fairly tough antibiotics for it. In many ways the first part of the trek today was like going up to Seathwaite from Seetoller, in the Lake District. It consists of a very flat, very rock strewn wide valley. Obviously it is on a very much larger scale - it is enormous. We are starting to meet people who have summitted. The lodge here (which is well known to the guides and sherpas as a place that extracts the absolute maximum of cash out of its visitors) is absolutely packed with people going up and coming down. One of them is a French woman, who summits solo, who has been moving up at more or less the same time as us, was questioning us about the expedition. She was intrigued up to the point where members of our group described the summit expedition as taking a exercise bike up to the South Col. This she just found silly, and was giggling for much of the evening. Sleeping here was a new altitude record for me.