The second day we had to say goodbye to one of our members, the heat of the day before was extremely unfriendly to them, and they made the decision to turn back when it was possible to do so, rather than continue into day 2 where it would soon be impossible to turn back.
Breakfast was delicious and very filling. I enjoy my muña tea whenever I can.
We set off on what felt like a relatively easy progress, but today we’d be ascending 800m today, quite the ascent and will unfortunately become relevant soon.
The hiking was mostly switchbacks (zigzags) which I prefer as I can look ahead at the end of each segment and pretend that’s the last one. Una mas, one more.
Just before the first pass we stopped for lunch, once again a well prepared meal by our cooks.
It’s now I’ll bring up something that I feel intrepid have done wrong. The other group we merged with for this trail were coming from the Amazon jungle (where we are going next), they’ve not had much time to acclimatise.
There is a mantra in mountaineering, climb high sleep low. You sleep lower than the highest altitude you reached that day. There is plenty of evidence to show that this helps your body adapt to the altitude. On day 1 we reached camp 1 at the highest altitude we reached. We didn’t descend. Apparently they used to drop down but there were problems with that other camp site.
Arriving at our lunch site!
Back to our hike, after lunch we reached the first pass, and one of our members who was not doing well started really not doing well. I won’t go into any detail except to say that the correct term is severe acute mountain sickness. We all worked together and they were able to continue with our group, but it was not great to see it happen.
Once we got to the second pass we hit the wind, and it got really cold, but it also marked the beginning of our descent. We were at 4,440m and made our way down.
However we had our largest obstacle ahead — the quarry itself. We had to make our way down a very steep rock quarry, I don’t have any good photos of it, frankly because I spent my entire energy and concentration on not slipping. It would be almost impossible to do it without hiking poles.
The descend to camp 2 was probably the most difficult part for me, I felt like I spent the entire time walking on my toes.
Camp 2 was once again wonderfully setup by our porters and cooked, we arrived around 4pm and after unloading our kit into our tents we had afternoon tea, followed by dinner at 6pm. I think we were all in bed by 7:30pm and asleep by 8pm.
On night one there was someone (I shall not name them) that snored very loudly. On that second night I awoke to what was a different but also audible snoring, but something was odd. I needed to go pee, so eventually I got out of my tent — to discover that there was a horse, next to my tent, “snoring” away.
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