Miro Caban

We are leaving Kathmandu tomorrow.

On March 25th we thoroughly checked the tents that I've had stored here for the past two years in barrels. All of them are alright so we take some with us for building the altitude camps (C1-C3) on the mountains. The remaining tents will be air freighted back to the Czech Republic after we come back from Cho Oyu. We also checked what the cook packed for us, added few bombs for the cookers and paid the agency for its service. Because of the problems with the Maoists there has been insufficient supply of gasoline to Kathmandu so we will get the juice for our generator later on in China. We were quite unpleased to find out that China had decreased the load for one Yak down to 40 KGs. This will add more cost to our expedition since instead of 9 Yaks we will need 17.

In the afternoon we met with the agency's representative Ms. Elizabeth Hawley who takes care of the statistics regarding the climbers and climbing of eightthousanders in Nepal. Another representative, Jeevan Shrestha, wished us uneventful climbing and with a big smile added that he would see us again in two months. Now, it's the time for an evening relaxation and at 6:30 am local time we are leaving for Nialam. The GMT/UTC increases to +8 hrs (considering most of the Europe is GMT +1 and switching for the summer time now the real difference is +6 hrs).

It's been a nice sunny day in Kathmandu and I wish you the same,

Miro