Waiting for Luggage & Final Preparations

It was a better night’s sleep, but the room was very warm. I did not realise in the middle of the night that there was air con in the room. I got up feeling more rested and less tired than yesterday.

I was tracking my iTag and it was still in Mumbai. Kiran called Indigo again, and I messaged them on WhatsApp and they said they would help. When I saw my iTag move to the side of the terminal, I felt reassured. The last track picked up the tag next to the runway so I felt like this was really good news.

I spent the morning doing admin including clearing my Dropbox, all things I should have done in the UK but just ran out of time. I must always remember to get admin done prior to travelling as doing it remotely is so much more time consuming.

I walked into Thamel a couple of times to get lunch, and look around a bit more. Thamel was busy, smoggy and chaotic as normal. But it’s such an interesting and fascinating place.

My bag finally arrived at the hotel at around 6pm. Geljen Sherpa and Deha came too, to assist, and that was good of them. Geljen looked through my kit for about 20 seconds, and said ok. He barely speaks English but that’s ok. We work it out between us. I am glad I had done my own kit list and doing Ama Dablam 18 months earlier was great preparation for knowing the kit I would need.

In the evening, I went to a restaurant close to the hotel. It was New Year’s Eve for Nepal despite it being April, and lots of people were out on the streets. I ate a pizza and steak, and fresh carrot juice, watermelon juice and pomegranate juice. I wanted to beef up as much as possible before the expedition. When I got back to the hotel, I weighed in on the Withings scales at 71.95kg which I was pleased about. I had aimed to be 75kg but had found it very hard to put on weight due to the high level of cardio training I had done prior to the Everest trip.

I packed up two big bags and there was just so much to pack. The bags seemed really heavy. It took at least an hour to pack everything, there was so much stuff. The DJI Mavic 4 drone was very heavy, as was the DJI RS5 gimball, and I was starting to regret them. With DJI FlySafe being an absolute pain in the backside to deal with, not to mention the cost and difficulty of getting a drone permit, I really felt like this could be a bad idea trying to take a drone to Everest.

I got to bed around midnight knowing I probably sleep restlessly with the wake up time planned for 6:10am.