Sun 29^th April 2012 Camp 2 6500m

Rest Day

After my immense sleep I actually feel totally refreshed in complete contrast to yesterday when, apart from completing the London Marathon in 2005 (when suffering from a stomach bug and in unseasonably hot sunshine) I have never felt so exhausted.

My moments of exhaustion and emotion were captured by the TV crew doing the WWTW documentary. Just my luck my only moment of fame will be a crying mess in amongst the soy sauce and tomato ketchup bottles!

This is only day 2 at Camp 2. We are scheduled to stay here 3 more nights, then go up to camp 3 halfway up the Lhotse face and back for another night at Camp 2 before going down to Base Camp.

Even by the end of this first day I am regretting not bringing up a book (in the interests of weights and space) as there is the Mess Tent or my ‘shared’ tent and nowhere else to go.

Our tent has a ‘card’ circle who once the meals are finished dive into their game. They are playing ‘Hearts’, a kind of reverse trumps where the aim is to end up with as few a points as possible. Only Hearts and the Queen of Spades score. It looks intimidatingly fiendish and I lack the courage to force my way in if one of the ‘players’ is temporarily absent.

1230 lunch, afternoon nap, 5.30pm supper, bed around 8pm, listen to music sleep around 10pm after listening to my IPod.

Tonight the wind howls around the tent. Huge gusts can be heard approaching, just like a train and then batter and shake the tent with such ferocity that you are immediately awoken and wonder how the tent has not collapsed. In fact we learn that it is only due the tents being occupied that in this wind they do not literally fly off the mountainside.

Sleep is a pattern of drifting in and out of consciousness between seemingly hurricane force winds.