Day 14 of our attempt to hike the EBC. Today was a rough day for me personally. It started with mum waking me up at 5am telling she was done and wasn’t going hike any further. She couldn’t eat the food and she was done. Well after a little bit of cajoling and taking a liking to my breakfast it turns out she could be tempted into hiking a little bit further. Our next stop is a two night acclimatization stay so we might as well go that far and see what happens. Today we had to double up to catch up on our missing day at the beginning so we would hike from Tangboche to Dingboche, a 10.4km hike with a 600 metre elevation gain. On paper it didn’t look to bad. We started out well and mum got into a good rhythm, we were making great progress. Lunchtime was where things got a little ratty for me. I had been noticing the last km before lunch my heart beat seemed awful loud in my ears and that though the elevation was gentle I seemed to be having breath hard to get the air. At first I put it down to lack of breakfast, lack of sleep and anything else I could think of. So we stopped for lunch and loaded up on carbs and hoped that would be that. At first it seemed to work but then as we got into the last hours of the hike I could feel it. As soon as we had any elevation gain I was breathless and having to rest often. This wasn’t so bad as mum rests often. However it got worse and worse as we made our approach to our final destination. It got ridiculous, the last 50 metres from the hotel I had to stop every 10 paces to catch my breath. I was getting tunnel vision and I felt I was in danger of passing out. I managed to limp the last run home and managed to hold on long enough to get a hot chocolate which seemed to cure the issue almost instantly. I had read online that once you reach 4000 metres that’s where most feel the altitude sickness. I’m sure that is the breathing and the passing out is more likely a fueling issue. This seemed to be proven when I got my sats result they are actually quite good for this altitude at 89% where as mum is down to 78% which is still in range. We are at 4300 metres now and it’s starting to cool off. Hopefully tomorrow is a better day!
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