We travelled along the Friendship Highway, dodging the remains of some landslides (there's been a lot of rain recently) towards Mount Everest and bush camped within the park to get up at 4am the following morning to head towards the mountain which hopefully wouldn't be covered in cloud! The roads were windy and it was a little scary as we darted ditches and rocks in the dark in torrential rain. Late morning we finally got the first glimpse of Everest much to everyone's delight and it wasn't too covered in cloud! We were heading to a hotel (it was a local's tent) to stay for the night to maximise our chance of a clear mountain view. On the way, we stopped at Rongbuk Monastery and at 5100m it is the highest religious building in the world.
At altitude every bit of exercise is a slow slog so we spent the afternoon walking to 'base camp' which I think everyone was very disappointed with. It wasn't the climber's base camp that you see in the photos with all the tents put up everywhere, it was a small hill with the same view of the mountain that we could see from the hotel. It was a bit of a surreal evening as we dined in the local's house and watched the kettle being boiled in the centre of the tent on Yak dung and tried to communicate with our hosts whose English was limited to 'Hello'.
After the sun went down and the moon came out, Everest really revealed itself as the cloud cleared to reveal all 8844m of mountain. Although visibly huge we were viewing it from a valley of much smaller mountains and I can't help but think that it would just be any other mountain blending into others if we could have seen the whole mountain range. We all felt incredibly lucky though as there had been people waiting a week to see the mountain and we just popped in for the 24 hours. The morning we left it was covered in thick cloud again!
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