I woke up to a bit of frustration. I had 5 voicemails on my phone, yet I couldn’t access my voicemail; basically, it wasn’t detecting my password input. I spent 3 hours of my morning trying to work it out with AT&T. Answer me this; why is it that when I call the American help line, I get a representative that is clearly offshore and hard to understand, but if I call the international help number, I get a US based representative that is easy to understand and is more knowledgeable? IRONIC. Luckily, Jasmine spent a good portion of her evening helping me by checking my VM from her end.
After beating my head against the wall on the VM issue, I went downstairs for my free breakfast. I ended up sitting with 3 other teammates and having a long chat session. I’m not normally one much for talk, but we all had some great experiences to talk about. It’s a bit different when you have the choice to hang out together vs. you are chained by the hip on the trail.
We decided to meet back up at 2:00 PM and go to the shopping district we had our last group dinner at the previous night; at this point, 3 of the team were already in the air on the way home. We stopped in at a watch shop on the way to the restaurant; it amazed me there was a shop selling $1,000 watches (some Swiss outdoorsie models) in Kathmandu when the is so much poverty evident right out the street. Just for the record, I stuck with my el-cheapo Garmin watch.
Lunch was good, I had pepperoni pizza. I seriously am going to have to get back on the wagon when I get back home so that I don’t undo all this great work I’ve done on my weight. I am, however, taking a week off exercise after what I’ve put my body through. We were up above a busy intersection as we are lunch, so we traffic watched. Kathmandu doesn’t have traffic lights; there are policeman at every major intersection to direct traffic. We did see inactive traffic lights; our guess is they are not used because the constant power outages in the city. Or perhaps it is just a way to provide more jobs.
We did a little more browsing, but headed back to the hotel to meet our sherpa Kami that flew out with one of our sick group members. I really liked Kami; he appeared to be the low man on the totem pole of the local staff, but he bent over backwards the most for us. Great guy. I also love the fact he tells us he has summited Everest just two times. That is a huge accomplishment, there should be no “just” in that sentence. Kami presented us with Khatas (ceremonial scarfs) and placed them around our necks. Very special, and I was glad to be able to say goodbye.
After Kami departed, our lunch group met again for a evening supper. We ate at Le Sherpa, an upscale restaurant; my $20 meal here would have been $50 back in the states. This is the same place we had our first team dinner with AC, so for two of us, it was ending where it began. We headed back to the hotel to find a Hindu wedding in full swing. We watched for a few moments, and then went our separate ways for the night.
Trekking Geek 