Land Cruiser - another series of “Uh-ohs”. The driver promptly gets underneath, and pulls out a rather bent looking shock absorber, and proceeded to smack it onto the dirt road to try to straighten it! It truly was one of the strangest sights I’ve ever seen! Very quickly though, he gave up, and gave the broken shock to a kid who’s curiosity had brought him to the scene!!! So, off we set in a slightly more bouncy old land cruiser!!!

The next section was through another wide valley with a big lake in. As we progressed through the valley, a series of snow capped mountains came into view, they looked seriously big, and obviously had glaciers on there slopes - the heartbeat raised ever so slightly …… we then arrived at the un-pollution bus station. Basically they have stopped old land cruisers going on the last section up to the base camp, to help control the pollution. So we had to

wait for a while, and transfer to a newer minibus for the last bumpy hour up to the monastery at Rongbuk, where we’d spend the night. Again in the space at the end of the pass we were in where Everest allegedly was, was a huge white cloud!!

We were told by the guide that the guest house only had dorms, and that we could stay in a monks room in the monastery. Ok, we thought. We were led to a little outbuilding within the monastery and shown into a small, extremely basic room with two beds and just full of all kinds of monastery type things!!! Now don’t get me wrong, it was a fantastic experience to sleep in a monastery at nearly 5000m underneath Everest, but this was about as basic as we could handle. It was cold, the window was broken, the bedclothes were definitely not clean, the beds were like ploughed fields, and there was no toilet!!! (Hel said it was like staying in someone’s garden