Greetings from sunny Kathmandu. An uneventful trip with Turkish airlines, nice new planes which ran on time and food which did not poison me (an improvement from my last long haul flight). Woke up to see the snow capped mountains of Afghanistan below and then the Himalayas. The mountains don't look a bit daunting from 30'000. I met up with John 2 sticks in Istanbul and the Cleggie and Sam who flew in to Kathmandu from the USA at the same time. We are now established in our base camp, the hotel Shankar, in the middle of Kathmandu.
It is the same hotel Gill and I stayed in when we visited about 10 years ago, it is a large "colonial" hotel which was seriously damaged during the earthquake a few years ago but I am pleased to say it is just as good. We sat in nice warm sunshine drinking Everest beer (what else?) whilst our guide gave us a briefing.
The first worry is that instead of sherpas we are having yaks "because it is too cold for sherpas", so why is it not too cold for us?
The second worry is we have to get up at 4am tomorrow to catch a 6am flight to the most dangerous airport in the world. There are six flights a day, all depart before 7.30am so as to give the pilot a fighting chance of seeing the runway before the mist comes down. Once he starts his approach he has to land as there is not enough space to abort the landing. There is a certain amount of nervous gallows humour amongst the four of us at the prospect, apparently some airlines (including Lufthansa) don't have a row 13 as people believe it is dangerous, do they think rows 12 and 14 will survive the crash?
Just in case our guide has issued us with body bags, he says they are to keep our stuff in but we are not so sure.
Will we survive the flight? Tune in tomorrow to find out?