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We have finally arrived in Cho Oyu basecamp! We are happy to be here, although part of our equipment is still in Old Chinese Basecamp (2 days walk from here). We partly solved the yak issue. We hope to welcome the last yak shift tomorrow (Thursday).
Basecamp will be our home for the next month. The coming days we'll spend our energy to build a comfortable base from where we'll work our way up the mountain. We are early in the season and the first team to arrive in basecamp this year. The Cho Oyu looks impressive from closeby. High on the mountain, we still need some more snow for a continuous ski descent from the summit. Luckily it's snowing right now!
Our basecamp is situated at 5715 m above seal level, still 2486 m to go! The temperature at night is -20 degrees Celcius. The airpressure is currently 504 hPa, (half the pressure at sea level). Apart from some breatheless awakenings at night (Joost), minor headaches (Greg) and some episodes of diarhea (Herman), we feel great!
This weekend we plan our first climb up the mountain to carry the first loads to camp 1 at 6400 m.
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