FEELING the THIN AIR

Sixth day of the Everest Base Camp trekking. Last night we slept in the 4,400 meters Dingboche village and today it is an acclimatization day. So we will hike high and we will come back to Dingboche to sleep. In the morning we went for a few hours hike to a "hill" close by. The "hill" is 4,900 meters. Pretty amazing to me. It is higher than Mount Blanc, the highest European peak. Mount Blanc on the border between Italy and France is "just" 4,810 meters. Again pretty amazing for me. I grew up thinking to those 4,810 meters like a taboo. And I guess, my body thought the same. Today for the first time I had the feeling I was running out of breath while I was hiking. It is a very strange feeling. You feel like your legs are just fine, you could walk forever ... but you are out of breath. So you have to stop for a rest pretty often. something like every 20 steps, you rest for 30 seconds. Really a scary feeling. Like you have suddenly smaller lungs. And really it is like this. There is not enough oxygen, and the brain and the muscles need it. So the heart has to run much faster. Bust all this process is not automatic. The body needs time to understand it. In the meantime you run out of breath, even if you are walking. A pretty scary feeling. You feel suddenly old and useless. But once you are down things are suddenly much better. Anyways, here are some of the pictures that I took today. The day was still a little bit cloudy, but the it was not bad at all. Actually the cloud made it easier, because we did sweat at all. This is the way going up ...

And this is me, really exhausted and cold on the top. Really feeling the thin air kicking my butt ...

... tomorrow is an other day, but I really hope that I will feel better. The highest point of our trek is 5,600 meters, and I really need to get used to less and less oxygen ...