About an hour after we camped a big blue Chinese truck backed up to the camping area and started unloading next to us. Two youngish European men jumped out and came immediately over to us and introduced themselves. They were John, a Canadian living in Sweden, and Declan (great name) and Irish guy living in Sweden too.

They were very friendly. It was so nice to meet really friendly people. It was what we had hoped for at EBC.

Turns out they were filming a Californian man who planned to ski down from the summit of Everest. They planned to transmit the video and photos back "live" via the first high-speed internet connection direct from Everest. Of course there had been previous internet connections from base camp, but via satellite phones at slow speed. John and Declan's connection, they said, would be fast enough to transmit video live.

It wouldn't actually be live. There was a Sherpa link. The skier up on the mountain had 4 Sherpas with him. They would take video and bring it down the mountain then hand it to John and Declan who would then broadcast the pre-taped footage over the internet They were quite confident and told us we could check our email the next day once they had setup the satellite link.

John and Declan were sponsored by a Swedish dairy company. They had a group of Sherpas with them, setting up camp and cooking. They had several tents up in about an hour.

After the Swedish team a lone German arrived on foot. He had a big bushy beard that puts mine to shame and long hair. He looked like the kind of guy that could live in the Alps for months. His name, appropriately, was Wolf. He had hiked in via Old Tingri, the route we were considering to take out. We really didn't want to ride back over the steep and rocky Pang La.

Wolf had a small, very rugged, low profile expedition style tent and set it up a little bit away from the rest of us. He planned only to climb the mountain as far as camp one, a.k.a. Advanced Base Camp or ABC.

Then a truck carrying a young Chinese man and a bunch of helpers drove up. They also set up a few tents. The young man wore nice clothes and a western-style colorful, probably Goretex parka. The helpers wore coats that were more of the drab local variety. None of them spoke a word of English but they treated us like Sir Edmund Hillary. They were so friendly and anxious to help. I spent quite awhile working on our dying stove, trying to get it to work better. Meanwhile they enthusiastically boiled water for us with these strange flame thrower stoves. They seemed so happy to be able to do us a favor.

I never figured out if the young Chinese man intended to climb the mountain or exactly what he was doing there. (Joan: I thought the guy said he was support for some other climbers already on the mountain).

My fear that we would alienate the other expeditions--by coming across as gawkers waiting for catastrophe--was entirely unfounded. Everyone was quite impressed that we had made it to base camp by bicycle. Maybe they also gave us a special respect because we had arrived before all of them.

The wind blew hard all day and the clouds over Everest remained but every now and then one of the shoulders of the mountain showed itself in the middle of the clouds. When we got our first glimpse of this, it was far higher in the sky than we expected. The peak looked like a lone rock in the sky. Amazing!

I spent a long time with the stove, cleaning and cleaning it with the small wire that I stroked back and forth in the fuel tube. I took everything part and put it back together again. Still it didn't appear that I had improved much. It still took a long time to boil water. Would we make it out of Tibet?

The wind died down that night and the skies cleared. Then in the morning we had a magnificent view of the whole mountain. It's not worth photographing, at least not for us, because we couldn't do it well. Everest looks like any other snow capped peak in photos, maybe not even as attractively shaped. What's amazing is how high in the sky it stands--how far you have to lean back your head to look at it. We just couldn't capture that in a photo.

It was worth all the trouble of getting there. We were very glad that we hadn't been on a jeep tour that just saw a gray cloud then turned around. (The jeeps stop for just a few minutes, and then go, even if Everest is hiding in the clouds).

We played the camp that morning, mingling among the Swedes, the Chinese, all the Sherpa helpers and Wolf. Everyone was enthusiastic about the good weather and whatever they were about to do that day. Everyone except Declan that is, who had accidentally left his passport of all things at a restaurant he and John had stopped at on the way to base camp. When we woke up, he was already driving a jeep back to retrieve it.

The Swedish team's head Sherpa, Pisang, really impressed us. John had told us earlier we could have a little fuel for our stove. Pisang figured out a way to funnel it from their giant 100?-liter plastic bottle into our 1.5 litter bottle: he poured it into a tin can, and then emptied the can into our stove.

I noticed that Pisang kept a piece of plastic wrapped under the lid of his fuel bottle to help prevent leaks. He helped me do the same for ours. It turns out that all plastic Chinese fuel bottles have leaky lids. Ours had been leaking while it was on the bike, and then whenever we set it down, it would fall over because it had a wobbly base. That's how we lost almost all our fuel. (Later we discovered we had another serious leak in our stove).

Then Pisang cooked us an omelet! with Swedish cheese (compliments of the team's sponsor) to boot! It was the only cheese we had had since Vientiane in early July (except a bit of processed tube cheese on the Yangtse). That was the best omelet I ever had.

I don't imagine anyone can pay Pisang what he is worth. He is very good natured, a good cook, can think on his feet, speaks several languages including Nepali (he's from Nepal), Chinese, Tibetan, and English. In addition he is as strong as Sherpas are reputed to be. They hired him and the rest of the helpers through a Nepali company called Asian Trekking in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Poor John was a bit uptight in the morning, even though he looked pretty cozy: He was wearing a down bodysuit I would have killed for and Pisang had set up a pretty little round table, with table cloth and a great omelet sitting in the middle. Give us that life!

But John did have some bonafide problems. He had an altitude headache. (He and Declan had driven directly to base camp (elev. 5200m) from Kathmandu (elev. 1350m), and so had had very little time to acclimatize). And his technician, Declan, who was suppose to be setting up the satellite link, was off looking for his passport. John had quit his job and started his own company to do this project so he had a lot on the line. Nonetheless he was quite friendly with us.

It took forever to break camp, perhaps because the sun didn't reach our tent until well after 10 a.m.. Maybe because we weren't anxious to leave. The Swedes planned to leave on the last day of our China visa and we were having such a good time we both considered just hanging and hitching a ride to Kathmandu with them. But they probably didn't have room, the schedule was a little tight and our adventurous spirits won out in the end. At least we knew that on Oct. 6 they would be passing us on the road in case we needed help.

It was nearly noon by the time we had the bikes loaded. We rolled them over to a place we could get a picture of ourselves with Mt. Everest in the background. Declan was back by then and he interviewed us on video for later broadcast and then took a picture of us with a digital camera that he said he would try to email home for us.

As we exchanged email addresses, John yelled at Declan to get going since it was almost noon. We needed to get going too.

To avoid Pang La, we planned to ride over the old road to Old Tingri. Our guide book had said the road was actually a hiking trail, and that if you go that way you should hire a guide and a few yaks. But some of the jeep drivers had told us the old road to Old Tingri was fine--so fine they had driven their trucks over it. Wolf, who had hiked in over the road, said we could cycle all of it except 7km, which was "bad."

We didn't know who to believe. All we knew was that we wanted to do ANYTHING to avoid over Pang-La, and at least two people had told us it was possible to ride the road to Old Tingri.

Next: Tibet Chapter 18 - Deceiving Observations

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