Most Inspirational Moment
Rounding a corner to see Ama Dablam and Everest for the first time.
Thoughts on Group Leader
A very experienced guide, which was extremely important because of the events of our trip (cyclone Phailin in India caused snowfall and avalanches which placed us with tough decisions to make). Other groups with less experienced guides felt it necessary to tag along at one point. His English was not great but nowhere near as poor as he felt it to be.
Advice for Potential Travellers
Ensure you have several hundred dollars worth of local currency, which is easy to get in Kathmandu. Take more than required if you can, especially if you have gadgets you want to charge regularly, cameras being the most common. It often costs 3 USD per hour per item to get charged. Water is expensive so a UV system and filter might save you money, although it costs time and up-front cost. Boiled water was barely cheaper than bottled, up to 5 USD per litre. I carried little water because we stopped for tea and lunch so liquid was available almost all the time. tea costs the same as water and tastes better (to me) - not carrying it made it taste even better! I used a (good) cell phone camera which required little charging and, most usefully, took along charging blocks (essentially large batteries with USB charging) so I didn't use any charging services. This paid for the charging blocks. I kept my kit bag below 10kg, difficult with my cheaper sleeping bag. Thus I didn't take some kit I would have liked to. However, many people on my trip seemed to think that the system was volume-based, using compression bags to cram amazing amounts of stuff into their bags. Many were at 13-15 kgs, only one kept below 10. The general vies was that it was ok "Because it is just a couple of USDs per kilo charged on the plane".Needless-to-say, this conveniently ignored the fact that the porters had to carry the bags. On previous trips, Peru for instance, each bag was weighed and rejected locally if the weight was too high, causing people to leave stuff behind or put it in their day bags. None of this happened to us, my bag was crushed and squashed to compensate for the unsquashable bag that it was carried with. This was mostly ok but it did break my shaver and cause things to get wetter when it snowed. On this last point, USE a waterproof kit bag or carefully put things in good plastic bags, the porters took the plastic covering for the kit bags and used it on themselves when the bad weather hit.If you get hungry more than most, take a lot of power bars or beef jerky to supplement meals, this will fill gaps and save a fortune, it often 20 USD per day to eat.
Reply from Exodus
We are pleased that Ivan enjoyed the scenery on this fantastic trek, but we are sorry that his group were affected by bad weather at the start of their trip. October is considered to be one of the best months to go trekking in Nepal, but weather conditions in the mountains are never wholly predictable. We have built buffer days into all our itineraries in the Everest region so that if weather conditions prevent flights from operating on the scheduled day we have the opportunity to fly on the buffer day. Very occasionally when bad weather persists and fixed wing flights are unable to operate on consecutive days, we may give groups the option to take helicopters to Lukla (should this happen during the 2014 trekking season Exodus will contribute half of the cost of the helicopters), but clients always have the option to wait for the next fixed wing flight. Treks sometimes have to be slightly altered or compressed, but we always endeavour to achieve the main goal of the trek (such as getting to Everest Base Camp) and we explain the possibility of this happening in the trip notes.