Day 5: Shomare to Dingboche

Just about as soon as I entered Kathmandu, my body started complaining of my surroundings. My lungs protested at the dusty and windy streets, while my nose went on strike during the nights and my throat, not able to do the same, became as prickly as a curmudgeonly senior citizen yelling profanities from a porch. Apart from one rest day at the beginning of the trip, I was able to more or less stifle my symptoms to the side, but Shomare was a new assault on my body.

The night before, I was feeling fairly chilly no matter how many layers I had thrown on, with brief little respites only when I was downing another mug of ginger lemon tea or a bowl of soup. The morning of this day, though, was an entirely different story: I could not stop shivering and coughing a dry hack. Even when I left breakfast early to rest a bit, huddled inside a sleeping bag with two comforters piled on over top, I was still shivering and coughing. Oh, and my eyes were leaking, too (remember that Third Rock From the Sun episode where Sally, and the rest of the them, discover their eyes leak? I felt like that). At the back of my mind, with all my coughing and burning lungs and tachypnea/tachycardia and breathlessness and now shivering, was HAPE, and I thought it'd be a good idea to just delay things by a little bit.

We were set to leave around 7ish and ended up setting off closer to 10:30, but by then, I was feeling much (re: a sliver) better but enough to know I could plod through to the next destination. Making a big push to Lobuche was off the map, but Dingboche at about 4,300m would do just fine. Plus, it had this bakery where I almost died in happiness when I ordered a brownie and black Americano. The brownie was huge but dry and the coffee was a little watery, but jeepers, was it ever the best-tasting thing I'd had in weeks.

It also dawned on me that there was a pharmacy at the bottom of the hill. Since I resisted paying money to talk to a doctor, I figured I should at least drop in on the pharmacy and chat with someone. Good thing I did, too, because I ended up getting my pulse ox measured and was uplifted to find I had a score of 92, with a resting heart rate of 105 (I had just skipped down a hill, though). I also stocked up on some Strepsils and nasal decongestants, the former of which was as valuable as gold to me.

So, there was a bit of good news in there to take the edge off the lousy new porter-guide, Patti. From the moment of first meeting him, I distrusted him greatly and though I tried to look at different angles, my suspicions would prove to be quite founded over the next several days. The first incident I wasn't so pleased about? He owned a teahouse in Shomare, which, in his mind, meant he had to go there and spend some time there. But this teahouse was far removed from the cluster of other ones in Shomare and instead of leaving his staff in charge, he just locked up business entirely. I couldn't help but think this teahouse of his was a front for something else — after all, if it was truly an operable teahouse, why not leave it open and make money while he was away? We weren't paying him that much that he'd want to focus all his energy on being a porter-guide for the next several days. But at this point, I wasn't skilled or smart enough in the way of the mountains to do anything but move forward with Patti, so it was reluctantly onward ho.