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This sunday morning started sunny in Himalayas. Sleeping
in the altitude of 5000m has created some headache to some
of the team, but by breakfast most of us were ready to
start the trek. Timo decided to stay one more day in
Lobuche and Esa volunteered to stay with him. The trek to
Gorak Shep at 5200m would take around three hours. Our
seven person group divided into two when Arri, Heikki,
Jussi and Juha decided to visit International science and
technology research center.

This center, named Pyramid, has been built by Italians in
1986 to make medical and environmental research. The main
focus today is on environmental studies. Similar center is
located in Pakistan in K2 area. The main project currently
is EV-K2. Those who are interested may find more
information in the internet.

Big-Piggy (Mikko) persuaded Tomi and Antti to go directly
to Gorak Shep without any detour. The reasoning was that
detouring do not help in getting to the summit of Everest.
The trek itself undulated in rough terrain in the moraine
formed by Khumbu glacier. There were sherpas and yaks
passing back and forth all the time. In one encounter with
few yaks Tomi shouted to Mikko who was leading: "Hold the
line!". Mikko did as ordered and faced the first yak eye
to eye. The yak didn't get confused but yanked Mikko off
the path without hesitation. During the 1.5m fall Mikko
thought that his counterstrike should have been faster. He
remembered seeing a movie where yak is tamed with one
quick strike to the forehead. With good laugh Antti
mentioned that Mikko is hardly so quick at present.

The rest of the trek was about being rather dull. Luckily
Antti decided to launch a competition. All of them had
suffered slight headache and they launched a "Who hurts
most" competition. Each bounce with heavy backbag meant
slight pound in the head. To have a reference pain point
they defined a "norm bounce". The scale was 1-5 and
the "norm bounce" is 1. Norm bounce was Tomi's forehand
punch from the distance of 5cm to the forehead. They
collected the points up to around 20 bounces and the score
was quite even. At that point Antti decided to take
advantage. He stepped on top of a big stone and made a
clean somersault with a twist landing cleanly on the path.
He noted the pain being at 4.7 and Tomi and Mikko decided
Antti was the clear winner.

Expedition doctor's opinion: Everyone in Gorak Shep are
perfectly fine

Good day, all is well.