Holy Frozen Shit Fight, Batman!

Short Version:
Cold. We walk up a hill to a lake, then hike back down to find ourselves shafted. We meet our first Israelites, and are unimpressed.

Stats:
Total Walk Time Day 10 = 7:00
Cumulative Total Walk Time = 48:00
Beer Time = 32:00

Long Version:
Tilicho Base Camp Morning:
Where are we? What is this grim place? Are those tents? Are people sleeping in those tents? Are they mad?

Both lodges had been full of trekkers, and the fields around the lodges were festooned with colorful, frozen tents, where younger,hardier,more frugal, and/or stupider trekkers had spent the bloody cold night. Icicles were everywhere. Every puddle was frozen solid. Even the several fast-flowing streams in the vicinity were ice-choked. The dining room was warm by comparison; the dung fire had a knot of shivering people huddled around it as it worked to warm the fairly cavernous - albeit low-ceilinged - sparsely-decorated space. If it weren't for the dive fin nailed to the wall the place would have been essentially unadorned; as it was we found ourselves reading and re-reading the words on the fin, placed there to commemorate the Polish deep dive at altitude team who'd submerged themselves in Tilicho Lake back in 2007.

We set off early for the hike up to Tilicho Lake, leaving the bulk of our gear at Base Camp. Three hours later, we arrived at the lake. That's three hours of uphill; hauling ourselves up a series of steep switchbacks, back and forth across a steep, unstable scree slope.

The bright sunshine at lakeside was glorious, though, and we sat for a while, cups of hot lemon+honey drink in hand, before the rise of the chilly, biting wind drove us back down the hill. Snow-covered mountains loomed on all sides, with Tilicho Peak particularly imposing at the western, upper end of the valley. Glacier-carved ridges split the valley and its streams; these met at the bend where the valley turned southeast, beside the flat spot where the Base Camp lodges had been built.

Depending on which source one consults, and what one accepts as the definition of or criteria for calling a body of water a lake, Tilicho is either the world's highest lake, or something like the 20th-highest. There were a number of signs referring to it as the highest. No signs said "cold," but there were icebergs floating around, and snow to the shoreline on all sides, so that's a fair bet. Other signs espoused the holiness and sacredness of the lake and surrounding area. We threw frozen yak shit at each other.

Back at Base Camp, we gathered our gear together, ate the worst meal of the entire trek (also one of the priciest), and hid Lovely Wife away in a dark room. An hour later, sun-induced headache a thing of the past, we set off back down the trail we'd come up the previous afternoon. Turns out that there really were apparently-levitating standing stones all over the place, and that the stairways really were treacherous and surrounded by gaping pits. Also, there were spectacular frozen waterfalls. Oh, and an avalanche.

A few hours later, we beat dusk to the lodge at Sheree Kharka, where we'd lunched (and napped!) the previous day, and where we'd booked a room for tonight. "Sorry," they said. "A big group arrived, so we gave your room away." ... "But we booked!" ... "Yeah, sorry about that."

Luckily, there's a half-built new lodge two minutes downtrail.

Unluckily, that lodge is also full.

Luckily, there's a half-finished, not-yet-furnished room that we can have, with temporarily-emplaced foam mattresses on the floor. This is quite a relief.

In the dining room that evening an old man wandered around with plastic bags on his feet, an Amerikan got told off by a porter for insulting the gods by putting his feet too far into the flaming brazier, and some Israelis were rude to the lodge staff and kept leaving the door to the frigid outside world open.