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04 APR 2001
 Audio Dispatch
Viesturs
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Hi, it's Ed Viesturs making my first report at the beginning of the 2001 American-Finnish Shishapangma expedition.
It's April 4th, it's about 7pm, Veikka and I are in Kathmandu. He arrived yesterday and I got here earlier this afternoon. We've been moving along pretty quickly already. We went to where we had all of our equipment stored, brought it to the hotel, and started sorting through our gear.
We'll be here in Kathmandu for the next two days on the 7th and 8th , and then on Saturday the 9th we'll start driving for the border of Nepal and Tibet to start our three day drive into Shishapangma Base Camp. The weather is pretty nice, it's calm and clear, very warm, we're outside wearing t-shirts and shorts. We're excited to get this thing going once again. It's fun to see my friend Veikka. We only see each other once a year but when we do we have one hell of a good time.
Just trying to get things going. Kind of a long flight over, takes about 36 hours of traveling. You fly from Seattle to Tokyo to Bangkok, where you spend about 8 to 10 hours overnighting in Bangkok, and then another 3 hour flight into Kathmandu. I don't think my body really knows what time zone it is in right now, it will take a few days.
Everything is squared away, we've got a great cook along with us, Dorje Tamong, who's been along with us the last few expeditions. He will be coming with us as our sirdar and our cook. Asian Trekking is handling all of our logistics all the way through to the border. They got us the permit for Shisapangma through the Tibetan government and they'll be, when we arrive, at the border late on Saturday. There'll be a Chinese contingent that will pick us up with a Land Rover and large army truck for all of our gear. We won't have a lot of equipment since there's only two of us climbing on the mountain and so we're just kind of sorting through that today, and tomorrow and the next day, packing it all into reasonable loads for the yaks. I'll talk a little bit more down the road what we're taking as far as equipment and how much of this and how much of that.
So I've leave it at that for now. That's my first report. Thanks for joining once again. We look forward to a great and fun, exciting adventure and thanks for checking in on Mountain Zone.
— Ed Viesturs, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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