 Ed Viesturs' Quest for the 8,000 meter peaks |
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Sunday, April 2, 2000
 Viesturs | |
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Hi this is Ed Viesturs at the end of the day on April 2nd. We had a good walk today. We left the truck-stop town of Beni, which is at the end of the road, and we walked for about six hours up the Kali Gandaki river valley. Beautiful walk today but very, very hot. Michael Kennedy was joking thinking that we somewhere taken a wrong turn and ended up in Pakistan. But at the end of it now, we are in this very nice, but small, quaint village. I won't bother to tell you the name because it's not on the map and we couldn't figure out exactly where we are, but we walked probably 15km today. We're at altitude of 4,000ft. We've begun our trek to Base Camp: day one of probably a six-day walk to the Base Camp.
We're all feeling pretty good. We have 44 porters with us and part of those are due to the fact that we have four trekkers with us from Finland and so they have some gear, some food, and some kitchen equipment as well. But everybody's doing well, we got here at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and the porters arrived four hours later. So, again, our trekking and our days are limited by the length of the days and the distance that the porters can journey in one day. Six hours of walking for us was quite a good start. We plan to leave tomorrow, probably a little bit earlier, simply because it is so hot. We're still quite low in altitude and the days get quite hot around 11 or 12 o'clock in the afternoon. So we'll probably leave here no later than 7 o'clock in the morning.
So that's all I've got to report. Everything is going well, everybody is doing fine, everybody's healthy and I'll give a call again tomorrow night. So thanks for checking in. This is Ed Viesturs signing out from Mountain Zone.
— Ed Viesturs, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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