NEPAL TIME: 
|  Manaslu (8163m) and Dhaulagiri (8167m) |
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Pick Up Delayed Tuesday, April 27, 1999 — 6:33pm (PST)
 Hear Ed's Call from NepalClick for [RealAudio] [Windows Media](Requires FREE RealPlayer or Windows Media) |
Hi it's Ed Viesturs reporting on The Mountain Zone and it's the evening of April 27th. Well we're somewhere where we hadn't expected to be because right now we had planned to be past the Dhaulagiri Base Camp, but things didn't work out quite the way we had planned. Yesterday we descended from Base Camp with our porters to the village where we're at now, which is Chame, which is just at the base of Manaslu. And today we had been hoping to be picked up by helicopter here and flown to Dhaulagiri Base Camp, but that didn't happen.
We packed up, we were up early, we were waiting for the helicopter and about 9:30 this morning, which by then the helicopter should have arrived, we decided maybe something was up. We made some telephone calls and some inquiries, and found out that today we weren't going to get picked up. Today it turned out to be some sort of a holiday, nothing's happening, and the next possible, possible day that something could happen would be for us to be picked up here on Thursday.
This is kind of a restricted area and sometimes, sometimes they let helicopters fly here, sometimes they don't, and the word was that there might be a chance we could get picked up here on Thursday, or a better chance of us getting picked up two days down valley [satellite transmission fails].
So rather than risking the possibility of just perhaps maybe being picked up here on Thursday, we decided that with an increased chance of being picked up on Friday lower down valley, we're going to hoof it down for the next two days. We're going to leave here tomorrow morning and walk for two hard long days and hopefully, if things work out, get picked up on Friday in the village of Philim and fly from there to Base Camp.
So a little bit frustrating when things are out of our control and plans don't work, but it's kind of the way thing happen when you're out in the boonies like this and we have to make the most of it and hopefully everything in the end will work out. [Unintelligible] plans, a few extra days of extra time but we're still optimistic, were just kind of going with the flow, it's kind of what we have to do.
So that's it for now, and maybe in a couple days after we've walked down valley I'll call back and let you know how things are looking and what our plans are from there. But for now, signing out from the base of Manaslu, Ed Viesturs signing out. Thanks a lot.
— Ed Viesturs, Mountain Zone Correspondent
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