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Puja with the Rinpoche
Deboche - Sunday, April 9, 2000
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Prittie

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Hello Mountain Zone, this is Willi Prittie calling from Deboche, Nepal for the AAI 2000 Millenium Everest Expedition and we had a wonderful hike up here. Actually moving, beginning to move up the mountain, now advancing our acclimation phase of the expedition. Our elevation up here is about 3820 meters. This morning again we have beautiful weather here in paradise. It got down to about four below Celsius last night — that's about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. But as soon as the sun comes up it's just a beautiful day — nice to just kind of lounge around and relax in the sun. Everybody had a wonderful hike yesterday. We were up and down through a couple of side valleys and crossing a major crossing on a suspension bridge of the Dudh Kosi river in some pretty areas of forest on the way through.

A highlight of yesterday, however, was we got up to Thyangboche, and we took some time there yesterday in Thyangboche and visited the Rinpoche of Thyangboche who is the chief monk of the monastery there in India and of this part of Nepal, as well. Dawa Sherpa, one of our Sherpa staff assisted us in this process and we were actually granted an interview directly with the Rinpoche himself and he conducted our puja ceremony there for us.

A puja is a ceremony by which the Rinpoche actually bestows his blessing upon katas, or silk prayer shawls, and he then gives each expedition member one of those. There is also a Phooha, that is a blessed string that is then tied around your neck and by tradition that should remain around your neck until it comes off on its own accord. And these are all things that the Sherpa people, in particular, truly believe help and invoke the blessings of the gods and therefore keep expedition members safe.

In fact, Sherpas themselves will not ever set foot up above Base Camp without a proper puja ceremony. So we were very, very fortunate to be able to see the Rinpoche in person on this and it was definitely a highlight of our trip, one of the highlights so far. We also look forward to another ceremony actually at Base Camp where we will erect our lines of prayer flags up there. We will have a small altar for the ritual daily burning of some juniper, and we'll talk more about that at the time and tell you a little bit about that when it transpires.

After the highlight of being able to speak with the Rinpoche with Dawa translating back and forth with our questions, we actually visited, just our own group, were granted permission to privately enter the monastery building itself, where we just kind of enjoyed the artwork. We did send many photos back which I think are posted on MountainZone now. We were allowed to photograph in the Hoyt monastery Katmandu. Here they do not allow photographs, but it's many of the same things. Very colorful frescos and paintings on the walls which illustrates a lot of the Buddhist philosophy. They are very beautiful and very peaceful places to visit.

So that was a definite high point of our trip yesterday and then we got our first camp actually set up. We now moved to sleeping out in tents rather than in tea houses and we have our own cooking staff, who have been working with us for many years, handling the meals. We are trying to keep things — the cards as stacked in our favor as possible in maintaining our health on this expedition and we feel as though that is the best way to go about it.

Had a great night — oxygen sats are still running average about 91 and average pulse about 69. That's an active pulse sort of sitting at the breakfast table, so the numbers are looking really good for acclimation. Like I said, we have moved up to 3820 meters here, so we are beginning to up the ante a bit in elevation.

Everybody is doing fine, enjoying it and we've got a day, another day of acclimation where we won't be moving camp today, we will be walking back to, uphill a little bit to the Thyangboche Monastery, doing a little photography and just kind of hanging out and enjoying the beautiful day.

So that's all for now from Deboche and the Khumbu region of Nepal, but there will be more as we get into more mischief here. This is all from Nepal for now.

— Willi Prittie, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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