Many went out to acclimatize after breakfast, but my partner and I decided to stay in to recover from yesterday’s hardship. We purchased a 24-hour Wi-Fi card (despite there still many GBs of cell data left in the phone, but hardly anywhere there were cell signals since we were on the road); put on our warmest clothing, convened at the coffee shop of the teahouse to try to kill time.

Here the difference between the two popular software, WeChat and WhatsApp, was demonstrated thoroughly: WhatsApp worked normally in up- and downloading stuff and even doing voice calls; WeChat was a different story: it was too slow to work.

We exchanged pleasantries and chatted with a few Malaysian ladies who had long hiking experiences and were well-prepared for this trip. They had hired a tour guide and porters. But they had to endure one freezing night after another and can’t wash their hair or shower... it's too hard to continue. They therefore had to admit defeat and terminate the trip. They would be taken by helicopter tomorrow to look at EBC (and Mount Everest) from the sky, then land them back in Kathmandu. It was a pity since they were only two days away from EBC.

My interior clothing/gloves/socks had not left my body since Namche; for daily sanitation the most I did was to quickly sponge myself with cleansing wipes - even that was painful, imagining you had to lose your clothes in the sub-freezing weather. Today I took the opportunity to stay put to have a super-quick, lukewarm “hot” shower, dunk the dirty clothing in cold water, and leave them out in the sun to dry and sanitize. At sunset, not only were they not dry, but they also had all become icicles. So, I left them next to the stove in the kitchen to melt the ice and put them into my sleeping bag at night. The next morning they were half-dried by my body heat, so I put them in a zip bag in the backpack.