Today was a long and hard day of walking. We started with breakfast (French toast and Milk tea, yum!) and left by 8am. Our itinary would have us going past Nha and to Phorche via a different path, but due to a washed out bride, we returned the same way we came (via Dolay), which is a 12-ish km trip, where the first 6 were steeply down, and the next 6 steeply up. Overall we still lost about 600m, and I can feel the difference in my breathing. Oh, and there were stairs. Sooo many stairs…. -_- I’m still quite happily carrying my own 12kg-ish backpack though. The med kit and metwurst have been placed into Kempys Duffel bag, which the porter carries. My backpack is now 12kg +/- 3kg depending on how much water I carry on a given day. We had an excellent lunch at Phorche (3810m) which was unfortunately spoilt a bit by the arrival of the noisy group of yanks from Gokyo. On the way from Phorche to Pangbouche we also got to see some roadworks. Instead of a jackhammer, a chisel is hammered through a piece of wood. It’s then held in place by the handle over a large rock. Another worker then hits it with a sledge hammer. Oh, and we had our path blocked by some yak along the way. But our guide simply whistled until they got of the track. Well trained yak! We arrived in Pangbouche exhausted, but went for a bit of an explore around after settling into our room. I found me a replacement bracelet, for 350R (around AU$4) so it was cheap too! Tomorrow we keep going to Dingboche, (4285m) where we’ll have another rest day to acclimatize. Our guide mentioned that on the rest day we’ll probably check out Nangkar Tshang (5083m). That is to say, acclimatize by climbing a 700-ish meter mountain… As we’ve dropped a bit in altitude, I’m hoping to sleep extremely well tonight.