What is an active rest day? It means you aren’t just sitting around doing nothing all day. We did an easy acclimatization hike this morning gaining approximately 1,000ft.

I realized I hadn’t posted a photo of some of our living quarters along the way, so I figured this was the perfect day to do that. You will notice in the photos that the accommodations are very basic but they can’t really afford to upgrade their lodges with a lot of the comforts most of us are used to…like heat. I believe that most everything is brought in by yaks or porters. We saw several porters carrying steel beams up the trail. Nothing is easy for the people that live here.

Most places have gas-powered showers but other things are solar-powered. These lodges typically charge $5 per shower, $1 for a towel, $6 for a 200MB Wi-Fi scratch-off card, $1 for a pack of tissues, $4 for toilet paper and $5-7 for unlimited charging of electronics.

The food menu at the lodges are all very similar. I included a photo of some typical menu items. I have yet to try the yak meat – I am not that adventurous. Besides, when they have power outages here, they cannot store/freeze meat long-term so the only time we have eaten the chicken is when they tell us if it is fresh or not.

What do we do with the rest of our downtime? People either play cards, read, surf the internet, blog (like me) or take a nap.