Everest 2006: Fi and Paul: Visiting the Tengboche Monastery

Visiting the Tengboche Monastery

Paul seated in front of the Lama after receiving his blessing.

Location: Deboche
Altitude: 3700m
Local Time: 17:30, 28 March
Weather: 8C, Cloudy

Hi everyone, it's Paul here.

Today was a scheduled rest day, so we had a late breakfast and set about charging some batteries for our sat phone and ipaq. After breakfast we headed back to Tengboche to see the Monastery. Unfortunately there was no morning service, so we went back to the infamous bakery to try a few other items, but couldn’t find anything worth rating! After spending some time relaxing in the sun (it's t-shirt weather) we went back to Deboche for lunch. It's a really slippery, muddy & icy path between Tengboche and Deboche, so we had to proceed with caution. Fortunately we made it fine.

Blessing by the Lama
One of our Sherpas arranged for us to have a blessing by the Lama. We were given a silk Kata each, which is a cream coloured scarf. We then put in a small donation into the Kata and were ushered into the Lama's house, on the grounds of the Monastery. You approach the Lama, hand him the Kata, he opens it up, the money falls to his lap, he says a few words and places the kata around your neck. We then all sat in the room, while he said some words in the Sherpa language. Afterwards we found out that he said to keep the mountain clean and look after the Sherpas.

Visiting the Tengboche Monastery
After our blessing by the Lama we attended the afternoon service at the monastery. After taking our shoes off, we all filed into the temple room and were seated on rugs to one side. The monks came in, prostrated themselves many times in front of a 3m high statue of the Budda and then put on crimson robes over their crimson polar fleeces. They then sat on elevated platfoms and started chanting. The chanting continued for about 10 minutes, before they stopped and were served tea by a young monk. They then started chanting again and after 10 or so minutes, were served some more tea. The temple was extremely cold and after about half an hour we all slowly left and hurriedly put on our shoes and started jumping around to get the blood flowing.

Hi to all the QECVI English Students in Canada.
You wanted to know about the effects of thin air. We will give you some more detail later on, but I can tell you that what we notice most is feeling out of breath. If you go and run 100 yards as hard as you can, then you will feel the same as we do when we are just walking.

To Liane from Canada - we will find out if Mingma Sherpa is the same one that climbed with Shaunna Burke and Ben Webster.

Tomorrow we are off to Dingboche, which is over 700m higher than here, so it will be interesting to see how we all cope.

Cheers,
Paul.

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