Everest & Nepali Controversy- Latest

Sidebar on the latest and greatest dealing with Nepal and China, the torch relay and how China just proved that for a mere 100 million Euro, you too can buy off an entire country while simultaneously making them puppets.

While in San Fran, I called Willie (our team lead) and discussed some of the aspects of whats happening. Some good news, some ok news, not much bad news. Which is more good news... wait...

So the trip is still a go. I made it clear to Willie that I'm all in favor of going for it and as long as we are safe, it's fine by me. He feels the same way, and relayed to me that he was a bit frustrated by the New York Times, who misquoted him. Anyone who knows a guy named Sanjay Bhatt in Seattle knows how I feel about distrust for certain opportunist newspaper reporters who l-o-v-e to misquote people in order to stir up controversy and make themselves a better story.

Filled with frustration, he told me that his quote- essentially akin to "you do what it takes" was mishandled and cropped short to make the story more exciting sounding. What did they crop? The front end, where he stated something like "given all safety factors working out and the team being safe," "you do what it takes". Man, I tell you. When did Sanjay start working in New York.

The other piece of good news is that we -may- look to Nuptse in order to acclimatize if the Nepalis don't start coming around. Willie told me that the International Climbing Community (or whatever. I'll just affectionately call them the ICC for this blog and to create a new acronym because if there's one thing the world needs, it's another acronym) is in heated discussions with the Nepali government, going as far as to threaten a trip to World Court. Hey, I'm all about that class Action. It's not like they didn't wait until the 11th hour to send out their decree- and what a doozy it is, by the way. Noone beyond Base Camp until after 10 May? That's just flat out ridiculous. So there's some optimism that the Nepali sanctions might be relaxed in order to make this a little easier pill to swallow. But hey, how flat-out awesome would it be if we were able to hit Nuptse in addition to Everest? Schwing schwing! I'm actually pretty jazzed about that option.

Lastly, Willie mentioned that if for some reason this doesn't go the way we expect, long shots don't pan out and the trip is canceled, we'll be worked into a later date climb where it wouldn't be all lost. So now I can breathe again about that, because thinking about waving bye-bye to all that moola was a pretty scary thing.

So he did mention that I'll have to do a good job in hiding my laptop though, because he thinks that there's some restriction on sending dispatches back. So I'll have to be creative about it to say the least... just prepare for some blackouts if for some reason there is a decree and we have to abide by it.

As I learn more, I'll post here.