SummitClimb Cho Oyu 2004: Ryan Waters reporting in live!

Ryan Waters reporting in live! from Cho Oyu 9/14/2004 (click here for the mp3)

Hello Everestnews.com! This is Ryan Waters and Arnold Coster, expedition leaders of the Summit Climb 2004 Cho Oyu Expedition. It is September 13th, and the local time here in Tibet is about 7:15pm. Our entire team has reached Advanced Basecamp (ABC), situated at about 5700 meters. Virtually all our camp is up, and everyone has arrived. We had a few missed turns along the way - Paul Burgess spent some quality time with a Tibetan family and got to know them fairly well - but now we are all here, and about to eat dinner tonight and celebrate our safe arrival at ABC. Everyone is healthy and in good spirits. Tomorrow is a rest day and we will probably just relax, as well as finish setting up our ABC. Also tomorrow, we will begin looking at sending some stuff up to Camp 1, so that we can get that established. ABC is very full now, and there are many expeditions here, with a very international crowd, as many countries are represented. Although it's pretty packed, it seems like all the teams are getting along well so far. We will call later when we have more information to report. Thanks again for your support. Talk to you later, good-bye.

Ryan Waters reporting in live! from Cho Oyu (click here for the mp3)

Dispatch #1 -- 9/11: This is Ryan Waters, calling for the Summit Climb Cho Oyu Expedition. It is September 11th, we have reached the Cho Oyu Basecamp - known as "Chinese Basecamp" - at 4800 meters. We have established basecamp, and we plan on staying here for about 2 days. Everyone is feeling healthy, and we just got a number of tents up - cook tent, storage tents - and we plan on taking a couple of days to acclimatize and just relax before moving up to an interim camp, and then eventually to Advanced Basecamp (ABC), where we plan to move our whole operation in a few days. Again, everything is going well, everyone is feeling healthy, and we'll give you a call back when there is new information to report. Thanks again for your support, and we will talk to you later. Bye.

Previous Update is below.

Arnold Coster here writing in from Nyalam, on behalf of the entire SummitClimb team. We spent the day taking day hikes on the surrounding hills for acclimatization. Most members reached elevations of 4,500m, so we are getting used to the altitude and are ready to travel up to Tingri in the morning. We are planning to leave via 4-wheel drive land cruisers and the trip should take us around 4 hours. We will spend one night in Tingri on the 10th and plan to meet our truck carrying the rest of our food and equipment for the final trip to Chinese Base Camp.

Mon and Neil have informed us of a new breed of British underclass called chavs and we were all very interested to find out the specifics of the lifestyle. We were wondering if any of us would be classified as a chav.

We have received reports that the weather in Basecamp has been good so far and that there are approximately 15 teams already on the mountain. It should be a busy year, as it is the 50th anniversary of the first ascent.

As you can imagine, the internet connection in this high Tibetan town is not exactly lightning fast, so a few of us passed the afternoon by watching Roland try to send one important email over roughly a two hour period. The good news is it finally went through, bad news, I lost 10 yuan bet that it wouldn't.

All of us are feeling good and from here on out we will be calling in dispatches via satellite phone so hope to send another report soon. Thanks from the SummitClimb team.

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