It's a good feeling to get away from Namche with its tourists, noise and smells. Since our trip, Namche seems to have been quite widely touted as a tourist destination but I can see little to justify a stay of more that a few days. The town remains a market and a gateway to the mountains only.

The route down the Khumbu is very busy with yak trains and porters carrying all manner of goods for sale in the town. Trekkers run nimbly down the hill, and struggle and wheeze in the other direction.

A yak train on one of the may dramatic bridges in the Khumbu Photo © Jeremy Thomson 1998

As we crossed the border out of the National Park, getting into a TV documentary in the process, it was time to say goodbye to Julian, who had a conference in Miami to attend, followed by an all expenses paid trip to Barbados. It's such a hard life being an academic. We have lunch, take the usual corny photos and wish Julian a fun walk 1500m back to Namche.

Back on the trail, Antoine and I fall into conversation with a Brit who looks like Art Garfunkle and runs a trekking agency. He knows all the tricks, apparently, as well as pretty much everything else. By the time we finally lose him, we reach a village on a bridge with the amusing moniker Phukding and realise we haven't got any idea where we're supposed to be going. At some point we should have turned left and headed up the valley side towards a pass into the Lumding valley. While we think about this, Gazan appears and shepherds us like children back onto the route.

Home for the night is the vegetable patch of an isolated Sherpa home up on the valley side. The bloody kerosene has got into the bloody daal, but we are comiserate by plenty of hot apple chhang to 'guard against the cold'.