It's been an eventful 48 hours. On Sunday afternoon, I had one of those 'small world' moments. Our group was sat, drinking 'lassi', a delicious yoghurt and fruit based drink, chatting away to our guide Kim and one of her business partners Joel, who had just returned from a trek with a group. Conversation got round to careers and, once Joel knew my background, he mentioned that one of the girls in his group had a brother who flew the same type of aircraft for the Service and had just moved from Yorkshire to Scotland. Instant goose-pimples, as there was only one squadron of fighters in Yorkshire, which we disbanded in April. Turns out her brother is a chap I taught when an instructor and operated with on the squadron for over two years - Eddie Morris! I subsequently met Jess back at the hotel; her bright eyes and big smile were unmistakenly Morris and she was every bit as good company. Fancy that, 6000 miles from home in the Himalaya, coming to trek with the same company at the same time!
Later, we had our first 'full group' evening meal at a local Tibetan restaurant. The food was not quite up to the standard of the evening before and the beer was truly awful - sweet, sickly and hugely over-manufactured. I only had 3 small glasses of the stuff, the third under suffrance to help finish the jug (always a bad sign if the beer pitches up in a silver jug). It was called 'Godfather', and later that night it gave me hot and cold sweats and, for the first time in my life, hallucinations (no comments required)! It took most of the night to get rid of the symptoms and the headache was monumental. The next day, Joel would tell me that it was known to be full of chemicals but that, recently, the brewery had, allegedly, cleaned up its act and stopped adding formaldehyde to the cocktail. Not sure, myself....
