I’ve struggled with the question of I’m fit enough to go this high again, and this morning it was 50/50 between going up and going down. There’s a lot of doubt in the long night when you can’t sleep and your heart races but when I got up, and the sun started warming me up I felt like a lizard sitting on a rock getting energised and decided that Gokyo was still on.

So backpack repacked off we go and then stop, the first fifty meters is tough. Ok, step by step I’ll get going again, and once you clear the first ridge out of Machermo the trail becomes more undulating the mountains are out there, and life is good once more. After half an hour you pass a memorial plague for a group of Korean trekkers and their Nepali staff who got killed when an avalanche swept away their lodge in 1995. Some bozo entrepreneur has built a new hotel right next to the monument. Between the ghosts of the dead and the avalanche risk, there is no way I would stay there.