A well used line by all the Sherpa:
“Daal bhaat (दाल भात) power, 24 hours, basecamp no toilet no shower!”
The toilets at EBC remind you of the scene in the film “Slumdog Millionaire”. The EBC permit teams setup a pile of boulders on three sides of a blue plastic bucket that can be removed from the back side.
People at your camp use the toilet by squatting over the bucket hidden in the piles of precariously placed boulders. Many people miss their #2 and some have even sprayed the walls!!
Remember, this is not a pee toilet. It’s just for your #2s. There are special porters that are paid to take these buckets down to a town.
I try to plan my #2 business (1) early in the morning, (2) during a snow cold day, or (3) very late at night as an absolute last resort.
The cold keeps the horrible smell to a minimum. You often hear gagging among the sounds of the glacier. Consider yourself lucky I didn’t take a shot of the inside.
People develop diarrhea and other explosive bowel movements while trying to acclimatize. You don’t want to go to the #2 toilet late at night and have a mis-step or slip or a boulder shift with your body weight … you get the idea.
Remember, everything you do at altitude seems to takes more energy. You spend your time thinking over it many times, then finally do it.
Imagine you’re in your down sleeping bag, asleep and relatively warm. You wake up and wonder why you woke up. You lie there and begin to think. You realize you have to pee. That means unzipping the bag and positioning yourself to use the pee bottle – or worse, getting out of the bag, getting dressed for the cold, putting your boots on, opening the tent, stepping onto the glacier and the cold night, …
You know you will feel cold doing it, but you also know you need to unload all that water held and heated by your body. If you could get rid of it, you wouldn’t waste energy heating your urine. But you still lie there thinking how cold it’s going to be, wasting energy holding it and thinking about it!
Your mind then starts thinking how bad it would be if you peed in your sleeping bag. Nobody wants to sleep in a wet bag.
With a bit of self encouragement, you go ahead and relieve yourself as you originally thought you should. All that takes a good 30 minutes and now you need to drink some water, warm up, and get back to sleep.
Now why would you want to leave these luxurious accommodations?
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