Everybody, this is episode 2 by Mount Everest, Mount Lobuche expedition. The previous episode I just talked about how you're going to select an expedition team, how you're going to do it in Kathmandu if you're going through Nepal and things to do, things not to do and all the way to Lukla, Lukla Airport. So once you get there, just to resume where I stopped, once you get to Lukla, then the fun begins. Then you're going to start your hike.
No more cars, no more helicopters, well, although there's still a lot of helicopters, you can definitely take one all the way to base camp. But keep in mind that the process now can be divided into sort of two experiences. The first one is you must acclimatize. That means you must spend enough time in certain altitudes in order to adjust your body.
Otherwise you're going to feel really sick and you can have serious complications such as Bomaneria Dima, Cerebroia Dima or just the standard acute mountain sickness, which I got and pretty much everybody gets some level of it. So that's the first objective. This is why it's going to take maybe two weeks to get to base camp alone or to some of the mountains in that range, just to give your body enough time to acclimatize. So that's the first important process and why it takes so long.
The second is enjoy the experience really. I think stopping in every village every night and sometimes spending a couple of days depending on sort of the hiking and elevation gain profile of your expedition, they're slightly different, slightly. And it is just a great experience. You get to meet some of the people, you see the villages and of course you see the landscape. It's just mind blowing. I'll remind you that Leucla Airport and Leucla itself is already at about 10,000 feet.
So it is higher than most mountains in, think about it right in the world and that's just where you start. So Kathmandu is at about 5,000 feet. Leucla is about 3,000 meters and 300 meters, give it a take, 10,000 feet, a little bit more than that, give it a take. So you start at a very high altitude already and the landscape changes significantly. It's very green until you get to about 15,000 when it becomes more rocky and you see it be very, if any, vegetation. But again, it's just amazing.
So keep in mind, in my point of view, there were two main purposes of taking about two weeks to get to your mountain, to get to your goal, could be Everest and those are the two. So we'll cover both of them separately. So let me talk about acclimatization first, super important because you want to have a good trip. You don't want to feel sick all the time. You want to be able to actually get where you want to be.
It could be at summit Everest, it could be just a base camp, it could be somewhere between those two, which was my case. Why is it important? Everybody, there's less and less oxygen as you go up at about 17,000, which is a base camp, 17,500 feet or 5,200, nearly 300 meters. There's just about 40% oxygen. So you need to adapt. Your body needs to develop more red blood cells and you need to, the whole physiology of your body needs to try to adapt as quickly as possible. Everybody's different.
Some people will adapt very quickly and by quickly, I mean at least two days in a certain altitude. As you move up, the recommendation is if you move up 300 meters or about 1,000 feet, you need to rest at least a night or two. So again, this is the local recommendation. This is actually you find in the tea houses or the quote, unquote hotels that you spend the night. They are generally very good. I mean good for Nepal in the middle of Himalaya. Don't expect the four seasons.
Actually, I don't want to say this about the member of our expedition, a tracker who was just doing the tracking to Everest, complained in the very first night that his mattress was too hard. Come on, give me a break. And then he even asked one of the guides, our lead guide, if somebody could replace the mattress in his bedroom, in his tea house, in a bit of nowhere in Nepal. Oh, come on. So they shouldn't be there in first place. That's what, that's the big concern that they had.
Anyway, I digress. Let me go back to acclimatization. So drink a lot of water. That's the other recommendation. Really by a bunch of people, not just the expert guides with us, about four liters of water every day. That means you're going to pee a lot. So don't forget about that. That's the part typically nobody tells you. But drinking water and taking your time, if you feel sick, stop, tell all the people. I saw some people trying to just push it through and they just got worse.
So follow those two recommendations. Try to eat well. Some people lost their appetite as part of the altitude sickness. I didn't. Luckily, I was eating like crazy because you are burning 8,000, 9,000, maybe 10,000, 12,000 calories a day, depending on where you're climbing and how much you're tracking. So you've got to eat a lot. Luckily, for me, I never lost my appetite with the exception of one meal that I was really feeling altitude at base camp, Everest base camp, that I didn't eat well.
But other than that, the whole month was awesome because you can eat whatever you want. So those are sort of the key secrets to acclimatization. Not much more. Everybody's different, as I said. Now, some people in my team, they started taking some medication before. So typically, you take three medication for altitude acclimatization. Actually, you typically don't take it, but you take it with you. You don't take it. Actually start having them. But you take it in case you need it.
And I'm going to start from the most severe to the less severe one. So the most severe complications are cerebral edema when your brain gets too big and compress your, you know, the outside. Just you get increased pressure. That's what it is. I'm missing the words now, but you got the point. And that can be very, very serious, as you imagine. Can lead to death very quickly. So you have medication for that.
You have medication for pulmonary edema when your lungs due to the lower pressure altitude, due to altitude, start filling up with fluids. You don't want that too, because that can cause death. So you take those two, but those are really emergency situations. And the only medication, the only solution for those conditions is going down.
So you got to go down, either you walk down if you can, or your helicopter out of there as quickly as possible to lower altitudes all the way to Kathmandu, as some of my friends had to do this year. And they're still there, right? Because they were just feeling sick and there's no other remedy. The more common one, less serious, at least initially, is acute mountain sickness. And you can start getting it at, you know, even lower than 10,000 feet.
So even before you get to Lukla, you can start feeling the symptoms of acute mountain sickness, which is like nausea, loss of appetite, headache. You won't sleep well, but you're not going to sleep well in altitude period. Just live with it. Do not expect to it. So if there's something that is not something you like to endure, don't go, because you're not going to sleep well. You're going to wake up multiple times because you're drinking a lot of water too. You're going to pee a lot.
So you're going to wake up and you simply can't sleep well. Every time you adjust for a couple of days, keep in mind that you're moving up. So your body needs to readjust. So you can't really, you can't catch a break until you spend three, four days in the same altitude. So expect to be miserable for a long time. Let's not don't fool yourself. No matter what other people say, I mean, again, people are different. So maybe it's going to be great. You're going to feel awesome.
I felt awesome for most of the trip for the first two weeks. And then I didn't. And when I didn't, and I'll cover that later, I really felt like, not I was going to die, but I felt like going back. So expect the worst, I think. And but just plan to do and follow the instructions to minimize the effects of altitude. The last piece is called the medicine that you can take for. And that one you can take even preemptively before the trip.
Some people were doing it like two weeks before they even got to Nepal. Some of them are, you know, we're living in at sea level in the US and others in Australia. So they take this medicine called Diamox. Diamox is very popular. It's a very known prescription medicine. They were taking it. They just wanted to make sure they were prepared. It will help you help your body, of course, with the oxygen saturation and retention in your bloodstream. Yes, it will have some side effects.
Remember this, right? Tingling, you know, fingers and which go away to be like 30 minutes after you take it. It's just a little bit annoying and you're going to pee a lot. So and you have to drink more water. So think about this, right? So if you're on Diamox, you've got to drink six liters of water, not four. And you're going to end its diuretic. So you're going to pee more.
So you know, if you're not going to sleep because you don't sleep just because of altitude, you know, adaptation and then you have to pee because if you're drinking four liters of water without Diamox, then you're drinking six liters with a diuretic. So you're going to wake up a lot and you're going to stop along the way a lot. That's sort of the most the more annoying collateral effect. However, right? If you are feeling sick with the other symptoms of AMS acute mental sickness, it's worth it.
I ended up taking Diamox about two weeks into the expedition. I wanted to know how far I was able to go without any medication because I wanted to know, right? The limits of my limits, my body's limits. I found them. I'll tell you. So I went on Diamox, no problem, right? And I got better in a matter of a day or two, what it takes a while for your body to adapt and to react to the medication. So keep that in mind, right? Most people are on Diamox, I found out.
And even from the guides, for certain mountains, a certain altitude typically above 20,000 feet. What I do is often they take the medicine for pulmonary edema just as a precaution, right? On summit day. I found that this is somewhat of a secret. I don't know why because people don't want to admit they are taking that weird. Why wouldn't you? If there's no, there's really no collateral effects as Dr. Romain just told me before my trip. So that is sort of the acclimatization piece of this.
Super important. It's going to make your trip either miserable or more enjoyable. Keep in mind, this is mountaineering and one of the episodes of my mountaineering podcast series, I said it's suffering because it is suffering, right? So it's not like, I just say, is either miserable or more enjoyable because it's not like sitting on the sofa and watching TV and drinking some good wine. It is a lot of work. Your body is not adapted.
Even some of the Sherpas who were born there, right, feel the altitude, you know, effect. And even day sometimes they say, I had a horrible night, right? Which surprised me. I thought they were like, you know, completely immune to that and they are not. So that is really all I want to say about acclimatization in terms of the effects on our body. The profile of how you climb and how you minimize those effects change.
As I said, I mentioned many things drink a lot of water, etc. But typically what you do is in our expedition, right, has a different has a slightly different profile where we go up about a thousand, 1500 feet, sometimes 2000, but no more than that. It's about, you know, 300, 500, up to 600 meters a day. Rest, then take a hike the next day. Right. Just a one day hike, go up, go down, stay in sleep a second night in the same altitude, same village, then move up. And then we keep doing it.
So it's at least two days in every stop in every village in every tea house. I'll describe more about the tea houses later in another episode and sort of the whole process. As I said, not not just the acclimatization, but enjoying the landscape and the cultural aspects of the trip. So that's for the next one. But to finalize the acclimatization, so that's the profile, right? So you go up, sleep, up and down, sleep, keep going one more.
So if you do this, if you think about going from 10,000 feet, and I'm going to do this in feet, apologies, I already tried to do it in meters as frequently as possible. But if you do it in feet, you start at 10,000, average base camp is 17.5,000 feet. So that's about, yeah, that's rounded up to 8,000, right? Feet elevation gain. And there's no flat spot, by the way, you're always going up or down in the Himalayas. But the elevation gains about 8,000 feet.
If you spend two nights at every stop, that's about 16 days just to get there. If you follow this acclimatization profile of trekking and hiking and climbing every day. So that's why it takes so long to get there, to give your body enough time to adapt. Keep in mind that two days, it was okay for me, it was not okay for most people. Some people were just fine. I mean, the minority of them were just fine to spend like a night. They were like, okay, I'm fine.
I wasn't, I think I would need three days to be honest. So it's going to be a tough 16 days to get there to base camp. Because you will give your body some time to adapt, but not enough to feel great. That's on acclimatization. That's sort of the second part of the trip in terms of my podcasts. I'm going to cover the cultural aspects, which are much more fun than acclimatizing your body and suffering in the next, in our next episode.
And the tea houses and where you sleep, how do you sleep, how do you take shower, or if you don't. So until next time, bye-bye guys.