Expedition Dispatches
Satellite phone updates from the 1998 American Everest Expedition



Wally Berg making an Inmarsat to Land Earth Station call from the roof of the Hotel Tibet
(photo: Corfield)
From the Roof of the Hotel Tibet
Friday, March 27, 1998 — Kathmandu
Hear Wally Berg's call from Kathmandu
Satellite phones for Everest cybercasts provided by MVS/USA

It's another beautiful morning in Kathmandu, about 6:30am. Charles Corfield and I are on the rooftop of the Hotel Tibet this morning, and we are going to try to see if we have the sufficient cables and attachments to send you an email. This is a new deal to us, and we're very excited about being able to do it, so we will be giving that a trial run here this morning. We've also got both cameras up here on the rooftop, and we're going to take advantage of this nice morning light to get some images of Charles and I working with this stuff.

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Just a quick rundown about yesterday. As I think I mentioned, Friday was a holiday in Nepal. One of the wonderful, and I'll have to say, sometimes kind of annoying things about coming to Kathmandu to do business is Nepal is always having festivals of some sort or another. Saturday, today, is similar to our Sunday in the United States in that most people consider it a day of rest and don't work. Certainly all business offices and banks are closed. Anything that doesn't deal with tourists tends to be closed on Saturday, but in addition, Friday, yesterday was a holiday. A lot of festivities in the street, certainly no work to be done with the government ministries for instance Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Communication.

We got a lot done within the day prior and of course yesterday we were able to, especially Eric, Greg, and Charles, were able to get a lot of organizational work done with our equipment. Charles went off shopping for generators and continued his work acquiring power sources, power systems to operate this phone and a lot of other equipment, so we've been kind of picking away at it, taking care of our chores as we can.

We will, as I believe you know, fly to Lukla, on the day after tomorrow, that is on the 30th, on a chartered Russian MX17 helicopter with the small core group of our staff that remains here: myself, Eric, Charles and Greg. Dave Mencin will be arriving in Kathmandu that same day and will be departing for Lukla on April 1.

— Wally Berg, Expedition Leader

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