I'm a cameraman, so sound is usually a secondary thing to me but there have been some sounds on this trip that have stuck in my mind and will live with me forever...

Its a bit tighter for space up at Advanced Base Camp so the tents are even closer together. This means that not a single solitary sound goes unheard!! Some sounds I will forever associate with this trip and will always stick in my mind:

- The rock slide in the middle of the night which sent 3 or 4 of us running for our lives in thermal undies, expecting to be crushed any second by boulders the size of cars;
- The sound of a yak grunting as he enjoyed laying another land mine just outside my tent, about 1ft from my head at 5am;
- And by far the worst... the sound of a full grown man, in a panic having to hot-swap pee-bottles in the middle of the night in his tent!! No actor could ever replicate the realization, terror, panic, pain and sheer relief over the period of 30 seconds purely thru grunting and without uttering a single word!! This performance earned the anonymous person a well deserved, hysterical applause in the middle of the night!

Another similarly themed memory is one I desperately want to forget. It was shortly after the first trip to North Col, when everyone in the crew was exhausted and sat in the mess tent, desperately trying to re-hydrate and feed. Most of the climbers based at ABC had packed up and gone, and the Sherpas wanted to try to consolidate all our tents into a smaller area. They tried to do this as a nice surprise for us and bring everything closer to the mess tents and away from the toilets.

They couldn't have known though that because of our very early start, a number of us had failed to empty our pee-bottles from the previous night. They managed to bathe not only my sleeping bag, but sleeping mat, down-suit and nearly all of my clothes in 10 hour old urine!! Nice. Next day was definitely a wash day!