One of our members Emil sent in this article for our blog and claims a diamond height badge :-) on his return from Nepal.I wanted the Diamond Climb for god-knows-how-long, but being a low-performance pilot I thought it safer to do onfoot... I tried the Annapurna Circuit in September 2005, but about3 days before the summit at Thorung La (5416 m asl) Imashed my knee fair bit, and needed to fly out. So muchfor safety and avoiding flight... Being stubborn, and finding myself with loads of time andno job (my usual "self-unemployed" condition), I flew backto Nepal in March of this year to give it another whirl. This time it all went smooth. Ok, for most of the time. After 2 weeks of hiking with an oversize pack full of nuts,chocolate, and thermal underwear, I got to the Thorung Labase (photo shows me relaxing on some plastic furniturethat some other lucky soul got to drag up there).
In keeping with the tradition of surprises, there was anunreal snow dump THE NIGHT BEFORE my summit. By the time Iwent up, it was about -20 degrees, although nice and sunny. The 3 feet of snow didn't help much though. There was agroup of people going up that day, and in the photo youwill see that some pack more than others (that is a porterthough, so SOMEONE ELSE made him carry the sink and the boxof apples). Everyone made it up and down safely, although most got somesort of altitude sickness: headaches, nausea... ** When I got off the trail after 3 weeks in the sticks, itturned out that the "smoothness" had ended and the wholecountry was falling right apart, with demonstrations andshotings and tear gas and all that stuff. 
The people gottired of the king, and staged a nation-wide strike. It gotvery messy. My ticket out of Nepal was far June 27th, so I thought Iwould go to the Biman Bangladesh Airline office and get itchanged, but since there was a tank parked outside (seephoto) and a shoot-to-kill curfew, I changed my mind andflew with Thai Air instead. But hey, Diamond Badge, eh!? Where do I send the forms? 
