Nathaniel Merriam Thursday, April 22 Katmandu, Nepal

Here we are.

For weeks people have been asking me "are you nervous?" or "are you excited yet?". My answer has always been the same -- no, I'm neither nervous nor excited because I'm working too hard to be thinking about it. There have been a few moments where the realization of what we're doing has set in, and in those moments I definitely begin to panic.

One such moment was Sunday night (we left Monday night for Nepal) when I was driving home at 3 in the morning to pick up a few personal belongings to take back to the office and pack. I had realized I was not going to be returning to my apartment again to sleep before I left, so this was to be my last chance to avoid forgetting anything. As I drove north on I-91 from New Haven, the deserted road found me with fifteen minutes to be introspective. It was to be my last moments of quiet thought in the United States, and my hands began to shake on the wheel as I considered how truly ill prepared I believed myself to be for the task ahead.

Fortunately for my sanity, the pessimism passed when I got home and began gathering up technical and personal items. The calmness that comes with focusing on the task came back and I worked straight through the night until we left for the airport at 5:30 the next afternoon. On the van to the airport I slept for 30 minutes, and over the next 30 hours of flying to Frankfurt, Singapore, and Katmandu, I slept another 10 hours or so. All sense of time left me as I was subject to the feeding schedules of Singapore airlines. We ate breakfast twice in a row at some point, and it may well have been the middle of the night.

Katmandu has been draining us all. Scott and Rick and I were met by our friends at Himalayan holidays who helped us get through customs with our 27 trunks of high-tech equipment. If you've ever been through customs in a third-world country you can imagine how impossible this scale of an operation would be if we didn't have a great deal of talented help on this end.

Having escaped the customs officials, we were met by a huge crowd outside the airport, and I was repeatedly asked if we were from the national geographic expedition. I'd like to think that the national geographic folks are getting asked if they're with the Yale|NASA expedition but I doubt irony could be that well balanced.

Arriving at the Yak & yeti hotel, we crashed in the first beds we've seen in days (it had been over 96 hours since I last slept in a bed, only 48 or 72 for Scott and Rick). We did manage to keep up until 11:00 or so to push through the jet lag, and ever since we have been on Nepali time.

I chuckle to think that our last team, the doctors from Yale (and a few others) will be leaving a few hours after I send this journal, and they may well dread the journey after reading our accounts. Rest assured we are going to have good liquor and warm beds awaiting your arrival.

The past two days have been nonstop work of coordinating the logistics of carrying a few tons of electronics, medical, personal, and survival gear up the mountain. Hopefully Scott has described it to you all, it's unbelievable the details that we have to concern ourselves with.

I've been focusing on making sure we'll have power to run equipment up at base camp. We have two identical generators going up, except they have completely different electrical plugs -- I have no idea why. Its things like that that makes my life more stressful than it should be. I have to ensure that when everyone gets up there, we have both 220 volt and 110 volt power from three different Nepalese socket designs as well as north American sockets. The Nepalese are very helpful and work very hard. It wouldn't be possible to do this without them. All of the things they provide (our electrical transformers, for example) are built with great care but look very "homemade" to say the least. I have never seen so many electrical and computer devices built in wooden cases! I hope they survive up at EBC (Everest Base Camp).

Katmandu is an interesting city -- the air is so choked with pollution that many people walk around wearing surgical masks. I'm disappointed that I can't explore more of the city but after a 30-minute walk with Scott last night he developed a rough cough, and we can't take chances with our health at this time. There are fascinating things all around and some incredible architecture. I'll be honest, though -- I'm looking forward to getting away from here and starting the trek.

Oh, in answer to all those who kept asking before -- now I'm nervous and excited. Now this is very real.

Nathaniel