The day after are also Marco and Robert packing their things together and proceed down the mountain. Here we can see Marco with a well-filled 130-litres backpack with as much of the equipment inside as outside the backpack.

A wonderful sight to see the base camp again. Now it is time for food and beer.

Robert's equipment and backpack has at last left his back.

Mattias and Olof have spent the morning by preparing the equipment for transportation down with mules and here we can see Mattias and parts of Olof's equipment scattered on the ground.

Since we had quite much food left we changed this to a ready-cooked meal in Campo Base that offers this service for commercial expeditions. It was some kind of vegetable compote with a few parts of meat. Delicious compared with what we have been eating during the weeks before.

The time had come...Beer, this wounderful beverage that we have been without for such a long time. Since some of us have not been drinking alcohol for almost six months before departure you can certainly understand how good we felt. Marco had a surprise in his equipment at the base camp, a fat Cuban cigar that we now smoked together with the beer. It was great!

During the afternoon the storm that we had instinctively felt earlier that it was on its way came. During the night it snowed and the nice weather that we had had during the weeks before had come to an end. In the evening we spend some time packing our duffle bags as full as possible in order to reduce our equipment that we have to carry the next day. We have to pay quite a lot for the mules but it is worth every penny!

Here we can see how the snow is falling tremendously the last minutes at daylight. We meet our Norwegian friend Rolf Bae during the night and he told us that the guy who had collapsed at the traverse during the day when the summit was reached is ok but has been transported out on a mule during the day. That was good to know. After the last two days of effort and having one beer each to drink we fell asleep and slept well that night.