Manaslu is getting closer!  The team have finally got to the town that sits beneath Manaslu itself....Samagaon.

It's been a pretty epic 6 day trek through some amazing terrain and scenery. Getting to the road head was an adventure on its own. The skill of the truck driver really showed through on a number of occasions, the journey still took over 6 hours for a mere 40km!!! It was an incredible drive with most of the team sat on all the bags in the back while Charles and I sweated it out in the cab.

The trek started in a place called Aragat and slowly took a path through a deep gorge with a crashing river in its dark depths. The first 4 days were a battle against the heat and humidity as well as bed bugs and Mosquitoes. Looking back on it now it seems like a true adventure but at the time it seemed a pretty miserable trek. Just as we started to gain some altitude and things cooled down the Monsoon let itself be felt once again with the last 48hrs being almost nonstop rain and low cloud. The positive thing was that the lodges got a lot better the higher we went and the Mosquitoes slowly disappeared. On the whole the trek was quite incredible we found ourselves walking through a lost world like landscape with amazing waterfalls and deep lush forest.

So now we are at Samagaon and the next part of the adventure begins. Alan has just caught the first glimpse of the glacier that tumbles down from the mountain. We have heard from another team that the trail to Base Camp is in a very poor state with a number of waist deep river crossings needed. All we can do from here is to hope that the rain stops and the sun appear so that we can start to move all our equipment the 1400m up to Base Camp.

The team are all in high spirits and we are all looking forward to getting our teeth stuck into the next phase of this amazing adventure of climbing Mount Manaslu. Stay tuned...

You can read Kenton's other blogs here.