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Presents Ski Everest Autumn 2000 !

On Wednesday at 5 a.m., a bus will depart from Kathmandu which is to bring the expedition and the cargo (the weight of which has, after adding provisions and additional equipment, risen to almost three tons) to the town of Jiri.

The journey will then continue with a helicopter ride to Lukla (the Lukla airport is still not ready for plane traffic). The next stop will be Namche Bazar, the capital of the Solo Khumbu province, which is home to the Sherpa nation. The arrival at Namche Bazar is planned for Friday.

The expedition reached the village of Jiri after a 9 hours' journey, and will continue by helicopter to Lukla tomorrow.

Although the wild bus driver, a local Michael Schumacher, made every effort to put our expedition to a pretimely end, the bus did finally make it to Jiri after nine hours' riding, with only one stop for wheel repair. Due to the rainy weather the helicopter ride to Lukla was put off to tomorrow.

The village of Jiri lies 200km away from Kathmandu, serving as a starting point for cargo transport by helicopter to Lukla or Namche Bazar. The road, one of the main ones in Nepal, gave us more than a good shake, yet apart from our bones' discomfort no real damage occurred. All members of the exhibition arrived at Jiri except Andrej Kmet, in charge of the communications with Slovenia. Kmet is still waiting for the lost equipment to arrive to Nepal, and will join the rest of the team in Namche Bazar in two or three days.

The same lodge which will now accommodate our expedition a few days ago housed a team of Russian mountain rescuers, whose challenge is the Lhotse South Face. The expedition wants to tackle the western summit of this eightthousander, which has not yet been conquered, and then traverse along the crest to the main summit of the fourth highest mountain in the world. We wish them every success!

Dispatches