Next on our itinerary for exploration and discovery is to put Pangboche behind us and to aim for the next camp in Pheriche. Actually, in hindsight we can say that we didn’t really leave everything from Pangboche behind because some of us picked up a little bug in the digestive track and each of us spent a few days of our own high level, internal diplomatic talks with the bacteria negotiating territorial ownership. Richard was hit hardest, and we traced the cause back to the holy water from Mt. Kailash that we all drank. There was a lot more positive than negative that we brought with us, so we were invigorated to progress on our journey. Remember what I said about the landscape at Phortse starting seem a little different. Well, as we hiked along the river valley norteast, parallel to the Imja Khola, we were straddling the tree line, and we were clearly passing into a different ecological system. Apparently we were wandering into fringes of the realm of aged, jagged boulders with colorful colonies of lichen. We were finding the landscape a bit drab as our eyes were adjusting to the new, subdued range of colors, with the rich green of the trees washing away into faded, dry grass.