Day 8: Saturday, April 12th, 2008 (Seek Up – Dave Matthews Band)

8:37am – We had a big breakfast (2 Americanos) with eggs, bread, coffee, and OJ. Now we are about to leave for an all day hike. We played Catch Phrase before bed last night and this morning before breakfast.

We had met an American couple (I called them New York and Maryland because that’s where they were from) the night before who were also staying at the Altai Oasis. We told them to meet us at 8am at the restaurant if they wanted to go along with us, but they didn’t show.

We found a guide in Sorata to take us up to this Lake. It was supposed to be an eight hour hike and we did it in about 5 hours. Our guide was flying. We stopped about halfway up on this plain and took a brief rest. My legs were really aching towards the end of the hike up. We had to take more frequent breaks to rest our legs. I really didn’t know if my legs were going to make it, but they came through for me. It was a lot easier coming down.

The lake at the top wasn’t anything too amazing. We were disappointed that it was a somewhat cloudy and foggy day, so we didn’t get many good views of the higher portions of the mountain, the areas the longer treks continued up.

6:37pm – After breakfast we hiked up to the town and contracted a guide to take us up to Lake Chillata. We went and bought some food to take with us (bananas, bread, apples, oranges) and took a taxi to the drop-off point outside of town. We walked from about 8000ft above sea level up to 13,500 feet. It was completely exhausting. We finally made it to the top in about 2.5 hours. We stopped and ate lunch and let our legs rest, then headed back down the mountain. It was tough on our knees going downhill, and it was tough not to slip with the steep slope of the ground. We had to walk all the way back to town (not just to the drop-off point), and about twenty minutes outside of town it started raining. We made it back to town and hung out at an internet café for about an hour while the rain died down. We had a huge dinner of pizza, lasagna, three tacos, and a bottle of Fanta between the two of us. Then we stumbled back to our hostel where we are currently playing Catch Phrase and talking on the phone to our families.