Techno Nerd arrives in Kathmandu!

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Dr. Paul Richards arrived last night to complete the 4-man Logistics Team. As the ?Power? Manager, he is our team?s electrical expert and proudly describes himself as a ?Techno Nerd?! I?m OK with mechanical things, having been a technician with the British Army, but when it comes to electrics I can get lost pretty quickly. Paul is an absolute genius with all things electrical and has the job of ensuring that all the laboratories are fully powered (although I have to say he just broken one of our hand-held radios by jamming a screwdriver into the side of it!!!!!).

For power in Kathmandu we will be mainly relying on ?mains? power, but power cuts are fairly frequent. This is normally due to scheduled ?load shedding?, which is because of a few problems with the electrical supply here. There hasn?t been as much rain as normal, so the hydro-electric plants aren?t running at full power.

The ?mains? power is being fed into a Victron Charge Controller, which manages all the electrical power for the research equipment. If the ?mains? power goes down, within 20 milliseconds the Victron unit will draw power from the bank of Exide batteries that we have. The switch over from ?mains? to battery power is so fast, the computers won?t have time to react and all the equipment will remain running as if nothing had ever happened. If the batteries start to get too low, an alarm will sound warning the team members to start the Honda generators. The plan is that we have a completely independent system with lots of back-up. After all, if a trekker is half way through an exercise test, they won?t want to be asked to do it all over again if the power shuts down and all the computers crash.

Things are looking up as far as getting the equipment to Kathmandu is concerned. I have just come off the phone with Feysal Nagi, the UK Sales Manager North for Qatar Airways, based in Manchester.

At present, we have just 178 pieces of equipment here in Nepal, out of the 853 pieces that were sent from the UK. Feysal has told me that 233 items will be put on the 20:30 flight out of Doha, Qatar tonight and the remaining equipment will be put on the two flights tomorrow. So, with any luck and assuming that all goes well, we should have all our equipment in Kathmandu by 16:00 tomorrow (Friday 9th March). I?ll keep you posted.

The weather was quite hot today and as Steve Holland kindly pointed out on the Blog, I am slightly deficient in the hair department, so plenty of sun-tan lotion was in order! Thank you Steve for pointing that one out! Luckily he?s an old mate, so I?ll let him off!

Having worked in an office for a year now and not done any exercise at all this side of Christmas, I decided that it was time to take this opportunity, while we are waiting for the equipment, to go for a run. I was up at 07:00 and headed out of the main gates of the Summit Hotel and turned right. The air was at a perfect temperature, there were only a few cars on the road and I felt quite good considering that it had been 3 months since I had gone running?..that was for the first ? mile anyway! Even at an altitude of 1500 meters you can feel the effects, or was I just unfit?! I ran for about 40 minutes and came back to do a few press-ups and sit-ups. After a refreshing shower, a bit of exercise certainly sets you up for the day. Lee, Rhys and Matt are all taking this time to get fit as well, swimming in the pool and doing some strength training.

Hopefully though we will be leaving Kathmandu within a week. With deep snow up at Base Camp, it will be hard work building the laboratories and I don?t want the Xtreme Team chomping at our heels waiting to get started with their research.

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