Second part

Day 7: 9 speedy kilometers to the Tien Shan Base Camp
In the morning, the weather is still good, but it is clear already that this will change, and it changes before noon. It’s the only moment where the summit of Pobeda (“Victory Peak”, in Kyrgyz “Jengish Chokusu”, with 7439m the highest peak of Kyrgyzstan) at the end of the Dikki glacier is almost free of clouds. The guide insists that we should go with the Spanish guys … nobody is in hurry, and we leave just before eleven. It’s a short and fast trip to the base camp … if you know the way. We follow the GPS trace of Felix and José, that’s easy, and they even play the gentlemen when it needs a big step --- they are now suddenly in hurry, they have to be at the camp for lunch. Without the GPS, this would have been another story, again impossible to follow the cairns, there are too few of them, Felix tells us that the first time, a few years ago, it took them many hours climbing up and down the steep crevasses, he would never do it again without a valid trace in the GPS.
We are not allowed to stay at the Aksai camp, it’s full, and they have no food left. We say goodbye to our Spanish friends and literally run over to the Tien Shan camp together with Sacha, the guardian. This camp is much quieter, closer to Khan Tengri, and the sky clears up again in the afternoon.

Day 8: a day at the base camp
It rains in the night, and suddenly it gets quiet … not really a surprise, we wake up in 20cm of fresh snow. Later in the morning, the sun comes out, and we have beautiful views on Khan Tengri, and also on the South side towards Pobeda and the crests above the Dikki and Zviozdovska glaciers. At lunch time, we get “bania”, in the “highest sauna of the world” as they say, it’s unbelievable. In the afternoon, I go for a tour on the glacier in the direction of Khan Tengri advanced base camp, together with two Germans who walked up the glacier as we, and want to climb Khan Tengri … but the weather forecast for the entire week is discouraging. In the afternoon, the sky suddenly blackens again, and we go back before reaching the camp, a few hundred meters from the Chinese border. The camp is now almost full, several climbers are back from attempts of Khan Tengri, but nobody reached the summit, the conditions are too bad, too much wind, too much fresh snow. We meet Aysel, the “crazy soloist”, a Kurdish girl living in US, who tried to reach Khan Tengri alone because her companions fell ill at Pik Lenin.

Day 9: the trip back to Karakol
The next morning around 10am, we will have the helicopter, promised. We hear the helicopter around 8, and everybody runs outside … false alarm, this one is for the other camp. But finally, we go. The helicopter flies all the way very close to the ground, but nevertheless, we have good views; it’s fun to traverse in 40 minutes the long way we walked up in seven days. Back in Mayda Adyr, in the green, in the heat, we jump into the truck taking everybody back to Karakol, we hesitate whether to jump out at the Chon Asuu pass, but it’s late and Monique’s bicycle first needs some repair. We stay at Turkestan, a tourist yurt camp and camping in Karakol, popular amongst budget travellers, the first night we camp, and then we get a yurt.