Our carbon footprint has been too high with the driving and flying, even though we did our best to carpool, offset, take direct flights, and even peeing before boarding! I calculated that we would have saved ¾ of our ground transport footprint had we been able to fly to Skardu instead of driving for two days. Twenty six hours to cover only 440 miles, which would have been only a hour flight using only around 2.2 gallons of fuel per person!

Sometimes carbon footprint calculations are not obvious, so check out sites like Climatecare , or Terrapass. I’m so looking forward to reducing our footprint by walking and carrying loads for the next 18 days. Our local food that we carry to base camp will include chicken and goats for slaughter! While many focus on transportation issues, most do not realize that our consumption of goods is often as high or higher than our transportation or even our homes. Eating local and organic reducing shipping, and saves on petroleum based pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.

Signing off for now. Hopefully we'll get our satellite phone so we can continue uplinks once we're in the mountains!! I’m very tired as we have lost power twice, internet 20 times, all while writing this one email, and the service is so slow that I have sent one email in 1.38 hours, and have yet to get a connection to send this one.