If the word around camp is anything to go by, the final assault on the summit of Everest will begin in the early hours of Thursday morning. Journalists and accompanying officials have spent much of the day taking souvenir photos and snapping up post cards at the “world’s highest post office”.

The rumours would appear to be based on nothing more than collective will (or hysteria, perhaps).

A brief flurry of concern fizzed around camp when, after two days of clear skies, the wind picked up and clouds blocked our view of Everest.

This project is no walk in the park, though, as the climbers hanging around here are keen to emphasise.

But optimism remains that by mid-morning tomorrow, the mighty achievement may have been accomplished.

Dave and I will be keeping our fingers crossed. Mark, being a South African, is holding his thumbs.

China mountaineering team spokesman Zhang Zhijian details on a diagram the proposed route for the Olympic torch’s ascent of the world’s highest mountain Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma. Photo by David Gray.

You’ll never guess who I met at Base Camp.

After a quick stop to watch the monks and nuns at the Rongpo monastery at prayer this morning, we finally got up to Base Camp proper this afternoon.

It was pretty bleak. Basically, a cluster of tents on an exposed rocky flat. It made us feel almost grateful for our humble cabins back at the media centre.

The views, as always, were a compensation.

I was trying to get a couple of basic facts from an official whose English was as good as my Chinese when we reached the point of non-communication.

I turned around to find someone to help me out with translation and found a willing soul who I assumed to be from the corps of Chinese media at the camp.

He translated and nodded in reply to my cheery “thanks mate”.

Next thing I knew, though, three Chinese women journalists were squealing like schoolgirls and posing for pictures with my interpreter.

Turns out this was Zhang Chao Yang, CEO of Chinese web portal Sohu and hero to China’s vast young army of netizens (couldn’t someone invent a new name for web users?).

Once we repaired to a nearby tent for tea, Zhang told me he was not only at base camp because Sohu was a media partner of the Everest leg of the torch relay, but also because he was a keen climber himself.

He has climbed a fair few mountains himself and been to 6,666m on Everest. He didn’t fancy going all the way to the top, though, because he thought it might damage the brain which has made his fortune.

I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if there were at least some celebrity involvement with this great adventure.

Ed adds: Our team have to tough it out for a few more days at Everest. You’d think by looking at the pictures the weather is lovely, right? Wrong. Apparently it’s blowing a gale up there, so at the very earliest it’ll be Saturday before there’s any action. Read Nick’s story.

And by the way, we’ve hit the 100-day countdown till the start of the Games. For all our Olympic stories, take a look at our website .

Pix from the top (l-r). Armed Chinese border police stand in formation at a camp near the base camp of Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma April 30, 2008. Buddhist monks and nuns pray as they sit in the temple of Rongbo Monastery situated at the foot Everest. Yaks laden with supplies walk past the large camp for the Olympic torch’s ascent of Everest, also known as Qomolangma, in the Tibet Autonomous Region April 30, 2008. Chinese journalists taking it easy. And the Reuters team … Mark, Dave and Nick (tough job guys!: Ed). All snaps by David Gray.

More negotiations over whether we should delay our departure for base camp kept us off the road for an extra couple of hours and stretched the patience of the Chinese journalists.

All was forgotten, though, a couple of hours later when got our first real look at Everest from the top of a pass.

Arrayed in front of us was not only the famous mountain itself but four more of the world’s 14 8,000m-plus peaks.

It was a whole lot more impressive than I had thought it would be. I was not really aware of how much my concept of a mountain had been based on Everest itself.

Two hours later, we were at Rongpo Monastery (5010m) where the Everest Base Camp media centre is located.

There followed a frustrating evening and the first casualty of our rapid rise to altitude, read more about it here.

Pix from the top: The peak of Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma, can be seen behind the Olympic flag (R) as it flies next to the Chinese national flag (C) and the official Beijing Olympic Games flag on the outskirts of Everest Base Camp April 28, 2008. Foreign and local journalists look from an observation point at Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma, near the township of Shegar. A Chinese policeman salutes as a convoy of official Chinese government vehicles passes his checkpoint near Mount Everest. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA)

Remarkably we managed to get to our night stop, Tingri (4,300m), in time for lunch.

There was one morning diversion to visit Pu Bu, a model farmer who showed off the two story house he had built in the last few years.

He was 63 but typically looked much older. The Tibetan environment is unforgiving and adds a decade or two to the complexion, especially if your work is on the land.

Crying off the afternoon excursion, photographer David Gray and I headed down to new Tingri so he could file some pictures at an Internet café.

Strolling down the main street with a couple of our interpreters, we were greeted with cheery smiles by almost everybody and the odd “hello!” from children of school age.

One girl cycled past wearing a blue woolly hat with “Everton” written in white across the front. She was not nearly as impressed as I was by the fact that I should have come across a fan of Liverpool’s second soccer club so far away from England.

The elderly Tibetan man stands in his house near the Tibetan town of Shegar April 27, 2008. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA)

After another round of negotiations with the organisers the next morning, we reached an agreement that we would get an extra day to acclimatize before we reached base camp.

That didn’t, of course, mean we would make the short journey to the next stop at Lhartse in short order and have the rest of the day to relax.

The journey was extended with a trip to a hot spring.

There, I was encouraged to consult a purveyor of traditional Tibetan medicine, who based his prognosis on feeling the pulse on both wrists.

After his first call went a bit wide of the mark (Had a motorcycle hit me 10 days ago? Er, no), he hurriedly decided I was in excellent health and had no need of his herbs.

I was reassured that there was no mention of altitude sickness (a cinch diagnosis for any Tibetan snake-oil salesman faced with a European, surely?) but had my confidence tested almost immediately when our little coach rattled its way up a winding shingle track to the Tsam Monastery (4,500m).

It was worth every hair-raising bend of the drive to see the intricate wood carvings in the 1,000-year-old cluster of buildings.

A group of pilgrims shared their picnic of ground barley and dried mutton and there was cup after cup of Yak butter tea.

Lhartse (4,200m) itself was nondescript but it was a mild shock to realize that there were still places in China where children beg for pencils.

Pix from the top: An elderly Tibetan woman walks towards the 1000-year-old Tsam Monastery located on a mountain at an elevation of over 4500 metres near the Tibetan city of Shigatse April 26, 2008. The 1000-year-old Tsam Monastery located on a mountain at an elevation of over 4500 metres near the Tibetan city of Shigatse. A young Buddhist monk puts his hands together as he stands in a temple at the 1000-year-old Tsam Monastery. A young Buddhist monk stands in the Tsam Monastery. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA)

At last, 11 of us did get onto a plane to Lhasa last Friday. It was soon clear that while the Tibetan authorities were prepared to let us in, this was by no means going to be a free-ranging reporting assignment.

The hotel ‘near Lhasa airport’ that we had been promised turned out to be 300 kilometres away in Shigatse (3,900m).

The compensation was the drive up a stunning river valley. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered in a stiff breeze above the squat houses and children skinny-dipped in the aquamarine water beneath azure skies.

On one of the toilet stops, a friend of mine in the Chinese media party told me he had been acclimatizing in Lhasa for four days. It turned out that all the Chinese media had had at least one day more to get accustomed to the high altitude. 

We arrived at Shigatse late in the evening, were fed and told to be ready for departure at 9am the next morning.

Seen through the windscreen of an official Chinese government bus, a paramilitary soldier stands guard under a road sign located near Lhasa Airport April 25, 2008 indicating the road to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and the town of Rikaze. A heavy troop presence was evident on Friday lining the road between the capital Lhasa and Shigatse, the second largest city in Tibet, after foreign reporters were allowed into the region to witness the Olympic torch ascend Mt Everest. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA)

We’re here, where’s the torch?

We arrived. For a long time it looked like we wouldn’t, but on Monday morning, four days after leaving Beijing, 11 foreign journalists arrived at the media centre on the lower slopes of Mount Everest to report on the torch relay.

It brought to an end two of weeks of uncertainty that started when a briefing was cancelled and we heard nothing more until we were summoned to the Beijing Olympic media centre on the morning of our scheduled departure. The party of foreign media, at this stage 20-strong, was informed that bad weather had caused a delay to our journey and the departure ceremony for the climb team and torch had been cancelled.

Little did we know, although we might have guessed, that the Tibet Autonomous Region did not want foreign journalists poking around the still sensitive sores of the March riots. It took pressure from the central government, we have now learned, for them to finally allow us to go.

But the lost days meant we would be going from 54 metres above sea level in Beijing to Everest Base Camp (5,200m) in just three days – something that rang serious alarm bells with the doctors we consulted. “I would strongly advise against it,” said one British doctor, an expert on high altitude sickness who reached the summit of Everest last year. “You’re putting yourself in a position where you could get something that could kill you.”

There followed three days of back and forth with deadlines missed and pushed back, meetings in cafes, stand-offs, stand-downs, demands for money, demands for information and a BOCOG employee being chased down the street by reporters trying to stuff wads of cash into his hands.

Chinese security personnel watch from their observation post in front of the peak of Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma, near Everest Base Camp April 28, 2008. A small group of foreign reporters have been allowed into the region to witness the Olympic torch ascend Everest. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA)

There is a common myth perpetrated about China — that everyone speaks “Chinese”.

There is in fact no single “Chinese” language.

There is an official language, Mandarin, taught at schools and used on the airwaves, yet even the government admits that only about half the country’s 1.3 billion population speak it fluently.

But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other Chinese languages spoken in the country. The government calls them dialects, but linguistically the likes of Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese are as distinct and mutually unintelligable as French, Spanish, German and English.

Linguists consider them separate languages, though many others are genuinely dialects. Mandarin has been promoted as a single unifying tongue by the Communists, and the Nationalists before them, as otherwise somebody from Guangzhou would find it impossible to speak to somebody from Beijing or Shanghai.

That makes total sense. But Chinese “dialects” today are increasingly marginalised, which is, I think, a great loss for Chinese people and their centuries-old culture, both in China and abroad.

I love going to Singapore and hearing people chatting away in Hokkien, Teochiu, Hakka, Hainanese and Cantonese, even if my knowledge of these languages is limited to being able to say “pai sei” (”I’m sorry”) and “ti a bo” (”I don’t understand”) in Hokkien — phrases I picked up from my time in Taiwan, where the language is normally known as Taiwanese.

I’m sad to hear more and more young Singaporeans speaking to each other in Mandarin, and more than one Singaporean friend has told me that they think they’ll be the last generation who can speak so-called dialects.

In China, there is now a recognition that dialects form an integral part of the nation’s fabric, though there are no moves, as far as I know, to introduce teaching in dialects at school, as happens to a limited degree now in Taiwan.

Tang dynasty poetry, taught to every Chinese schoolchild and extremely beautiful, sounds a lot better read out in Cantonese or Hokkien than Mandarin.

At the time they were written, the court language more closely resembled these southern Chinese tongues. Today there is only very limited official support in China for dialects: a few radio shows in Shanghainese or Cantonese, and the odd academic trying to protect dialects in danger of dying out.

Yet two places in the Chinese world buck this trend — Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is still very much alive and kicking. The more racy newspapers fill their columns with stories written in colloquial Cantonese, using Chinese characters which only exist in Cantonese, and make no sense to a Mandarin speaker like myself. I now have a Cantonese dictionary to try and make sense of some of these words.

And in Taiwan, where the Nationalist government once ruthlessly supressed Taiwanese and Hakka in a bid to get everyone to speak Mandarin, Taiwanese is once more very much back in the limelight, thanks to the Democratic Progressive Party of President Chen Shui-bian, which has tried to promote the island’s native culture. Taiwanese words are liberally peppered into everyday speech, almost as a fashion statement, and appear in newspapers. I learnt a new expression in March when in Taipei to cover the presidential election. “Ao bo”, meaning “dirty tricks”.

Now that I have mastered Mandarin (I would never dare call myself fluent as I’m not a native speaker), I’d like to learn another Chinese language. It would either be Cantonese or Hokkien — both have some great swear words. Yet the one thing that rather daunts me is the number of tones in these two languages.

Mandarin has just four, and it took me rather a long time just to master even them. Hokkien has 5, 6, 7 or 8, depending on how you classify them and in what part of the Hokkien-speaking world you are in. Cantonese has around 9. Again, there is debate on that. I think I’ll be sticking with Mandarin in the short term.

Picture of a sign promoting the use of Mandarin by Alfred Cheng Jin

Until a few months ago, a few weeks in some cases, the Jingshun Highway, once one of the main arteries out of Beijing heading for skiing in the mountains and the Great Wall, was lined with scrappy auto-repair workshops, metal yards, tyre stores, manual car-wash services and other businesses.      

I am talking about the stretch of highway northeast of the huge conurbation of Wanjing, beginning where the airport expressway veers off to the right and surrounded by the suburbs of grandiose villa compounds with names like Beijing Riviera and Grand Hills, temporary homes to CEOs and other rich expats.      

They weren’t the prettiest of shops in Beijing, but they bustled. Roads and pavements were packed as red-cheeked children ran to and from their village homes and mums and dads ate squatting on the flagstones outside their stores.

In short, this was a sprawling, busy trading community supporting hundreds of
families, if not more.

Now, suddenly, many have been wiped from the face of the Earth.

Where once there were workshops, there are now thin lawns, bushes and spring flowers. On one stretch, a long, pretty, one-storey building, in the style of old China, houses several businesses, presumably uprooted from their uglier previous incarnations.

But the rest have been erased. Where did they go?      

And why all the effort to make this road, no longer a major artery with huge, fast, state-of-the-art highways being built all around, pretty?      

A long-term resident suggested an answer. The road is not as important as it once was, but it is the road athletes and spectators will take to the Olympic rowing and canoeing.

They won’t want to see slums.  

Pictures of the rowing/canoeing venue at the end of the road by David Gray (top) and Alfred Cheng Jin.

Picking my way through chaotic traffic, dust and unmade footpaths on my way to the Bird’s Nest stadium this morning, I had a flashback to the Olympic Stadium in Athens four years ago.

The difference was that when I was stumbling through the debris in Greece, it was just a few days before the Games rather than the 114 days that remain before the Opening Ceremony here in China.

Almost lost among the thousands of words written about the torch relay during the International Olympic Committee’s visit to Beijing last week were continual statements of confidence that the athletes were going to experience a top class Games this summer with facilities that few would have seen the like of before.   

If the Bird’s Nest is anything to go by, that assessment may not be far off the mark.

Forget the aesthetics of the twisted steel exterior, from the inside it simply looks like it’s going to be a superb arena for the world’s greatest athletes to strut their stuff.

I first really caught the sporting bug when, at a tender age, I first walked into the maelstrom of a stadium packed with thousands of spectators. In my case it was an English football stadium, but friends have spoken of similar formative experiences at baseball, rugby and cricket grounds.

That feeling of awe and delicious expectation remains with me and I felt a small twinge of it when I first glimpsed the inside of the Bird’s Nest. Packed with 91,000 cheering fans in August, it will be quite a place. 

It was difficult to see too clearly today, though. It was not one of Beijing’s much vaunted “blue sky” days and the smog hung thickly.

There is still much work to be done. 

Pictures by David Gray. Also check out Liu Zhen’s feature.