Wow. Ok so I did a little exercise in translating the Gokyo Ri Itinerary to my Outlook calendar including timezone shift so that it would be clear to my team when I would be available to work. In the course of this I checked a few things that were niggling me with the trek leader over in Nepal.
Well. All I can say is that it's a good thing I did. It turns out that the itinerary that I originally had was wrong. In the end, after much to-ing and fro-ing, it transpired that the itinerary I was given was off by 2 days and the return route was wrong. Frankly I had thought it looked a little odd - there were 2 days of trekking which looked weird because I know the area and they looked like quite a bit of milling about. And indeed, the optional day hike(s) for the rest day at Namche had been pulled out and described as separate days of hiking.
On top of that, the "original" itinerary was a straight shot there and back but it now transpires that it's actually more of an ellipse and the return is via a different route. The nice thing about this is that we will see more BUT it affects my planning because I was going to drop caches of laundry so that I would have clean and fresh clothing. So I'm going to have to rethink how I manage that.
Also this means I need to study the variation to the route. Luckily I know most of the new leg from last year. I'm just worried that everything will be ok for the other trekkers. I mean, we all booked our flights based on the intial understanding of the schedule so now we will have an extra 2 days in Kathmandu. Will they have to pay for 2 days extra accommodation and food? I know some folks are on a tight budget so I hope it doesn't cause too much hardship.
I'm just glad I discovered this now rather than there! After all, we'll be flying out in one week and that doesn't give folks much time if they need to alter their plans. Personally I don't mind a few extra days to kick around Kathmandu. I may even take a day trip to see another city or something.
Anyway, really glad I embarked on my planning exercise to get everything scheduled with my team. I'll be distributing my Nepalese phone number to them so that they can call me and we will be scheduling our daily stand-ups so that I can skype in (although I hope they can figure out a way to call me and patch me in as that will be both cheaper and use less of my precious batteries). Plus it will be hard to both skype AND run the Jira board simultaneously on my kindle.
I also still need to record webex's of how to do some things on Jira and Confluence, train Pam in the admin duties, and hand her admin access.
Oh crap, and I have to redo half of the entries in my calendar to reflect the new understanding of the itinerary and then reflect that in the scheduling of our morning stand-ups.
It'll get there but in the meantime, please don't forget to donate to TNMOC. The button is on the right side of this page, it's really quick and easy and, of course, ALL proceeds go to The National Museum of Computing.
No comments:
Post a Comment