Logistics

Food:

First I thought that we were going in the middle of nowhere. Actually, that wasn't true. We could have bought plenty of food in the valley, and even rented out some equipment. But anyway, preparing everything before the trip made stuff simpler on the spot.

We ate in restaurants until Priut camp at 4120m were you can't find anything else than what eventually people would leave after them (we got a whole bag of food from our tent neighbours and had to give it away to the rescue patrol!).

Packing food took quite some time. 7kg of food in total for 10 days. Too many nut mixes, but they turned out to be nice things to bring when drinking tea with others. I had 5 packages of dry meals that I brought back home. I lived on musli with warm dried fruit soup in the morning, some bar or nuts and salty liquorice when hiking, and dry veggie soup mixed with a blend of couscous-dry soja farce-dried tomatoes or algaes with sesame or other seeds. Well, that was pretty good in the end and did not get bored. Oh yeah, also some swedish cheese-in-a-tube with dry bread, and good tea. Perfect! My mates were relying more on dry meals and dried mashed potatoes and chocolate bars.

Language:

well, if you don't speak russian, life is gonna be hard. First of all, it is mostly russians around, and either they dont speak english, or they dont dare. Speaking russian makes it much nicer, and you make friends at every corner.


Route:

We chose the south side because we didnt know really how it would turn out in case of altitude sickness. But in the end it seems that even the north route is pretty ok, although you have to carry your luggage up the whole way (which we did anyway), and there is less food avalaible around. We took a guide only for the summit day, only in case of bad weather (people tend to loose track of the route and wander on the crevasse fields with more or less chance...). That was pretty cheap, 300$ for the three of us. If I had to redo the trip, I would head directly for the north route wich is less crowded and without all the snowmobiles and dumps from all the people...
Beware of fake "charlatans" guides that skip some acclimatisation phases and just get tons of money from you... Maybe one of the best alternatives is to contact the rescue service people that also work extra as guides, they know what they are doing!