hot and cold

each of our bags during the trekking were around 8-10kg heavy and yes, we carried them roundtrip from headquarters to laban rata (about a total of 12km). no, we didnt carry them to the peak.

i really don't know what made our bags so heavy. i was just carrying one set of extra clothes (we even skipped carrying extra pair of socks -- hahaha!!!), toiletries (which i dont think were that heavy), some energy-boosting snacks (2 snickers and 2 small bags of raisins each) and other necessities like torchlight, poncho, sweater and windbreaker. Oh, we carried the tripod (which we baptized as 'yang'), video camera, digital camera and a 1.5 liter of water. i think howlake was carrying almost the same amount of stuff except that his towel was 4x the size of my towel and wet, which made it even heavier.

so what's up with the title of this blog?

well, one of the discussions howlake and i had when we were climbing was whether it's heavier to carry a cold water or a hot water. because on the second part of the climb, we were advised to carry a warm water since it's gonna be a cold trek to the peak, since it's at 230am. howlake said there could be no difference since it's the same volume. i said i'm not sure, because there might be some chemical reaction going on that might affect it. just like when a metal gets heated, it expands. we went through some 'smart' ideas like "oh yea, maybe warm water would react differently to its plastic container and alter the weight". hahaha! imagine, we were discussing this at around 4000m above sea level at 4am. amazing how our minds still work.

well, guess what?

cold water is more dense than hot water, and is therefore heavier.

density is the weight (or more accurately the mass) of a given volume of a substance.

wowow!

so do you want to know what water we carried to the peak? hahaha!

C-O-L-D

why?

our theory is that even though we carry a warm water, since weather is very cold ... our water would turn out cold afterwards, unless we carry a thermos. and we didnt have a thermos. hahaha!

wait a minute, on second thought... it doesnt really matter if it was cold or warm, because we asked our guide to carry our water to the peak as we werent carrying any bags and he was. hahaha!!!

WISE!