Promised Technical Answer

I've been asked repeatedly what lenses I use. So here's the information:

AF-S Nikkor 17-55 mm 1:2.8G ED DX
AF-S Nikkor 70-300 mm 1:4.5-5.6G ED VR

The camera is a Nikon D200.

Yes, it's heavy. No, I'm not a professional (I wish!).

Many people on the trails have made remarks about the camera. Some were envious. Nobody envied me for the pack size and weight though. I wonder why :-)

I carry a small Slik carbon fiber tripod which looks like a joke in comparison to the ones the Japanese have. I use it less often than I should or could. Mainly because I'm getting tired or lazy.

I also carry a small Nikon flash which I only used once in Royal Chitwan Park. But it's been up and over 5000m+ passes.

A couple of polarizer filters belong to my accessories as well, but I don't like to usem them much. That's for 2 reasons:
1. I'm lazy
2. I don't like the dark indigo sky colour you may end up with.
On the other hand they would have been very useful many times in bright daylight or some haze conditions but they were not very handy and I just had to make do without them.

I have 2 memory cards of 12GB (yes 12GB!) each.

The harddrive (160GB) that I carried with me on the Annapurna Trek stayed in Kathmandu this time. I gave up saving the pictures in RAW format and so I "upgraded" from 531 pictures on a memory card to 2K. Therefore, no need to have the harddrive around to save periodically. It worked fine at 4920m (Tilicho Lake) and 4130m (Annapurna Base Camp) but it starting failing in Pokhara (some 700m or so).

I have 4 camera batteries which I keep in my fleece pockets and sleeping bag. Especially at night it's best not to keep them out in the cold (camera). During sunrise sessions they tend to discharge at a very fast pace. Well, the temperetures were also around or below 0.

There's a whole bag of cables and other accessories I have left in Kathmandu, I'm not sure I'll get to use them ever (different plugs, cables, etc).

Some very important items I carry with me all the time: a little bottle of lens cleaning fluid, a microfiber cloth and a special brush. On the Everest trek I ended up using them even a couple of times a day. So much dust around, you never can clean the lenses enough.