Namgyal Lodge was one of the best lodges on the trip. The rooms were off a beatiful glass-enclosed walkway with lots of calendula flowers. We lounged around most of the day, did our laundry and ate a lot. In the afternoon we visited the Machermo altitude clinic at 15:00 for their daily altitude sickness presentation. Two volunteer doctors from Australia and Scotland had a set of very informative and sometimes quite funny slides to show and answered questions from the 30ish trekkers cramped into a room in the clinic. At the end, one had the option to have blood oxygen saturation measured, Irene had 88 and I had 92 percent. These values are average for 4400 meters and 3400 meters of altitude.
Over the course of the day the lodge filled up with several large groups. One was from Spain and I was kindly allowed to borrow one of their Canon battery chargers. We talked about photography and our planned routes quite a bit. There were also a couple of Germans from the Saarland where Irene and I used to live. Small world...
We headed to bed early that night after ordering some chapati with jelly to take along the next morning.