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Dr. Jules Jacot-Guillarmod Diary Entry Friday, 18 August 1905
Ten days after leaving Darjeeling, the vanguard arrived at Tseram (around 3,700 meters), the first and only Nepalese village that we were to meet in this country forbidden to Europeans. And we still need to agree on the definition of village; in this particular case, Tseram is represented by two miserable chalets and its entire population is made up of one family, children, parents and grandparents, a dozen people in all. It is from Tseram that the actual exploration of this region begins. Alone, Freshfield had passed there before us, in 1899, on his tour of Kangchinjunga; but he had not pursued his investigations in the Yalung glacial basin. As for extracting useful and precise information from the natives on the topography and on the possibilities of climbing the Kangchinjunga, there was no more to think of than to find among them a guide, however rudimentary.
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