The Chomolungma Diaries: What a commercial Everest expedition is really like (Footsteps on the Mountain travel diaries)

by Mark Horrell

  It's a fine cloudless morning in Tingri and the winds are light, so most of us head up the viewpoint for a spot of light acclimatisation. A few hundred yards down the main street a concrete track leads off up a small hill with a radio mast. It's an easy walk and at the top I'm greeted by one of the world's classic views. Across a wide grassy plateau the dark pyramid of Everest and giant white massifs of Gyachung Kang and Cho Oyu line up across the horizon. There are lots of climbers mingling at the top of the hill and chatting in loud voices, so I walk a little away from them to have this moment to myself. Unfortunately at the foot of the hill is a community of houses, and someone keeps driving up and down the road in a noisy petrol-driven cart. Occasionally the engine is turned off and I'm able to contemplate the view in silence. It's one I'm unlikely to forget and I feel very lucky.

  Everest (8848m) from Tingri

  Conversation is quite intense at lunchtime back at the Ha Hoo Hotel. The final member of our group is Margaret Watroba, a 62 year old Australian who was originally a Polish immigrant who fled her country during the Communist years. A couple of days ago I had a conversation with her about football which went along the following lines.

  "I don't like football. What I like about sport is the sportsmen with nice bodies. Footballers don't have very nice bodies." (This was Margaret, not me.)

  I don't have a very strong opinion about this particular issue, but even so I feel obliged to stick up for footballers.

  "What about David Beckham modelling in his underpants?" I ask.

  "Oh yes, David Beckham – cor!" replies Margaret.

  Until now Margaret's conversation has been quite light-hearted, but today it's a little deeper. She tells us about how she fled Poland with her husband in 1980.

  "I told my mother I was going on holiday to Austria, and when we got there we sought asylum in a refugee camp, and eventually emigrated to Australia. When I said goodbye to my mother I held her so tightly; I didn't know if I would see her again. 'But I will see you next week,' she said to me, but I couldn't tell her what I was going to do. In the end I saw her only once more, ten years later, before she died."

  Margaret climbed Everest from the south side with Phil last year, and Manaslu a couple of years earlier. I'm expecting I won't be able to keep up with her.

  If this isn't enough profundity for one day Mila chips in with some of her own. She tells me about a 60 year old Russian priest who is planning on carrying a cross to the summit.

  "What, you mean like Jesus?" I reply in my own profane manner. "Will he be wearing sandals as well?"

  "I think it's his Sherpa who will be carrying the cross," she replies.

  "Well, as long as he takes it back down again."

  "No, I think he's intending to leave it there."

  "But that's disgusting – that's litter!"

  For a second I'm worried I may have said something offensive, but it turns out that Mila is more upset about it than I am.

  "I find it in very poor taste. If it's true then I will try to sabotage it."

  But I feel sure Mila is not alone. It's hard to believe the Sherpas, who believe Everest to be the abode of mountain gods and won't set foot on it until they've conducted a puja ceremony to appease them, will allow this man to succeed in his dubious attempt to turn it into a Christian mountain. Half the mountains in South America seem to have crosses on the summit, but not here in the Himalayas, a world of Buddhists and Hindus. As Mila says, it would be in very poor taste.

  4. The Everest shortcut

  Saturday, 14 April 2012 - Base Camp, Everest, Tibet

  We have an interesting drive to Everest Base Camp this morning, leaving from Tingri at 4.15am Nepali time (a more appropriate time zone for this part of the world than China time, which is 2¼ hours later and based on daylight hours in Beijing and Hong Kong far to the east). There are two routes to Everest from here. To the east the main highway is tarmacked most of the way and an easy drive for buses, while to the west a dirt track heads off to Cho Oyu Base Camp. In between, the scenic route to Everest crosses streams and passes, and is normally only accessible to Landcruisers.

  The driver of our big battle bus opts for the latter, confident he can get through, but we soon begin to suspect he doesn't know the way. First a barrier is down across the road and he tries to take a diversion round it across rough earth, but gets lost. One of our Sherpas, Ang Gelu, jumps out and shines his head torch across the rough ground trying to find a route that's feasible, much to the amusement of everyone on board. Everyone except Phil, that is, who is keen to get to Base Camp early, as there's much work to be done when we arrive. Eventually we're able to rouse an official to let us through the barrier, but then, keen to make up for lost time, our driver starts hurtling up the road to Cho Oyu and misses the turn to Everest. Luckily Ang Gelu is alert, and we reverse back onto the right road.

  Once the sun comes up the road is spectacular, but there are moments when we wonder if the bus is going to make it. We pass along narrow tracks high above icy rivers and drop down again. All the while snow-capped peaks are visible across a dusty plateau flecked with green. We cross sheets of ice and drive carefully across frozen fords. Then we rise up to a gentle pass and drop down again, and Everest is visible at an unusual angle on the horizon beyond. At least, four Sherpas and Phil, who have all climbed Everest multiple times, are convinced it's Everest with its black rock pyramid towering over the other mountains on the horizon. We can't quite identify the features on the summit pyramid from this unusual angle, and surprisingly the mountain is totally devoid of its telltale plume of cloud as jetstream winds bash its summit, but nobody seems to have any doubt the mountain we're looking at can be anything other than Everest.

  Mark notices another big mountain wreathed in cloud further to the right, which he takes a photograph of, but he decides not to say anything. I take several photographs of the clear black pyramid and some video footage to go with it. It's only when we drop down onto the main highway and begin our ascent up the Rongbuk Valley, with Everest dominating the view ahead of us, that we discover a large lenticular cloud hanging over its slopes all the way down to the North Col. For it to have descended so quickly, a perfect summit day must have turned into a hellish nightmare in a matter of minutes. It becomes clear we've been looking at the wrong mountain, and the clear black pyramid we thought was Everest was most probably Makalu.

  But we've made good time, and arrive at Base Camp at 8am Nepali time (which will now be the time zone we work to throughout the expedition). It's a huge flat rocky area beyond the terminal moraine of the Rongbuk Glacier. Although there are small rocky hills on either side, some of which have sorry-looking glaciers spilling down from them, Everest screams for attention up ahead and nothing else matters. It rises nearly four vertical kilometres above us, and its North Face and Northeast Ridge can be seen in their entirety from here. Today, wreathed in its horizontal layers of lenticular cloud like a heavy chain tied around its body, it looks frightening. Only on certain days is the weather sedate enough for it to be climbable, and key for us once we're acclimatised, exercised and rested, is identifying one of those days. Not everyone does, and when this happens the stories become the disaster tales of Everest legend, recited in books which sell in their millions and give the mountain its fearsome reputation.

  With eight Sherpas and six kitchen staff to help him, Phil is insistent none of us paying clients should help out with all the hard work still to be done today. It's better, he says, for us to rest and acclimatise since we've jumped from 4300 metres at Tingri to 5160 metres here, and have reached this altitude in only five days. Chedar and the other Sherpas who arrived yesterday have already put up three of the big yellow storage and kitchen tents, and we sit in one of them drinking tea while the boys work around us. Twice we're called out to help with the big Mountain Hardwear dome tents as they flap in the wind, but the remainder of the time we laze around. By the end of the afternoon Phil and the Sherpas have worked like Trojans. Six yellow kitchen and
storage tents have been erected, two dome tents, and twelve comfy three-man sleeping tents. Tomorrow all they have left to do is complete setting up the recreation dome and pitch two toilet-cum-shower tents. It's going to be a luxurious base camp.

  In the evening I reacquaint myself with the dining dome that we ate in on Manaslu. It's a bit more spacious this time, with only seven of us inside compared with the 11 we had on Manaslu, but the kitchen sink with the hot water, the heaters and the comfy director's chairs mean it will be considerably more comfortable to dine here than any of the places we ate at in Nyalam and Tingri.

  Phil tells us many people have been visiting throughout the day, friends of the Sherpas, and Crazy Chris, leader of the Adventure Peaks expedition team, one of the few other teams here already. I've met him a couple of times before, at Concordia in the Pakistan Karakoram in 2009 when he "escorted" the top woman climber Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner down the easier trail to Askole while the group he was leading took the rather more strenuous high route over the Gondokoro La. I gave him the nickname Crazy Chris after a story he told me in Sam's Bar the following year about an unusual night out in Kathmandu, which unfortunately cannot be repeated here for reasons of taste.

  Phil tells us some of his former students from when taught at the Tibetan mountaineering school in Lhasa have visited.

  "These dudes were speaking fluent English," he says, "and they learned it from me. It made me feel proud."

  "Well, to be fair, if they were speaking fluent English then they can't have learned it from you," says Mark.

  "What were they saying?" asks Grant. "'Fuck, yeah, fucking shit, fuck, yeah', 'can you say anything else?', 'Fuck no!'"

  It's debatable whether Grant's own use of English is any less colourful than Phil's, but this outburst has us in stitches anyway.

  I have a mild headache tonight, and my stomach is feeling a little delicate after our big jump in altitude, but this is normal and nothing to be concerned about. We have plenty of rest days ahead of us here at Base Camp for me to get acclimatised. I'm glad when we turn in for the night at eight o'clock, although my sleep is interrupted.

  5. Base camp communications

  Sunday, 15 April 2012 - Base Camp, Everest, Tibet

  Our first full day at Base Camp is a day of mixed successes. In the morning Phil sets up the first part of the "recreation dome", which turns out to be a giant white sheet covering an entire wall for projecting movies onto. He's very proud of it and calls me over to come and take a look. It's enormous.

  "It's like an IMAX theatre," I remark. "We're going to have to watch Dorje's Everest film on it."

  Our sirdar Dorje is famous for being the Sherpa who carried David Breashear's enormous IMAX video camera to the summit of Everest for the Everest IMAX film in 1996, a few days after the disaster described in Jon Krakauer's Everest bestseller Into Thin Air. Unfortunately the cinema requires the petrol-driven generator to be running rather than the solar panels, and even with the combined brains of three engineers in the team (Ian, Grant and Margaret) we can't get it working.

  A bigger problem for me is the internet connection. We're intending to use the same BGAN/Inmarsat satellite system for internet access that we used on Manaslu. Phil takes it to several locations around Base Camp but can't get a signal anywhere. He suspects the Chinese government may be blocking it so that people can't blog anything negative about Tibet. He goes to talk to other teams and they all confirm their BGANs aren't working either.

  Then there appears to be a lifeline. Chris from the Adventure Peaks team says he was able to get a signal from a small hillside above camp, so Phil decides to go and check it out. I watch him scramble up a gully of boulders and cross a small glacier. Twice he falls over and he later tells me he used his rugged laptop case to arrest. After about 15 minutes of climbing he finds the place where Chris has built a wall to hide behind, and he stops to check for a signal. If it works then we'll be able to prepare our blogs down at Base Camp and Phil will climb up the hill each day to send them for us.

  But there's nothing. It later emerges Chris isn't using BGAN but another system. It will be disappointing if we can't use the BGAN to send blog posts and emails, but most of us are getting a 3G connection on our iPhones and Blackberries, so tomorrow we'll try and find a different solution using these while Phil keeps trying to get the BGAN working. On the plus side I discover I can get free internet access for web browsing using my Kindle. Although it's not a great user experience (web speak for a pain in the backside to use) it means I can check a lot of things I didn't think I'd be able to.

  In the evening cook Da Pasang and assistant cook Pemba make us the most delicious chicken sizzlers. They arrive on hot plates, and we enjoy a couple of glasses of red wine with them. Although my appetite isn't perfect yet as I get adjusted to our 5160 metre altitude, this goes down very easily. The downside to dinner tonight is when we discover Grant to be mine of bad jokes. Most of them have been around since the 1950s and have embellished many a Christmas cracker. Hopefully the joke mine will be fully excavated by tomorrow lunchtime, and the mine-workers will receive their marching orders.

  6. Base camp IT support and cinema hell

  Monday, 16 April 2012 - Base Camp, Everest, Tibet

  It's beautiful cloudless weather this morning and Everest is clear. Jetstream winds linger on the summit and provide the mountain with its distinctive plume of cloud, flowing off the Northeast Ridge like a cape and reminding me that to the Sherpas Everest is a living being, a goddess. The name Everest was essentially imposed on it by the British surveyors of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, who couldn't find a local name for it when they were mapping the Himalayas in the 19th century. It's named after Sir George Everest, who was once the Surveyor-General of India, though not at the time Everest was first discovered. It has to be one of the least appropriate names for any mountain anywhere. If they're going to name it after a person, they could at least name it after the one who discovered it, or the one who first climbed it, but no. Instead it's named after some obscure Victorian geographer-cum-civil servant. In fact there was a local name for Everest, if anyone had bothered to ask the Sherpas. They know it as Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess and one of the five sisters of long life, ironic given the reputation Everest has now acquired for shortening lives.

  Mark and I spend the morning trying to be IT technicians as we search for a solution which enables us to blog without the BGAN. Eventually we find one by transferring the files to Mark's Blackberry using the Micro SD card from my head camera, and I'm able send out a blog post. For one reason or another too boring to explain in an adventure travel diary we need to use a different method for updating my Tumblr blog. This involves Mark sending me an email from his Blackberry to my iPhone, and I post it from there. After beavering away for most of the morning I'm finally able to update both sites, though it's going to be a bit of a hassle to do this on a regular basis.

  The setting up of camp continues. They take the generator over to the Chinese camp, where a mechanic is able to get it working by replacing a spare part. The showers are now working too, and I have my first proper wash since leaving Kathmandu a week ago. The Sherpas start building a platform for our puja in a couple of days' time. With all this setting up of our luxury campsite it's easy to forget where we are. But for the plume on the summit Everest remains clear all day and at around 6.30, just before sunset, the whole of its North Face becomes bathed in a tangerine glow of sunlight. It really is a beautiful mountain from this side, and its features are becoming etched on our minds the longer we remain here. The Northeast Ridge, Norton Couloir and summit pyramid crown the black North Face scoured by snow. 7543 metre Changtse rises in front of the North Ridge and looks no more than a foothill.

  Afternoon sunlight over Everest's North Face

  I enjoyed the challenge of finding a solution for our base camp communications this morning, but it's something that interests me because I want to blog. The same can't be said of our cinema system. I don't
really watch much telly when I'm at home, and I can't remember the last time I went to the cinema. In my opinion expeditions and cinema systems go together like guns and lunatics, and only end in pain and suffering. Perhaps I was traumatised by my experience at base camp on Cho Oyu a couple of years ago, when all anybody wanted to watch were violent action movies, of no interest to me, yet I always seemed to be the poor sod squashed up against the far end of the dining tent with the cinema screen swinging across my dinner. When the rest of the team spend, quite literally, 40 minutes talking about cables at dinner this evening it becomes too much for me and I have to go back to my tent and fetch ear plugs. There's only so long you can tolerate a conversation about VGA, HDMI, USB and iTunes on a mountain.

  We christen the cinema by watching Ricky Gervais's An Idiot Abroad, a tongue-in-cheek documentary about a bigoted northerner travelling around China. It's a million times better than watching the Bourne Insomnia, or some other such moronic action thriller, but I'm not disappointed when the petrol generator chugs to a standstill in the cold of Base Camp and the lights go off.

  7. Remembering the Everest dead

  Tuesday, 17 April 2012 - Base Camp, Everest, Tibet

  It's another clear day at Base Camp, and in the morning I decide to do my first exercise of the expedition by taking a gentle stroll up to the Everest memorials on a small mound above the western side of camp. A bewildering number of stones have been erected in memory of those who have died trying to climb Everest, from the named and the unnamed, to the young and the old, the famous to the unknown. I would hazard a guess that many of these people have died trying to do something silly, like the French snowboarder Marco Siffredi, who died trying to snowboard down the Hornbein Couloir, or found themselves fighting for their lives in marginal conditions. A small number of people were probably trying something beyond their abilities but struggled on anyway because the mountain had become their obsession. I try to imagine that I'm too sensible to be any of these things, that I'm too cautious a mountaineer to lose my life up there, but you just don't know.