Up

by Ben Fogle

The long trek had overwhelmed hikers half his age, and despite never admitting it, I knew he had pushed through his own limits on occasion. It was his gritty determination that we all found admirable, and his good humour had turned what may well have been a banal hike to Base Camp into part of the adventure.

  His presence was a reminder to enjoy every minute of it. One day, I had overheard him chatting with Victoria. ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Jonathan,’ she said. I loved hearing that was how she felt.

  My favourite part of the time we spent together was undoubtedly at a cold, dark teahouse in Pheriche. Cramped into a pretty bleak little room after a hard day of climbing, we were all shattered. The steep climb and the added altitude had particularly taken its toll on Jonathan.

  I don’t think Jonathan will mind me telling you that he isn’t very ‘techy’ so, at first, for his Instagram account, I would get him to dictate what to post, but in the end I took to writing my own ‘copy’ next to the photographs and posting them on his account.

  That evening, when I checked my e-mails, someone had sent through a newspaper headline.

  ‘Ben Fogle’s father-in-law sent to “keep an eye” on him and former Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton.’

  As we all lay together huddled from the chill and trying to capture warmth from the yak-dung burner, I read the article to my father-in-law and the rest of the room.

  ‘Most wives would worry about their husbands disappearing on a nine-week adventure with an alluring Olympic star who boasts model good looks.

  ‘So television explorer Ben Fogle’s wife of 12 years, Marina, could be forgiven for taking the precaution of sending her father, retired GP Jonathan Hunt, to accompany them.

  ‘“Marina’s not a jealous type, but she wouldn’t be human if she didn’t have a few doubts about letting Ben go on the trip,” one of her friends tells me. “Her dad will be keeping an eye on Ben.”’

  ‘You’re making it up,’ Jonathan chuckled, a broad grin across his face. The room exploded into uproarious laughter. ‘Stop it,’ he laughed uncontrollably, ‘it isn’t real, you must be making it up.’

  I looked around at us. I was still wearing the same clothes I had been in for nearly 10 days now, including the same underwear that was practically walking (my father-in-law had even offered me a pair of his own pants which I thought very generous and strange at the same time).

  Victoria was bundled with about 50 layers of clothes. None of us had washed in more than a week. Jonathan and I were sharing an ice-cold little room with a moth-eaten blanket and our pee bottles on the bedside shelf.

  And this was the newspaper headline. It was honestly one of the funniest moments I can remember. To see the joy and happiness in Jonathan’s eyes at the ridiculousness of it all, will remain with me for a long time.

  A little like our journey, it was surreal and contradictory.

  The article then continued: ‘Marina’s father is the pair’s team doctor … He has even created an Instagram account to share photos along the way.’

  At this point, tears streamed down Jonathan’s face as he bent double in a fit of giggles. So much had been made by the whole team about his Instagram handle (the one I was doing) and now it was even in a national newspaper. I never thought I’d say it, but ‘Thank you, Daily Mail’ for bringing such joy and laughter to what would otherwise have been a cold, dark night.

  Now it was time to say farewell. Apart from saying goodbye, it also felt like cutting my final tie to Marina and my family. Jonathan brought a sense of connection. A comforting familiarity in a hostile new place.

  He had become a crutch. I liked having him there. It brought a sense of normality to the chaos of the unknown and the fear of what lay ahead. We hugged and he clambered into the chopper.

  ‘Take care,’ he hollered as the helicopter lifted and shot off down the valley. One chapter had ended and another was about to begin. Tomorrow, we would set foot on the mountain for the first time.

  Marina – The media

  It seemed to be a slow month for news. Having announced his Everest bid, the British media were keen to eke what stories they could from it. Our collective favourite was a piece in a Sunday paper, in which ‘a close friend’ had divulged that the real reason my father had joined the expedition was ‘to keep an eye on Ben and Victoria’. Sitting under an apple tree in my mother’s garden on an unseasonably hot Sunday afternoon, my mother, sisters and I laughed until tears streamed down our faces at the hilarity of the idea.

  The following week, Ben posted a picture of Victoria and him huddled together in a tent. ‘Tent selfie at 6400m with @victorialou,’ he’d written. Underneath, my sister, Olivia, had commented, ‘hmmmmmm … and no father-in-law to keep an eye on you guys …’ Cue a call from a journalist desperate for something to write. ‘Are you worried?’ she asked. ‘I mean it looks like Ben and Victoria are getting very close and even your sister seems worried,’ her mock concern betraying the desperate hope that she was on to something. ‘Considering that Ben hasn’t changed his clothes for four weeks,’ I retorted, ‘rather her than me.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Fear

  The first time I realised that I was scared of heights was when I was about 10 years old and on a trip to Wales with my friends Ben (everyone was called Ben back then), Barnaby and Toby. (They don’t make names like those anymore.)

  Ben’s family had a little farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons and we decided to climb the mountain behind the house. I say mountain, when it was probably more of a hill, but to a group of primary school kids it was a Himalayan-sized challenge.

  The four of us and our odd collection of dogs that included two golden retrievers, two King Charles cavaliers and some cocker spaniels all set off to summit our first Welsh peak.

  The dogs scampered ahead, leaping from rock to rock as they ascended the hillside with ease. We squelched through mud and scrambled through little moss-covered waterfalls until we were nearly halfway, when we hit our first obstacle, a large outcrop of rock that was just too high for the smaller ones in the group to clamber over (basically, that meant me).

  The others, including the pack of dogs, all scrambled over the rock, but I simply didn’t have the height, leg length or the strength to pull myself up. For 10 minutes, I struggled against gravity until I finally hauled myself up on my belly.

  Wet and muddy, we continued to scramble up the rocky and ever increasingly steep hillside until we reached another large rock. This one was even bigger. The drop was more sheer. My heart began to race with panic at the realisation that I wasn’t going to get up. Worse was the suffocating fear that had swept over me as I realised how far the drop was. I was marooned. In the blink of an eye, I found myself unable to go up or down. I crouched low and cried. My friends looked at me with a mix of panic and amusement as I sat there refusing to move.

  I can still remember the overwhelming sensation of fear. I had never experienced it before, but I now know it was the early development of vertigo. I felt a sense of helplessness as I looked down to the valley below. I could quite clearly see the little farmhouse with wood smoke coming from the chimney. It was so close and yet so far. The boys descended for help and several hours later I was helped down by Ben’s father.

  It was my first experience of uncontrollable panic. The first time I had found myself frozen with fear. Unable to move or think. I tried to avoid mountains after that, but the romance and excitement soon drew me back, and nearly a decade later I found myself in Ecuador, South America trying to climb the highest active volcano on earth.

  It was my gap year. Technically, it was my first gap year, but let’s not get bogged down with technicalities. I was living with an Ecuadorian family in Quito, the capital of the Andean nation. Each day I would look out of my window and see the snow-capped wonder of Cotopaxi. At nearly 6,000 metres, it was considerably higher than the few hundred feet of Welsh hill that traumatised my childhood, but the optimism of youth, or perhaps it was amnesia, attracted me like a moth to a
light.

  After nearly a year of staring at that mountain glistening in the Andean sun, I found myself romping up its peak with my friends, Guy and Guy (if you weren’t called Ben in those days, you were probably called Guy). We found a guide and hired some cold-weather gear, boots and crampons. The shock of climbing from 4,500 metres to the mountain hut at 5,000 metres is what sticks in my mind. It was just 500 metres. I could see the hut. There was a path all the way there. But it was like my rucksack had been filled with bricks. Each step was leaden.

  At the refuge, one of the Guys developed acute altitude sickness. His face puffed up and his gums began to bleed. So only Guy H, myself and our guide headed off in the early hours for the summit. All was fine, until daybreak. Beneath me, the drop felt dizzying. I didn’t know where to look. I wanted to scrunch my eyes closed and pretend I was somewhere else.

  The weather had turned and we found ourselves in our own mini-mountain drama. We summited in zero visibility and ended up getting lost on the descent. After we failed to return to the refuge, a search party was dispatched. It was pretty terrifying and humiliating in equal measure. I decided to hang up my rented climbing boots and axe.

  It didn’t take long before I was seduced back to the world of mountains. I was studying at the University of Costa Rica where I had been stabbed during a mugging and had decided to head to Bolivia to recover. It was here in La Paz that I decided to try one more mountain. I’m not sure why. I don’t know if it was to overcome my fear of heights, or perhaps it was just the unstoppable draw of the mountains?

  Whatever the reason, I signed up to scale the 6,000-metre Huayna Potosi, a popular Bolivian climb. Everything went well until I reached base camp. A winter storm had turned the soft snow into an icy slab. It was impossible to get the tent pegs into the ground, so I stupidly left my tent unsecured. At midnight, as we were getting ready to leave for the summit, a gust of wind blew my tent complete with all my gear off the mountain side, leaving me standing on the exposed mountain in my thermals with just a pair of boots. For better or worse, I never had time to ascend and confront my vertigo, as I was too busy scouring the mountain for my missing kit (which I did finally find).

  It would be a further decade before I faced another mountain. I was filming for a BBC series called Extreme Dreams in which I took groups of people on life-changing journeys and expeditions around the world.

  One of the dreams would be to try and summit the 6,300-metre Chimborazo in Ecuador. This was a formidable mountain to attempt. It was considerably higher than anything in my previous experience and would test my vertigo to its limit. What’s more, I was effectively the ‘team leader’, guiding others equally fearful of heights, across the Andes.

  The whole thing was pretty terrifying, not that I ever admitted it at the time. I tried to use my professionalism on screen to hide the fear that pumped through my body in a rising bile of pure panic. The higher we climbed, the more exposed we became and the more out of control I felt.

  Bad weather had hampered our climb, and low cloud and poor visibility had cloaked the mountain top ahead of our final summit bid. We made it to the last camp, but as we began the final climb towards the summit we were beaten back by the weather and had to return to base camp having failed to summit. We all felt dejected and beaten, and my vertigo had gone largely unchecked. It felt like the mountains were trying to tell me something.

  My fear of heights wasn’t restricted to mountains. A year after our failed climb, I was in Bristol for the BBC’s Countryfile to make a film about the International Balloon Fiesta. I had never been in a hot air balloon before and we had been invited to fly with Nick Langley of the Airship and Balloon Company.

  We took off in our simple wicker basket and soared above Bristol where we joined hundreds of other balloons. Everything was fine, until our pilot took us a little higher. As I peered over the edge of the basket, I felt an uncontrollable urge to jump out. I had never experienced this feeling before. I felt a wave of panic and my legs buckled under me as I sank further into the basket for security. It was terrifying. I squatted in the corner until our pilot descended.

  Being at height is one thing. Leaping from it is a whole other ball game. To this day, the swimming pool where we learned to swim as kids is a powerful memory. It had one of those massive concrete, multi-platform diving boards. While my sisters and other children were happy to leap from the 10-metre board, I could barely make it from the 1-metre. Occasionally, I would test my resolve by walking out to the 5-metre board. I would stand on the edge of the board, my legs shaking, heart pounding, feeling sick to my core. I can remember my sisters goading me to leap. ‘Come on, Ben!’ they would shout, but the more they shouted, the worse it became. The longer I stood there, the more people built up in the queue behind me. The pressure intensified and the height seemed to grow until it was a vertiginous drop into the unknown.

  A few years ago, I made a series for the BBC called Ben’s Year of Adventures in which I travelled the world in pursuit of fear and adventure. To get things going, I went Coasteering – a sport which has been described as a blend of ‘rock-hopping, shore-scrambling, swell-riding, cave-exploring and cliff-jumping’ – along the Pembrokeshire coast in Wales. I was filming with my friend and former SBS soldier, Bernie Shrosbree. Shortly before we completed the section of coastline, we reached a 15-metre cliff. Sink or swim, I had to leap off the cliff into the swirling waters.

  ‘You can do this,’ I repeated to myself as I walked to the edge of the sea cliff. I looked down and once again was overcome with an uncontrollable fear. I felt sick and dizzy. I turned and walked away. ‘Focus,’ I berated myself as I walked back to the edge. ‘You can do this.’ Again I was overcome with vertigo. The more I stared at the water below, the greater the drop appeared to get. Every part of me wanted to give up. I began to panic and the longer I took the worse it became. I hated myself for it. I was failing again. I couldn’t do it.

  ‘Come on, Ben,’ implored Bernie, ‘focus, breathe deep and just jump.’

  It took me 45 minutes before I went for it. I walked away from the edge. A few paces away, I turned and ran. It felt like I was falling for minutes. The feelings of euphoria and release were extraordinary. It felt like one tiny leap in overcoming my vertigo.

  But it was my solo skydive for the same series that really tested my resolve. We were in Australia in Perth and the idea was that I would have a two-day crash course in skydiving before making the leap myself, on my own – a pretty terrifying prospect, I think you’ll agree, for someone so fearful of heights. I couldn’t sleep the night before the jump. I lay in my bed imaging the fear of that freefall.

  The next day, as the plane circled tightly to gain maximum height, I wondered if I had finally overstretched myself, placing hopeful ambition ahead of sensible thinking. At 12,000 feet, the little aircraft door opened and I felt a rush of cold air as I slid my bottom to the edge. I dangled my legs over the edge and looked down at the tiny world below. It felt like an out-of-body experience. How could I do this?

  Once again, it was the fear of humiliation that focused the mind. I had to do this. Professionalism and drive cleared my head as I counted down from 10. An instructor joined me, counting down with his fingers.

  Five, four, three, two, one …

  Despite every bone in my body wanting to coil back into the plane, I threw myself into the thin air. ‘F**k it,’ I thought, as my body tumbled. It’s a strange feeling to smother self-preservation with wanton risk and fear.

  I plummeted through the air, and soon function and performance took over. The fear drained from my body and those little endorphins flooded through me, like I was in a drunken euphoria.

  The feeling was extraordinary, but I was far from purging fear from my body.

  My personal fears are far more complex than just vertigo. While few are numbingly overwhelming, I have had to confront a range of fears over the years. I’m not going to digress too much here, but I think it’s interesting to try to understand
my psyche and what it is that attracts people like myself to confront those fears.

  I’m often asked when I have been most fearful, and while I could use examples of being in a capsized boat in the middle of the Atlantic or stuck in a collapsing crevasse field in Antarctica, I think my greatest fear happened in the Okavango Delta of Botswana.

  I had been making a film about conservation in Africa with Princes William and Harry. It was a pretty surreal experience and one night I found myself around a campfire sandwiched between the two royals while a fellow conservationist shared extraordinary stories from the African wilderness.

  One story stood out. Brad Bestelink is a South African conservationist who had come to Botswana to help run one of the camps with his wife, Andi. Keen scuba divers, they had been desperate to dive in the floodwaters of the Okavango Delta. Two things kept them from pursuing their dreams: crocodiles and hippos. These two animals, between them, are responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other species.

  They decided to recce a stretch of water. For many weeks, they observed the habits of the local wildlife and one day, confident that there were no hippos or crocodiles in the water, they took the brave decision to dive in. With full scuba gear and no protection, they leapt into the unexplored aquatic world. No one had ever braved this underwater world before, for obvious reasons.

  They swam around in the 10-metre clear water, euphoric that they had defied the sceptics and survived a swim in the crocodile-infested waters, when suddenly from the depths appeared one of the prehistoric reptiles.

  Brad and Andi were pretty sure they were about to become lunch, but remarkably the creature swam off. It appeared that the crocodile had no reference point for ‘bubble-making scuba diver’, unsure of whether they were friend or foe, predator or prey, so it left them alone.

  The two divers emerged from the water, elated and relieved. The next day, they decided to put their theory to the test. Once again, a crocodile appeared but left them unscathed. The very unscientific principle of ‘crocodile swimming’ was born.