On March 31, at Gatwick Airport, the expedition members came together for the first time. Only Roger Portch and Richard Cowper were missing, as they had both traveled independently to Kathmandu. We looked and felt oddly out of place queuing up at the Royal Air Nepal check-in with our piles of flight cases and blue expedition barrels among holiday-makers heading for Tenerife and Mahón.
The expedition leader, Simon Lowe, was there, looking harassed and hot in a massive down jacket. Simon wore his hair long, scraped back and tied in a ponytail, which certainly wouldn’t have won him any brownie points in his former life as an army officer. He had been with Himalayan Kingdoms as operations manager since leaving the army under the “options for change” clear-out of 1993. He had been to Everest twice before, in 1988 to the West Ridge from the north side and in 1992 to the same Ridge from the south side. On both occasions he had climbed higher than 8,000 meters (26,246 feet). Behind his be-spectacled, slightly hippieish air, Simon was a tough negotiator, as he immediately proved by persuading Royal Air Nepal to cut several thousand pounds off the charge for our excess-baggage bill.
Simon’s second in command, Martin Barnicott—known as “Barney,” was also there, shod in a weathered pair of fur-lined mukluks. Soft-spoken, Barney had the shifting gaze of someone who has spent a lifetime in the mountains. Reluctant to make eye contact, he looked like he was scanning corners of the departures hall for an incoming avalanche. Naturally shy and self-effacing, he had a reputation, I knew, as one of the best high-altitude guides in the business. He had guided (and summitted) Everest with Himalayan Kingdoms in 1993, and would now have a crucial role to play in Brian’s attempt. He seemed anxious to get the introductions out of the way and get on with the flight.
If Barney was successful during our expedition, he would be the only British climber to have summitted Everest from the north and the south—a potential first that he shrugged off with a nonchalant “We’ll see.”
Sundeep Dhillon, the expedition doctor, was busy doing some last-minute packing, stuffing sterile swabs and sinister-looking inspection devices into a huge barrel. Sundeep, a captain with 23-Parachute Field Ambulance based at the Aldershot military installation, had obtained army leave to join our expedition at his own cost. He was on the final leg of a personal quest that had taken three years of his life: to become the youngest person ever to climb the Seven Summits, the highest points on the continental landmasses. Kilimanjaro, Mount McKinley, Aconcagua, Elbrus, Carstensz Pyramid, Vinson Massif—climbing them comprised a project that had taken him to the farthest corners of the world and to the brink of financial disaster.
Now, “only” Everest remained on Sundeep’s list—a mountain that he was unlikely to be able to afford to attempt more than once in his lifetime. He had taken out a bank loan of £20,000 to join the expedition and would be paying it off for years to come. This, coupled with the high expectations of his commanding officers, meant that Sundeep was under considerable pressure to succeed.
Tore Rasmussen, the Norwegian member of the expedition, had flown into the airport from Oslo earlier in the day and had the jaded look of someone who has already spent too many hours in a waiting lounge. A black-belt karate expert, he had hard, slate-colored eyes set beneath impressively bushy eyebrows. Tore had the compact body and high muscle definition of a top-class athlete. His handshake could crush avocado stones. Simon had climbed Aconcagua with him and had a high regard for his strength at high altitudes.
Kees’s pretty Canadian fiancée, Katie, was there too, looking slightly bemused to be wishing her husband-to-be good-bye when their wedding was just a couple of months away. Realizing that last-minute planning would be too late by the time Kees returned, they were plotting the finer details of the wedding ceremony and the travel arrangements of family members (large numbers of Kees’s family would be flying to Toronto from Holland) right up to the departure gate.
Brian arrived with his family, bearing with him a single bag that looked suspiciously light. The rest of us had numerous bulging packs, zips strained to the breaking point, into which thousands of essential items had painfully been squeezed. Just one of my kit bags—the one containing extra food—was bigger and heavier than Brian’s entire load. He looked as if he were leaving for a weekend break in a country hotel.
“Where’s all your gear?” I asked him.
“That’s it.” Brian patted the bag, looking shifty.
“It can’t be.”
“Well, I can buy any extra bits and pieces in Kathmandu. You can get everything there.”
I was about to pick up on this when Brian moved on, noticing that Kees had the camera out and was preparing to film. A consummate performer, Brian cannot resist the opportunity for fun when a camera is waved in his direction:
“The main piece of advice, Kees, is never camp below the French. They will shit on you from a great height.”
As soon as he saw the cameras were out, Al Hinkes also leaped into action. Armed with a handful of brightly colored stickers, he moved from one barrel to the next, sticking on logos from some of his various sponsors.
“Oy!” Simon shouted at him, laughing. “Have you ever thought I might not want those stickers on my barrels?”
“Nope.” Al kept sticking.
We filmed Brian’s farewell to his wife, Hildegard, and daughter, Rosalind, and then bid our own good-byes.
I walked with Fiona to the parking lot and made sure she had the right change for the ticket machine. Over the past twelve years we had been through these airport partings many—too many—times before but this time we held each other tighter than ever.
“Don’t worry. It’s only a film—just like any other shoot.”
“Just come back in one piece or I’ll be seriously pissed off.”
With that, she smiled, wiped away the tears, and drove away, pausing only to blow a kiss through the back window.
Fifteen hours later, after a stop in Frankfurt, we arrived in Kathmandu, minus the huge barrel of medical equipment and drugs that Sundeep had so painstakingly and expensively prepared. A volley of faxes and telexes was sent out to London and Frankfurt in an attempt to track it down.
An eager gang of porters loaded our equipment onto the back of a pickup truck that promptly shot off in a plume of black smoke. We followed it at high speed through the backstreets of Kathmandu in a rickety old bus, dodging trucks and swerving to avoid the odd cow sitting impassively in the middle of the road.
Squinting in the early morning light, feeling dazed after the sleepless night flight, I thought back to the first time I had arrived in Kathmandu as a traveler of eighteen on my first big solo journey. My recollection was of a tranquil, gentle place, in which the ringing of bicycle ricksha bells was the loudest form of noise pollution. Since 1978, a lot had changed. Now, the streets were filled with the choking fumes of badly tuned engines as trucks filled with building materials hurried to their construction sites and taxis touted for fares.
At our hotel, an embarrassingly grand banner was stretched across the entrance. Daubed on it in huge red lettering was: THE SUMMIT HOTEL WELCOMES THE 1996 HIMALAYAN KINGDOMS’ MT. EVEREST EXPEDITION (NORTH FACE).
“We like to keep a low profile,” Simon said.
Garlands of flowers were placed around our necks by smiling hotel staff and a small ceremony was held in which our foreheads were anointed with red paste and we were provided with an egg and a clay bowl of raki.
“Firewater!” Brian exclaimed, and downed it in one gulp.
Waiting for our arrival were the remaining two team members, Roger Portch, a British Airways pilot, and Richard Cowper, the Financial Times journalist who would be reporting on our progress.
Roger struck me immediately as a calm and self-confident personality, exactly the type of person you’d want to have at the controls of a jumbo jet while bumping around in a tropical storm. A talented climber, he had an impressive Alpine climbing history and was another of the team to have climbed Aconcagua, 6,860 meters (22,506 fee
t), the Argentinian volcano that is highly regarded as a warmup for the greater altitude of Everest. To afford his place on the team, Roger had sold his British Airways shares. When he spoke of the expedition to come, his total enthusiasm for the task was transparently, and charmingly, clear; to climb Everest would be the greatest moment of Roger’s life.
Richard was harder to read. An expert on the politics and economics of Asia, he looked like he would be more at home at a political briefing than in the rough and tumble of an expedition. His mission was to send back a series of articles, including a profile of Al Hinkes, and a piece on the pros and cons of oxygen-assisted climbs. He had brought his own dome tent from the UK, a “Himalayan hotel” of gigantic proportions with an intricate double pole system to resist even the fiercest of storms. The rest of us, with our inferior expedition-issue, Nepalese-constructed ridge tents, were green with envy.
The Summit is a pretty hotel with an immaculately tended garden, positioned on a small hill overlooking Kathmandu. Normally it is a haven of peace but our arrival soon changed that. Within a few hours the first-floor balcony was crowded with a jumble of expedition equipment as new gear was tried out for the first time. Most of us had only managed to pull together the final pieces on the list in the last few moments before departing for Nepal. This was our first and last chance to make sure it all fit together.
Problems immediately became evident. My plastic high-altitude boots were so huge that the neoprene overboots Al Hinkes had brought from the United Kingdom would only fit after considerable effort. They were so stretched that the slightest tear would cause dramatic damage. I made a mental note to take extra care with them. My crampons too were stretched right to the outer limits and looked like they would snap in two from metal fatigue after a few hours of use. There was nothing to do about that other than to carry the spare parts that might enable a repair.
Kitting up was strenuous work. Putting on the footgear, particularly when clad in my down suit, left me short of breath, even though Kathmandu sits less than 10,000 feet above sea level.
Brian’s equipment problems were more critical. His crampons didn’t fit at all, confirming my fears that he was not very well prepared or equipped. He went to the Tamel tourist market area with Barney to track down a better pair, which provided one of the first sequences we shot for the film.
Tamel is one of the joys of Kathmandu. It is a series of winding streets flanked by hundreds of enterprises offering everything from embroidered vests with marijuana motifs, to bootleg CD’s of Simply Red and U2. In the wood-carved interiors of Tamel cafés, chocolate cake and banana fritters are served up now just as they were in the heyday of the hippie era. In fact, alongside the crowds of trekkers—easily recognizable from their Gore-Tex boots—the sandaled feet of second-generation hippies still pad Tamel’s dusty alleys.
Passing a photographic shop, I decided on impulse to buy an eight-dollar plastic camera. This single-use Kodak “fun camera,” I thought, might be useful if my other two still cameras had problems. I stored it in a barrel and promptly forgot all about it.
In contrast to Brian, Al had a virtual mountain of gear, spewing out from an impressive array of barrels and kit bags, many of which bore the names of previous expeditions to other fearsome peaks. As a regular on the Kathmandu scene, Al kept a permanent stash of equipment in the town, to avoid air freighting it backward and forward several times a year—the mark of a true professional and another way in which Al was a different mountain creature from the rest of us. His passport also told the same story, with page after page of Nepalese, Pakistan, and Chinese visas.
Our Sherpa crew came to the hotel the next day to help check out the general expedition equipment. They looked to be a young, but extremely strong, team. Led by the experienced sirdar, Nga Temba, who had summitted Everest himself in 1993, the nine high-altitude Sherpas and two cooks would be an essential part of the summit bid.
Working with the Sherpas in the hotel garden, serenaded by a persistent cuckoo, we erected the two-man tents and surveyed for damage. The heavyweight mess tent proved more of a problem. Its complicated metal poles beat us until Sundeep, who knew the design from his army training, patiently showed us how to piece it together. The cooking equipment, food stores, and oxygen were counted and packed, ready for the journey to Base Camp.
That night, our last in Kathmandu, we ate together with the Sherpas, where free-flowing beer quickly broke the ice.
We pulled out of the Summit Hotel on April 3 and began the eight-hour drive toward the town of Tatopani and the Chinese border. Al was in good form, regaling us with dubious stories and even more dubious jokes. One of these mystified Richard, and prompted his question, “Al, what exactly is a ‘fudgepacker’?”
Even Al couldn’t bring himself to answer that one.
We drove up into the foothills of the Himalayas, passing through villages that became progressively more picturesque as we gained altitude and distance from Kathmandu. After centuries of cultivation, the mountain slopes of Nepal are etched with millions of terraces, and in these opening weeks of spring each terrace was carpeted with a blaze of green shoots.
After a pause to fix a puncture, we arrived at the Nepalese border town of Kodari two hours after nightfall. The Friendship Bridge, the narrow span that forms a fragile border link between Nepal and China, was closed for the night so we booked into a simple rest house perched above the turbulent Bhut Kosi River. High above us, on the Chinese side, the lights of Zangmu glittered enticingly beneath a full moon.
That night, while unloading the supplies from the truck into a storeroom, I misjudged the height of a door and smashed my head hard against the frame. Mistake, I told myself, seeing stars. I had gotten into the habit of analyzing such clumsiness in a futile attempt to try and discipline myself to avoid it. I still had a very real fear that my biggest enemy on the mountain might be myself and my lack of coordination. I sat on a barrel, feeling sick, swearing at myself and trying pathetically to work out how I’d failed to see how low the frame was.
After a cold omelette and chips we bedded down for the night in our sleeping bags. I found it difficult to sleep; the thought that tomorrow we would be in Tibet gave me a delicious shiver. I had wanted to travel through that mysterious high land ever since making a tentative and ultimately disastrous journey through Nepal in 1978 that ended with me running out of money and collapsing with amoebic dysentery onto a Kathmandu rubbish heap.
Just after midnight Kees was violently sick, having, like Sundeep, picked up something in Kathmandu. He spent the rest of the night running to the fetid toilet with acute spasms. In the morning I asked him how he was feeling.
“Oh, fine,” he said, “but a slightly restless night.” He went on to eat a large breakfast.
While the border formalities were being completed, we went to some lengths to get some surreptitious shots of the expedition trucks crossing the politically sensitive bridge. We felt rather foolish when we walked across; a group of Italian tourists went in front of us, openly filming the scene with their video cameras and getting no reaction at all from the guards. On the bridge a sign announced that we were 1,770 meters (5,807 feet) above sea level.
“Seven thousand and seventy-eight meters to go,” Al said.
— 4 —
Between the Friendship Bridge and the town of Khasha—or Zangmu, as it is now more commonly known—is a steeply rising three-mile track that constitutes a no-man’s-land. Halfway up, a team of shabby convicts were engaged in forced labor, under the watchful eye of an acne-faced guard. One of the prisoners was chipping at a huge boulder of stone, producing chips for road-building. His pile of gravel was about a meter (three feet) high. As we passed, he looked up and waved. He had an intelligent, refined face. I wondered who he was and what crime against the people he had committed to deserve such a punishment.
At the top end of this stateless zone we were met by smiling representatives of the Tibetan Mountaineering Association (TMA)—the host organization
responsible for our transportation and official paperwork. At the border itself we unloaded the equipment from the truck and waited, sleeping on our kit bags, for most of the day while customs and immigration were sorted out in a glass-fronted office building that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Milton Keynes, a “new town” in Britain much criticized for its architecture.
Brian entertained himself by bellowing a few choice encouragements from his perch in the back of the truck. Luckily, the border guards failed to decipher the true nature of these utterances and the paperwork continued.
Just before nightfall, the border barrier was lifted and our small convoy drove through into Tibet.
(illustration credit 4.1)
Roughly the size of Western Europe, Tibet has been occupied by China since the invasion of 1950. Prior to our journey, I had sought out some literature from the Tibet Society of the United Kingdom and their publication made for harrowing reading: since 1950, the Tibet Society contends, over 1.2 million Tibetans have died in a widespread program of imprisonment, torture, and executions. Tibet’s unique culture and Buddhist religion have been systematically suppressed, with the destruction of over 6,000 monasteries and public buildings. More than 120,000 Tibetans have fled to become refugees in India, Nepal, and elsewhere.
Just sixteen at the time of the invasion, the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s head of state and religious leader, has for the last forty years pursued a nonviolent path toward a solution, but despite his winning the sympathy of the many millions who have listened to his campaign, the Chinese have so far shown little sign that they will leave Tibet.
We were entering a country that had been occupied by an aggressive neighbor for more than forty-five years and for which no liberation was in sight. The town we now found ourselves in was a perfect example of how uneasy day-to-day life in Tibet has become.
Zangmu consists of one long street that zigzags up the valleyside in a series of switchbacks. Lined with wooden dwellings and shops, it feels every inch the frontier town. Rain had turned the unpaved surface into a muddy quagmire through which pedestrians waded ankle deep, dodging the brightly colored trucks and army jeeps that raced up and down at reckless speeds. Pigs, chickens, and dogs rooted successfully among piles of rubbish, and as night fell, rats too came for their share of the spoils.
The Other Side of Everest Page 7
