My travel diaries
Sunday 22 April, 2007 - Kathmandu, Nepal
We land at Doha, Qatar at about 6am. Here I meet up with Chris the PE teacher again, who introduces me to 3 more people I will be spending the next month with, Tim, Ian and "Bunter". Bunter is not his real name, but he refuses to tell us where the name came from, leading to some speculation. He's a slightly portly character in his early forties, and I wonder whether he's going to manage to struggle up to the North Col without sweating too profusely.
We catch our onward connection to Kathmandu, Nepal, where we meet our expedition leader, a smiley Australian called Mic, at the airport. He's wearing an Isle of Skye Highland Games polo shirt, so I ask him about his caber tossing. He says it's pretty good.
The trip by coach to the Summit Hotel is an interesting one. Despite being clogged with traffic, Kathmandu doesn't seem to have any major roads, so any trip between two prominent locations, such as an airport and a posh hotel, for instance, invariably involves driving along back alleyways roughly wide enough for two rickshaws and nothing more. Somehow our driver manages to get us there without scraping the sides of his vehicle, though some careful manoeuvring and plenty of reversing is required on several occasions.
The Summit Hotel is a peaceful haven set in pleasant gardens overlooking the hustle and bustle and (dare I say it) squalor of Kathmandu. Here we meet the remaining two members of our expedition, Mark and Petr. Mark is to be my tent mate on Everest and, as chance would have it, I shared a tent with him on Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro five years ago, but I haven't seen him since. He doesn't recognise me.
"I'm sure you had more hair," he says, when I point out that we know each other.
"I did," I reply.
It's a small world, the mountaineering community. If you don't know someone directly then there's a good chance you know someone they know. The final member of our team is the Czech Petr. Petr's daughter Klara is hoping to become the first Czech woman to climb Everest. She'll be climbing from the north side while we're there and Petr is hoping to meet up with her. Petr doesn't know Mark, but it so happens Mark knows Klara from an expedition to Cho Oyu last year.
"It's going to be interesting spending the next month with you guys," says Mic. "Between you, you've been to every continent except Antarctica, and visited lots of mountains I'd like to go to myself."
Mic then reels off a list of mountains: Cho Oyu, Spantik, Denali and Aconcagua. It turns out that by between us he means Mark, who's been to all of them. Later on, as I catch up with his travels in our hotel room, I discover he has in fact been to Antarctica as well. He now has his own investment banking consultancy and spends half the year working and the other half travelling. Bastard, I think to myself.
As dusk falls we sit in wicker chairs on the terrace outside the hotel restaurant drinking Everest beers. After dinner, and several Everests later, the conversation gets a little silly. Ian, who is a surveyor, tells us about the time he surveyed the foundations of a tower block in the City of London and couldn't get an accurate reading. He reckoned he was about 3 millimetres out and worried that this may lead to the tower leaning slightly when it was built. Bunter then likens him to a Nazi prison camp guard (slightly roundabout reasoning but it revolves around the refusal to accept responsibility for ones actions).
"But it was only 3 mill," Ian protests.
"3 mill - what, 3 million Jews?" replies Bunter.
The two of them only met today, and they will be sharing a tent together. Conversation continues in this vein for some time, but I start nodding off in my chair at about 11.30, so I tear myself away.
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