My travel diaries
Monday 23 April, 2007 - Kathmandu, Nepal
After a very solid night's sleep, I make it to breakfast some time after 8, where I discover Bunter and Ian are still talking to one another. Chris is feeling a bit put out because he was woken up at a very early hour this morning by the Xtreme Everest team, who are also staying at the Summit Hotel, exercising in the garden outside his room.
"Very annoying," he says, "I could hear an instructor shouting up, down, up, down . right outside my door. It was rather like that scene from Carry On Camping ."
"What, you were hit in the face by Barbara Windsor's flying bra?" I ask. But sadly for Chris that part didn't happen.
I arrange to meet my friend Tina, who lives and works in Kathmandu, for lunch at a rooftop café in Thamel, the commercial tourist heart of the city. Tina runs her own charity in Kathmandu for Nepalese orphans, and also an ethical tourism company called The Responsible Travellers with her fiancé Siling, a trek leader. She tells me about a recce they'll be making to several national parks and nature reserves later in the month, with a view to adding some lesser known areas of Nepal to their tour portfolio. It sounds quite exciting.
"It's a shame you can't stay in Nepal and join us," she says.
"Well actually ." I explain to her that I've just quit my job and am now a man of leisure, at least for a little while.
Within ten minutes Tina has spoken to Siling and agreed they'll delay their departure until I arrive back from Tibet. Meanwhile I'll contact Qatar Airways and see if I can change my flight so that I can stay an extra month in Nepal. After lunch we go to the Pilgrim's Book House, a few doors down the road, where I show Tina the route we'll be taking up Everest, and she shows me the intended destinations for their recce, then we go to an internet café and agree on dates. I invite her to join us at Kilroy's restaurant later that evening and we part around 3 o'clock.
Back at the Summit Hotel it's beginning to sink in. It wasn't a difficult decision to make: do I want to stay in Nepal for an extra month visiting 3 off-the-beaten-track areas of a foreign land with my 2 friends, who will be doing all the organising? I can't believe my luck. On Friday I was grinding my way through my last day at work and just 3 days later I'm in a different world experiencing a completely different life.
I bump into Stuart from Xtreme Everest having a drink on the hotel veranda.
"Was that you up at the crack of dawn exercising in the garden?" I ask him.
"Yes, and it'll be worse tomorrow. We've got to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to go on the exercise bike. 4 o'fucking clock!" he replies in his best retired schoolteacher manner.
Later that evening I meet up with the rest of my expedition team at Kilroy's in Thamel. Somewhat naively we get a table outside on the rooftop area, and don't cotton on to the fact that we're the only people out there. Fortunately there is space for us inside in the bar area when the thunderstorm starts. It's blowing a howling gale, and all the net curtains in the windows are blowing horizontally across our faces. We bolt all the windows shut, but there's still a huge draught blowing directly behind me. I keep trying to close the windows more tightly, but it doesn't seem to have any effect. It's only much later in the evening that I discover I can stop the draught by switching off the electric fan rotating about a metre away from me.
When Tina arrives she manages to embarrass me by telling my new friends about all the voluntary work I've been doing for their charity on their web site.
"This man's a saint," she proclaims.
Nobody believes her, but they all think it's funny and start calling me St Mark to distinguish me from the other Mark. She leaves to cycle back home when the storm abates at around 9pm, after presenting me with a Tibetan kata scarf to bring good luck on our climb. About 5 minutes after she has gone I get a little bit self-conscious about wearing it and have to remove it.
Most of the others leave soon after this, but Mark, Ian, Bunter and I end up at Sam's Bar drinking Everests. They're playing rock classics over the speakers again, and I feel compelled to tell my companions about the last occasion I was in this particular bar. I returned home to the UK to discover an unusual piece of video footage on my digital camera. The film was set in Sam's Bar with the camera panning around other members of my Mera Peak expedition team while my voice can be heard singing Jethro Tull's Locomotive Breath incredibly badly into the camera's microphone. I still don't remember taking the film.
This session at Sam's isn't quite as blurry, but goes on for quite a while longer, as we drink them out of Everests and move onto Tuborg, eventually ending some time after 1am. Back at the Summit Hotel I put in my earplugs so that I don't hear the Xtreme Everest team beginning their exercise routine.
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