My travel diaries
Tuesday 1 May, 2007 - Everest Base Camp, Tibet
We're woken at 6.30 by the sherpas bringing bed tea. Mark sticks his head out of the tent and declares the sky completely clear. This results in a rush to get dressed as the early start is quickly forgotten and I hurry outside with my camera to get photos before the clouds gather like they did yesterday.
The view in front of us is unbelievable, and has to be one of the world's top views, with the north face of Everest just a few miles away and absolutely clear. I borrow Mark's skills as a professional photographer to take a shot of me reclining in a chair reading the City of London Police newspaper In Force , which my friend Jaki edits.
At 8.30 we start out upon a short acclimatisation walk a little way up the East Rongbuk Glacier. I still can't get over the fantasticness (if such a word exists) of the view in front of me, and am snapping away with my camera almost continually. The route begins by walking alongside the lateral moraine of the main Rongbuk Glacier directly towards Everest. After about two hours of walking, by which time the clouds are beginning to form, we turn left up a side valley alongside the East Rongbuk Glacier. Everest is now hidden behind Changtse, one of its outlying peaks, and we start to climb steeply on the main route to Advanced Base Camp.
Sitting at Base Camp, the approach to Everest up the East Rongbuk Glacier seems obvious, if slightly less so than the alternative route straight up the main Rongbuk Glacier. It seems strange therefore that Mallory didn't notice it during an exploratory trip he made on the 1921 reconnaissance. The route from the North Col, up a rocky spur (called variously the North Ridge or the Northeast Spur by early explorers of the mountain) and onto the main Northeast Ridge leading down from the summit, had already been identified as the most plausible line of ascent, but how to get to the North Col remained unknown. From Base Camp the North Col is hidden by Changtse, an outlying peak of the main Everest massif. Indeed, the North Col itself is actually the col between Changtse and the Northeast Spur of Everest. It seems obvious that the two most obvious approaches from Base Camp would be either to the right of Changtse (continuing along the main Rongbuk Glacier) or to the left of it (by diverting up the East Rongbuk Glacier, as we do now). But, no. After taking the first option right up to the bottom of the North Face and dismissing the route up to the North Col from there as too difficult for porters laden with equipment, Mallory then retreated to Base Camp and beyond to make a massive semicircle some distance from the bottom of the mountain to see if he could find another route up to the North Col from the other (eastern) side. To give him credit, he succeeded in finding another route over a high pass (the Lhakpa La) several days later, but by then a slightly more meticulous survey of the area had been completed by Major Oliver Wheeler of the Geological Survey of India, describing the obvious approach up the East Rongbuk Glacier that Mallory had missed.
After another hour of walking we stop for lunch at a place called Japanese Camp, named after a stopping off point for one of the early pioneering expeditions. We have climbed about 300m over the three hours from Base Camp at 5200m, but are already feeling a little out of breath. I have been going 'slowly slowly' to avoid over-exertion and dropped some way behind the others during our walk, though Chris and Bunter were keeping me company from time to time. My packed lunch is meagre. I'm feeling quite hungry and craving chocolate. My lunch contains two hard-boiled eggs and no chocolate, and I feel a little disappointed as I pick tiny bits of shell off with my fingernails. I find hard-boiled eggs are a bit like walnuts in the sense of being hardly worth the effort of getting inside.
The return to Base Camp is leisurely and we're back in time for afternoon tea at 2pm. In the afternoon I join Mic, Mark and Petr in the mess tent. Petr has been joined by his daughter Klara
Polácková, who is aiming to become the first Czech woman to reach the summit of Everest. She has been three weeks on the mountain and has already been as high as 7700m. For someone who has been above 5000m for so long, she looks remarkably well and in good shape, and has come back to Base Camp for some rest before her summit attempt. Mark also knows her well from being part of the same team to climb Cho Oyu last year, an expedition led by Tashi Tenzing, the grandson of Tenzing Norgay, who is also leading Klara's expedition this time around. After she leaves he tells us about their expedition. Only two out of six clients reached the summit, of whom Klara was one. Mark turned back at 7000m after going strongly towards the final camp when he suddenly started vomiting, "some orangey stuff." After 10 yards of walking a yard and vomiting "a cupful", walking a yard and vomiting "another cupful" he decided that his expedition was over and it was wise to head back down again. Indeed. With the summit at 8200m, it would have meant vomiting at least another 1200 cupfuls of orangey stuff. At that rate, there wouldn't have been much of him left by the time he reached the summit.
Just as we're absorbing this tale of misfortune, he tells us about one of his attempts on Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America, and a mountain I've also tried and failed to reach the summit of myself. He set fire to his tent while attempting to light a stove at Nido campsite, on a broad col at 5400m. As the stove exploded he instinctively put his arm in front of his face to shield his eyes from the light, and this probably saved his eyesight. He received first degree burns to his face, but more serious second degree burns to his arm. It took him 45 minutes to descend from Nido to Aconcagua base camp at Plaza de Mulas, where he was evacuated by helicopter as soon as the weather was clear enough. Twelve hours later, which he described as agonising, he was in hospital in Mendoza, Argentina, being worked on by a plastic surgeon. He described an incident a few days later when his girlfriend was sitting by his hospital bed as the surgeon peeled away a slice of skin running from his wrist to his elbow. But he made a full recovery, and the following year he was trekking in Torres del Paine national park in the far south of Chile. He was telling the story to his guide, who had been on Aconcagua at the same time the previous year, when the guide interrupted him. "Oh, so that was you!" he said. Apparently, the incident had become legend. By comparison my attempt on Aconcagua was tame. We walked halfway along the summit traverse, about 500m from the top, and turned back because it was a bit windy.
Meanwhile Petr returns to our mess tent after seeing Klara off, and Mark asks him what he does for a living. Petr pauses, looks a little awkward, and struggles to answer. Having done a number of different jobs in my time, I know this can sometimes be a difficult question to answer, but the scale of the problem for Petr soon becomes clear. He used to be an engineer working on mainframe computers, but had to give it up in the late 70s and early 80s when PCs and networking became dominant. Then, after the collapse of communism in 1989, it became easier for people in eastern Europe to set up in business. He started an agricultural business with an old schoolfriend, but had to give that up when his friend acquired a gambling habit. Then he set up in business as a stonemason. He and his partners worked on statues high up on scaffolding around churches. Then he set up a business for his wife, who is a dentist. He built the office she works in from scratch. He built another house which they now rent out.
"And that is why, when people ask me what I do for a living, I don't know what to say to them," he tells us. "I do whatever comes, and I am happy."
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