author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Have you ever been so exhausted on a mountain that you wish you could crawl back down? I’ve been there and written a book about it. But which mountains provided the hardest physical challenge? Here are my top five.
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Tourism in Nepal has been hit hard by the earthquakes and border blockade, and tourist numbers have declined significantly. Against this backdrop, Nepal’s government continues to make announcements which damage its reputation as a tourist destination.
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The Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA) has recently lost a significant part of its annual income. In this week’s post I look at the NMA’s work to see what programmes will be affected and what this change is likely to mean for mountain tourism in Nepal.
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With earthquakes, fuel strikes and vacuous announcements about Everest dominating the news agenda, an obscure but significant rule change affecting Nepal’s trekking peaks has largely gone unnoticed.
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Responding to reports that Everest has become too easy to climb, the government of Nepal has announced a new set of arbitrary criteria in an effort to limit the numbers and produce a better quality of climber.
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They’ve just released a big-budget film about the 1996 Everest tragedy, which I went to see at the BFI IMAX in London earlier this week. I was expecting to hate it, but although I had some reservations, I ended up really enjoying it.
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I recently wrote about Colonel Jimmy Roberts, the grandfather of trekking. Now I would like to introduce another important figure in the development of tourism in Nepal, a ballet dancer called Boris, whose colourful life reads like a surreal fairy tale.
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I expect most of us have experienced it at some time in our lives: escaping the office for a few weeks of sunshine, only to end up somewhere wetter than a haddock’s bathing costume. Nobody likes rain, but sometimes it just won’t stop.
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I was a little apprehensive when I heard there was a BBC Panorama documentary about the Nepal earthquake called Disaster on Everest, by a journalist who accompanied climbers to Base Camp. I need not have worried.
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After two major tragedies on Everest in the last two years, which generated worldwide media interest, I have found myself reading increasingly violent reports, with explicit descriptions of injuries and upsetting photographs.
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