I grew up on the side of a hill. Ascent and descent were part of daily life. A
downhill walk, or more often a hurtling, blazer-flapping last-minute dash,
began the school day, and a slow plod back up from the bus stop ended it.
Steepness permeates my childhood memories, from respectable walks with my
parents down to and up from church on Sunday, to a series of brutal hill
starts when my father, never the world’s most patient man, was teaching me
to drive.
Sheffield was proud of its hills. It had the same number as Rome, though any
similarity ended there. It was enough to instil a vague sense of toughness,
of dealing with harder conditions than those who lived on the plains.
So I grew up conditioned by altitude, believing that cities should have steep
hills and wide views and strong winds and stone walls and inhabitants with
well-developed calves. And not just calves. According to a report in the
1970s, Sheffield women’s breasts were bigger than the national average
because of the amount of uphill walking they had to do.
Once I learnt to ride a bicycle, my life changed and the hills became less of
a prison and more of a glorious getaway.
A mile or so from our house, and easily accessible by bike, the land rose a
few hundred feet to wild moorland. From there I could make out the dark
silhouette of the Pennines, more than 2,000ft high in places, which, as far
as I was concerned, amply qualified them as mountains.
I was a romantic long before I knew what the word meant, and my bike rides
were rides into the imagination. On windswept moors and through the steep
valleys that led between them, I could see in my mind’s eye the drama of
faraway places. I translated the broad horizons, the crags and the fickle
changing skies into any remote corner of the globe I chose to visit.
Some three weeks after my 10th birthday, on June 2, 1953, I heard news of
Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest, possibly the most exciting public
event of my childhood. The best way I could celebrate this great feat was to
get on my bike and replay it in my own mind. The Pennines became a perfectly
acceptable substitute for the Himalaya.
FIFTY YEARS later, on June 2, 2003, along with my television crew, I was
travelling on the Karakoram Highway in northwest Pakistan, through the
valley that James Hilton immortalised as Shangri-la in his novel Lost
Horizon. Snow-stacked mountains rose above me and there were well-farmed
fields and fruit trees on either side. Near a town called Chalt, we passed
an inscription on the rock face above the road: “Here Continents Collided”.
Some 70m years ago, the northward-drifting Indian Plate met the Asian Plate
and slowly crumpled beneath it, upending trillions of tons of rock. Beneath
the tranquil orchards of the Hunza Valley lay the epicentre of this
infinitely slow head-on smash. I was at the point where the Himalaya was
born, and it was to be the start of a great adventure. For the first time in
my life, I was about to enter the highest mountain range on earth. For real.
People have investigated more thoroughly than I why people want to climb
mountains. But it’s worth remembering that it’s by no means a universal
urge. I once asked a Masai if he’d ever climbed Kilimanjaro and he thought I
had to be joking.
“It’s cold up there,” he reasoned with a logic as icy as the glacier on
Kilimanjaro’s summit.
Most of those who live in the Himalaya avoid the mountaintops for various
reasons. Two of the finest summits we came close to, the graceful
twin-pinnacled Machhapuchhare in the Annapurna range and the huge white dome
of Jomolhari on the Bhutan-China border, remain off- limits because they’re
considered sacred. The Tibetan name for Everest, Chomolungma, means “Goddess
Mother of the Universe”.
The 12,000ft Shandur Pass, where we filmed the world’s highest and most
dangerous polo match, is known as the Abode of Fairies; and the Kalash, a
mountain people squeezed along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan,
believe that the White Mountain is where their souls go after death. Nobody
ever goes there during their life.
The interest in standing on mountains was fostered in Victorian times and
reached its apogee in the early and middle years of the 20th century.
Westerners emboldened by enlightenment and spurred on by the spirit of
scientific inquiry wanted to get to the bottom, or in this case the top, of
everything.
An unclimbed peak was seen as a challenge to the human spirit, an affront to
ingenuity.
The British expeditions of the early 1920s, culminating in Mallory and
Irvine’s enigmatic disappearance into the clouds at the top of Everest in
1924, marked the beginning of the end for the virginity of the big peaks.
After the second world war, efforts to scale them redoubled. The
second-highest mountain, K2 (Karakoram 2), was climbed in 1954, a year after
Everest. Nanga Parbat, a 26,650ft giant known cheerfully as Killer Mountain,
was climbed by an Austrian, Hermann Buhl, in 1953. (My climbing friend
Hamish MacInnes, no stranger to the Himalaya himself, said that Buhl was a
famously hard man who issued his team with one-way tickets only.) When we
decided to film a series in the Himalaya, our aim was not to join, rival or
in any way emulate the mountain-beaters. Our intention was to concentrate on
humans rather than rocks, to follow the pattern of settlement along a
2,000-mile route from the North-West Frontier to southwest China.
Looking back, I can see it was both arrogant and foolish to imagine we could
somehow outwit the mountains, take what we wanted from them and move on.
They ordered every inch of our progress, closing off options here, slowing
us to a standstill there. Short cuts were possible but often unreliable. The
Chitral Valley, tucked close to the Afghan border in northwest Pakistan, is
accessible by plane, but because it’s surrounded by high mountains,
navigation has to be by eye as well as instrument, and vagaries of cloud or
wind can leave you stranded for days. Because of our tight schedule, we
decided to play safe and took the road route, an 18-hour journey across the
Lowari Pass, which had just opened after six months of ice and snow.
Forty-nine tight, heart-stopping hairpins wound down its far side.
We successfully cheated the mountains every now and then. Courtesy of the
Pakistan Air Force, we were spirited up to the confluence of two great
glaciers on the threshold of K2, a journey that would have taken a week by
foot. Half an hour was the maximum time the pilots thought we should stay.
This put considerable pressure on us, not helped by the fact that the snow
was deep and soft, and as we walked towards K2, everyone was sinking in up
to their waists and nobody seemed absolutely sure which mountain was K2
anyway. There is a strong case for labelling the Himalaya.
By various ingenious methods, we managed to fly or drive our way through the
mountains until we reached Nepal. This is the heart of the Himalaya, where
the mountains are at their most spectacular. From here on, it was clear that
we could not see what we wanted to see without putting on our boots.
Our director felt we should take on the Annapurna Trail, which winds up to
Annapurna Base Camp at 13,500ft. He had walked it before with his children,
the youngest of whom was only four at the time, which rather took the wind
out of any complaints we might have had.
The Annapurna Trail is hardly Joe Simpson territory. Though the path is steep,
it has been partly laid with stone steps, and all began happily enough,
chatting to fellow trekkers, mostly Israelis, and gladly obeying frequent
instructions to stop for water. Porters scurried up ahead of us, carrying
our film equipment, bedding, tents and food in conical wicker baskets,
secured by a band around their foreheads. I felt rather embarrassed that
we’d spent so many hours discussing the right choice of climbing boot when
they skipped past us in plastic sandals.
In charge of the expedition was a formidable team of Sherpas, who seem to be
the one people of the Himalaya who actually enjoy climbing mountains. Their
leader, Wongchu, had twice summited Everest, once so far ahead of his party
that he’d lain down on the top and gone to sleep for an hour until the rest
of them caught up.
I set off, pack on back, walking sticks marking the length of each step,
shedding layers of clothes as the unblinking sun peered over the ridges and
filled the valley. I smiled at every passer-by and greeted them with a
cheery cry.
“Namaste!”, “Namaste!”
But I knew from the day I set out, determined to enjoy the idyll, that
something was going to spoil it for me. I had the hint of a cough, an
incipient soreness in the throat. But I was at 8,000ft and climbing, and
from this point on, everyone feels the altitude in some way or another. I
resolved to be positive.
“Namaste!”
Even passing horses got a “Namaste!”
Once the sun disappears behind the mountains, the heat doesn’t linger and the
camp site becomes as cold as the grave. Alcohol is limited to a beer or two,
and the Sherpas don’t recommend it if you’re climbing. I lie in my sleeping
bag and try to pretend I’m fine, but by morning my nose is running and the
cough is persistent. My throat and lungs crave fresh oxygen, but the higher
we go, the less there is and the harder they have to work for it.
At the top of a particularly steep climb, an American woman is resting. She
seems to recognise me and gasps in disbelief as I pass: “I can’t believe
it!”
I turn and give her a modest, pained smile. This provokes an animated
half-scream, half-gurgle.
“Oh my God! It’s Eric Idle!”
Which was reassuring.
As the views become more and more magnificent, so my appreciation of them
shrinks. The amphitheatre of serrated peaks that is known as the Annapurna
Sanctuary should take my breath away, had I breath to be taken.
When I woke on the third day, my throat felt as if someone had poured
builder’s rubble down it during the night. Every piece I did to camera
dissolved into a wheezing cough. I barely saw the mountains, for my eyes
were fixed to the ground, watching and willing myself into every next step.
With one day to go to Annapurna Base Camp, the nights were getting colder and
longer. A chilly mist descended soon after lunch, shrouding the sun and
lowering the spirit. The Sherpas were concerned and considerate, urging me
to keep eating, but the cold was raging by now and all I could get down was
garlic soup with a Lemsip chaser. Later that night, alone and silent in the
pitch darkness, with manic dreams racing round my head like a video on fast
forward, I was, for the first time ever on my travels, seriously
contemplating giving up the job.
Next morning, the same mountains that had brought me so low, seduced me back
to a sort of health. The glow of the sun on the walls of Annapurna was so
bright as to be almost unnatural, like a beacon, a flaming torch, Excalibur
or the Holy Ghost. It was also irresistible. My head lifted, my body
responded and I tottered up the final thousand feet.
I felt I’d won a small victory over the mountains.
AS SOON as I was recovered enough, my director reminded me that Annapurna was
merely a preparation for what was to come. Everest.
Our itinerary read like a Victorian explorer’s fantasy: “Wednesday, leave
Kathmandu; Thursday, cross into Tibet; Friday, Everest Base C Monday, leave
Everest; Tuesday, arrive Lhasa”.
Never in all my imagination-stoked Pennine bike rides had I ever come up with
a scenario like that.
Though the Himalaya form a colossal natural obstacle, it is largely political
barriers that separate north and south. The Indians and the Chinese enjoy an
almost pathological degree of mistrust. The only main road crossings in more
than 1,000 miles of Himalaya are over the Khunjerab Pass, between China and
Pakistan (closed due to the Sars outbreak when we were there), and the
Friendship Bridge between Nepal and Lhasa.
The border crossing was an ill-tempered affair, noteworthy for only two
things. As part of the precautions against Sars, I had to stand in front of
a Chinese health official who pointed a gun at my head and pulled the
trigger. He then examined the gun, took a reading, smiled and waved me on.
Amid totally chaotic scenes at the customs post, I was cheered by the sight of
a wall-mounted box marked, in English, “Complaints About Immigration”. It
was at least 8ft off the ground.
The crossing of the Himalaya was dramatic and almost ludicrously swift. In
little more than an hour, the well-kept road climbed sharply out of the
thickly wooded southern slopes and onto an arid, treeless plateau, some
5,000ft higher up.
The Tibetan Plateau lies at an average height of just over 13,000ft. In 90
minutes, we’d been catapulted to a height it took us four days to reach on
Annapurna. I felt dazed, not quite connected, as if my system was busy
trying to tune itself in to the correct frequency and hadn’t found it yet.
Nor did it get much chance as we moved remorselessly on towards Everest.
South, off the Friendship Highway, we climbed up to Tong La, a 17,000ft pass,
which, apart from being the highest point I’d ever reached, provided a
jaw-dropping view. This, I thought to myself, is the reason I leave home. A
hundred-mile sweep of the high Himalaya lay spread out under cloudless blue
skies, like white-topped waves on a stormy sea. It wasn’t immediately
obvious which one was Everest, for it shares a busy horizon with peaks such
as Lhotse and Makalu, both just 1,000ft shorter than the Goddess Mother of
the Universe. For me, this was the defining view of the Himalaya. The one
that conformed most to my expectations. A monumental mass of black and
white, one summit after another, many of them unnamed and unclimbed. A huge,
and absolutely silent, landscape.
A few hours further on, the view from the Rongbuk Valley was very different.
There is only one mountain to be seen and that is Everest, a grey, deeply
lined pyramid on massive shoulders. The winds around the mountain were
fierce and a long white plume of spindrift trailed from the summit.
After two days the wind dropped and we were able to move higher up the
mountain. We ate Sunday lunch at Base Camp and then walked up to 18,000ft,
picking our way behind a herd of yak, along the rubble fields of the Rongbuk
Glacier.
That day, the conditions were immaculate. Every inch of the North Face was
clear and, in the bright sunshine, it looked if not exactly inviting, then
certainly tempting. The highest point on earth was a few thousand feet
above, clear as a bell, ready for the taking. All my conditioning, all my
upbringing, every shred of what I might call a sense of adventure, urged me
to get up on to that point, told me that to want to climb to that point was
a right and natural urge, and not to climb to that point a certain kind of a
failure.
I suppose at that moment I understood clearly why people climb mountains. I
was looking at that arrowhead of rock in the same way as Mallory and Irvine
or Shipton and Tilman would have looked at it from this point nearly 80
years ago. The tip of Everest reflected back at me all the deeply entrenched
set of hopes, expectations and attitudes that I had grown up with, and that had
sent me off on solitary bike rides to re-create other travellers’ exploits.
But there was no time on our schedule to go any further. We were day-trippers,
able, thanks to the Chinese who laid a road up to Base Camp in 1960, to walk
up to 18,000ft in carpet slippers if we wanted to. To go the next 11,000ft,
up into the Death Zone, would require months of training.
I turned my back on Everest with the inescapable feeling of having shirked a
challenge. Maybe, though, I’d just grown up. When all’s said and done, if
the choice is between four months preparing to climb 11,000ft of rock or
four months spent seeing the rest of Tibet, Yunnan, Assam, Bhutan and
Bangladesh, I know what I’d always want.
I feel fortunate indeed to have had such access to the wild and wonderful
Himalaya. I like being up high and I like having my breath taken away. But
as for conquering peaks, well, I realise that being there first is no more
than being there first. There’s so much else to see. Despite being from
Sheffield, I’m afraid I’m more curious than courageous.
Michael Palin’s new series, Himalaya, starts on BBC1 on October 3. His
book of the same name is published tomorrow by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at
£20. To order the book for the reduced price of £16, excluding p&p,
call The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585
