Everest: a risky business

Eric Ellis

Climbing the world’s highest peak is the ultimate adventure, says Eric Ellis, but with trips costing up to $100,000 each and numerous fatalities each season, it can be an expensive one too

You exited the bank just in time. The boltholes in Gloucestershire and Tuscany look after themselves, as do the family. You’re bored with your expensive toys and you’re not even 50. You don’t paint, read or garden. So, what’s next for Mr Alpha? Everest. ‘Because,’ as Mallory remarked in 1923 before disappearing in its snows, ‘…it’s there’. No matter that you’ve never climbed anything icier than the corporate ladder, you find the expedition websites speak your language. Mountaineering, like business, is about ‘the challenge’, ‘overcoming adversity’ and ‘problem-solving’. Suddenly you’re in Kathmandu’s bohemian enclave, Thamel. It’s intoxicating. True, people can die, but surely that’s just ‘risk management’? And you’ve kept yourself trim – isn’t that important?

It is, chorused Kathmandu’s hornet’s nest of Everest entrepreneurs – as many as 500 offer expeditions – during my week in Thamel, as I effected to be a retired tycoon yearning for adventure. But if fitness mattered, no one cared I was ten kilograms overweight, arriving exhausted at their desk after mounting the summit of their back stairs. I’d dressed like Bear Grylls: Thamel’s uniform of stubble, hardwear jacket, cargo pants and an Arafat-esque keffiyeh. But if Himalayan peak time was a pre-requisite, my confession that I’d barely tramped up Primrose Hill, much less the Kanchenjungas, Lhotses and Cho Oyus, where real mountaineers serve their apprenticeships, went unheard.

What mattered was my wallet. Few warned that I might be on a death path to somewhere I had no business going. Nepali climber Appa Sherpa, who’s climbed Everest a record 18 times, recently declared that ‘in the Khumbu [one of three subregions of the Himalayas], people are not judged by how many times they climbed Mount Everest or by how much money they have in the bank, but rather by how much they help or give to their neighbours.’ Such altruism doesn’t inform the grasping anarchy of Thamel, where myriad snake-oil vendors – not all of them Nepali – tout treks, expeditions and Himalayan joyflights and, if that doesn’t appeal, hookers, hashish and pirated copies of Slumdog Millionaire.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Next page