James Hamilton

Winston Aldworth talks to the chief guide of Southern Lakes Heliski, a veteran of Antarctic missions

Grab any opportunity. After I’d climbed Mt Aspiring with a client back in 2005, I got approached by a guy at Mt Aspiring Hut. He said: “We need someone to come to Iceland and run a guiding business.” I followed it up, went over there and lived in a tent in Iceland for three months. We’d get a little food parcel every two weeks from Reykjavik, a four-hour drive away. The main walk I’d recommend to any foreigner visiting New Zealand is the Gertrude Saddle, in Fiordland. Magic. And for drives, you’ve got to send them up to Glenorchy or on the Greymouth-to-Westport road. In Iceland, I ate some interesting things, like puffin. They’ve been through such hard times, they eat everything off a sheep — at the supermarket, you see sheeps’ heads. They eat this dish called hakarl, which is basically fermented shark. They wrap it in cloth and bury it for a couple of months. In the old days they’d piss on it, too. They don’t piss on the shark any more, but it smells like they do. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten. By a mile. They have a shot of Brennivin — which is rocket fuel — straight away, to take the taste away. Talk to Icelandic people and they’ll tell you they’re the only people who have won a modern war against England — the Cod War. They’re really proud of that fact. Beautiful looking people, though. It was a very unregulated industry compared with what we have here. So some of the safety stuff was a bit loose. I had one group of Danish guys who wanted to climb all the highest mountains in each Scandinavian country. They were doing one mountain a day, so hopping from each country. Hvannadalshnukur, the tallest in Iceland, was their last one and conditions were not good. They insisted on going. I took them up there, but — honestly — it was so cloudy I could have taken them up any old hill and told them they were there. I didn’t have any close calls in the Icelandic mountains, but Reykjavik is another matter — when all the locals go hard on the diesel until 3am. They are seriously crazy drinkers. Chucking glasses out the window of the bar, that sort of thing. After school I had the chance to take up scholarships to do sculpture at Elam. But, growing up on the West Coast, I always wanted to be in the outdoors. It’s not something you do lightly. The financial commitment to becoming a mountain guide is comparable to a