Through Himalayas to Everest Trekking the highest road to celebrate milestone 60th birthday

BRIAN PENDREIGH

FACED with those endless grey, wet, cold days that begin each year in Scotland, I decided I needed some cheap winter sunshine and went online to book a holiday somewhere warm. The next thing I know I have signed up for a two-week trek through the Himalayas to Mount Everest. I mean it is quite high, so it must be closer to the Sun, yes?

“First conquered by Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, Everest has traditionally been the ultimate goal for mountaineers. Today hard-core trekkers seek the challenge of reaching the mountaineer’s base camp,” say the trip notes. “You will be walking at altitudes of up to approximately 5545 metres above sea level and it will be demanding trekking. You will be walking with your day pack, with the possibility of extreme variations in temperature.”

Then there is the clincher – my trek is at the start of March, before the weather eases and the main season begins, and there is £500 off. And flights to Kathmandu from Scotland are surprisingly cheap. So just six weeks before the expedition sets off from Kathmandu, I have signed up.

I have my core fitness from long-distance running, but chronic injury has stripped out my race pace, so this seems like a good compromise. I am confident – well, hopeful – my leg will hold. I am still on drugs for nerve damage. And I went up Mauna Kea on Hawaii, 4,207 metres, two years ago and, while others gobbled oxygen from tanks like Irishmen with Guinness on St Patrick’s Day, I remained unaffected. But this trek goes more than 1,000 metres higher and they say one time you might be fine and the next you are crippled by headaches and breathlessness and the feeling that you are about to die, which you may well be.

My other big worry is the cold, with daytime temperatures forecast at zero and night temperatures dropping into minus double digits. Like many other runners I know, I have Raynaud syndrome. I buy a new pair of Rab gloves and heat pads and take my regular fleece running mitts, and the combo works for me. It is surprising how quickly the £500 saving is eaten up by extra gear.

There can be as many as 16 on treks organised by Intrepid, the Australian company with which I travelled, but it turns out that there are only seven of us – four New Zealanders, two Aussies and me; five men and two women; four in their late twenties, a guy in his mid-thirties; Robbie, for whom this has been a lifelong dream and who will turn 50 on the trip, and me. I am 60. They look like a pretty fit group – Army officer, multi-day ultramarathon power-walker etc. And, here is the rub – the chances are we are not all going to make it.

The adventure begins with a short flight from Kathmandu to Lukla, rated by the History Channel as the most dangerous airport in the world. It has a cliff-drop at one end of the short runway and a mountain at the other. There is a higher airport, but it was for single-prop planes and they have all crashed. But there has not been a fatal crash at Lukla for almost a decade, apart from one last year when a plane hit a tree, but there were no passengers on board. I mention this to a friend in a pub before going to Nepal, explaining that the chances of dying there are minuscule. He reveals that a friend of his died there. The top of Mount Everest. Trekkers to base camp face the possibility of altitude sickness and extreme variations in temperature

It’s funny how often stories of Himalayan adventure begin with a plane crash – Lost Horizon, Tintin in Tibet, The Champions TV show. We get the first flight of the day. The plane is tiny. We land safely. Later flights are cancelled because of cloud. The same pattern is repeated next day.

We pretty much have the trails to ourselves, apart from the porters with straps across their foreheads to carry huge bundles of, well, everything, and the donkeys and mules and cattle, and then higher up the hairy yaks, with the cute wee bells round their necks. There are no roads anywhere near Lukla. Virtually everything that goes to the higher villages is carried on the backs of men or beasts.

Snow-capped mountains plunge into deep