to doubt its wisdom was the mad cost of it. I was willing to spend the money because I knew that was what it took. But I also had my family to think about. It was a serious amount of cash, and if I could use it for my wife and kids rather than me, and have to sacrifice a little freedom on the mountain to make it happen, then that felt like a trade I simply had to make. If someone else was actually willing to pick up the bill, I felt like I’d have to say yes.
But that compromise soon led to another compromise, one that I was pretty unhappy about. The channel, and the production company, insisted that I book the trip through a different expedition firm. While the track record of Elite Himalayan Adventures was impeccable, they were still quite a young outfit and the terms of the expensive TV insurance they’d have had to take out dictated that we use people experienced with the particular demands of a film crew. That meant a group called Madison Mountaineering, based in Seattle, Washington and founded by Garrett Madison, who bills himself as ‘America’s premier Everest climber and guide’ and has garnered a reputation for taking the ‘ultra-wealthy’ up to the summit, with luxury trips that cost as much as $120,000. This sounded, to an uncanny extent, like exactly what I didn’t want.
Just three days before my flight to Kathmandu I’d come off the final date of my speaking tour. I’d been travelling the country for six weeks, taking my one-man show to theatres from Torquay to Leicester, Cardiff to Manchester, where I was lucky enough to have an audience of 2,500. It had been unbelievably good fun, getting out there and meeting people and hearing their stories, and I’d become so absorbed in the experience that when my departure date from Heathrow came along, it did so suddenly. To say I wasn’t mentally prepared for the trip would be an understatement. My head was in a completely different universe, still buzzing from the tour. The idea of going up the highest mountain in the world, in potentially deadly conditions, was one I hadn’t even begun getting my head around.
If anything, my physical preparedness was even worse. I’d been eating badly for a month and a half, drinking half a bottle of wine every night and living mainly off chicken wings from the twenty-four-hour room service of the hotels I’d been staying in. I had a lingering memory of Gareth, my tour manager, knocking on my door one night and with a troubled look on his face asking, ‘How’s the training for Everest going?’ I’d picked up my large glass of red wine and toasted him merrily – ‘Don’t you worry about me.’
On Everest there had been one fatality for every sixteenth person to have successfully climbed it. But I liked those odds. As I lay back on the pillows of my huge hotel bed, in my warm, fluffy hotel dressing-gown, licking Buffalo sauce off my fingertips in preparation for another sip of my nice Shiraz, one in sixteen didn’t seem like anything to worry about at all.
And then, on a dull and rainy English spring morning, I found myself packing my luggage into the back of a taxi and going through the ritual of kissing my family goodbye. As I slammed the boot of the cab shut, my two-year-old daughter Priseïs, clinging on to her favourite pink mouse-ear backpack, suddenly burst into tears as she registered that Daddy was going away somewhere for a long time.
‘I know, I know, I know, baby,’ I said. But I couldn’t calm her.
As my car swung out of the centre of Chelmsford I switched on the little camera that I’d been given to film my journey and pointed it at my face. ‘It’s never nice saying goodbye. I’m just going to dwell on it for a couple of minutes. Get it out of my system and then get my head in the game.’
I turned the thing off and looked out at the wet trees and the grey motorway. I was close to tears.
But by the time I was pushing up my tray table to prepare for the landing at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International, that familiar bittersweet sadness was long gone. I was about to alight in a brand new country, one of my most favourite little pleasures. There’s not much else that can fill me with such simple childish delight as the sight of an airport sign spelled out in an unfamiliar alphabet.
When I’m in a foreign land it always feels as if the chains have been taken off, especially these days, when it’s becoming increasingly hard for me to move about unnoticed. Stepping off the plane in my grey T-shirt and jeans, I could feel the drop in temperature and sense the thin air. A fizz of enthusiasm bubbled up as I walked through the brick building, past adverts for the Everest Bank, and hustled my way impatiently through immigration and then customs. I entered the noisy arrivals hall, weaving my trolley laden with my three bags of kit past endless leather-jacketed men calling, ‘Taxi, taxi, do you need a taxi?’, and was met by a fixer from Madison Mountaineering, who was holding a little board with my name on.
‘Welcome to Kathmandu, Ant!’
Part of the deal for agreeing to have my expedition filmed was that I wasn’t going to do it in the luxury style at which Madison, in particular, excelled. Any normal commercial expedition up Everest involves a large team of people led by Western guides and supported by teams of local Sherpas, who all work with between ten and twenty clients at any one time. As you’d expect, these companies can and do ply their trade with safety as a top priority. One of the biggest dangers on Everest concerns the many problems that come as a result of the lack of available oxygen. This is not just an issue in the death zone. People can fall sick, become confused and make perilously bad decisions even down at Base Camp, which sits at over 5,000 metres above sea level, where there’s 50 per cent less oxygen in the air than in the lowlands.
To try to combat this, Westerners are taken up the hill slowly. When you’re ascending from sea level to nearly the cruising altitude of a jumbo jet, you need to allow your body to become used to the conditions as gradually as possible. This is why climbers use a system of ‘rotations’ to acclimatise. Having first done the long trek to Base Camp, where they can stay for two weeks or more, the rotations start with the ascent from there to Camp I, where they stay for two nights. Then it’s a couple of nights in Camp II and then back down to Base Camp again. The second rotation is the same, with the addition of Camp III. It’s pretty standard to complete a third rotation. And then, finally, you get to do the summit rotation.
That sounded like a lot of hassle to me. I didn’t think I could be bothered to complete three rotations only to have to start all over again from Base Camp to get to the top. I decided I’d see how I felt when I got on the mountain, but I honestly didn’t feel the need to be as careful as all the other Westerners. I wasn’t there for my health and safety.
And there were also some other ways in which I intended to do my climb differently to most. I made it clear to Madison Mountaineering that, as far as possible, I’d be my own boss. While they would take care of all the general organisation, and I’d stay in their camps and make use of their supplies of food, drink and oxygen, I wasn’t going to be chucked in with all their wealthy clients. I didn’t want to be part of any tour group. I also refused the help of their Western guides. My expedition was just going to be me, a Sherpa, Ed to film us and another Sherpa for him. And unlike all the other fresh-faced visitors, I wasn’t going to rely on Sherpas to lug my stuff up the hill. Westerners are sometimes guilty of viewing the locals as little more than mules – I wasn’t going to be one of them, and I would carry my own kit.
‘Your Sherpa’s outside waiting to meet you,’ said Madison’s American fixer, trying to take my trolley off me so she could push it. ‘His name is Dawa Lama. And your cameraman Ed’s here too.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, politely but insistently pulling my trolley back.
As soon as I left the airport building I clocked Ed. He was walking towards me with his large camera held at chest height and his headset on. I’d heard that this tall Scottish hard-man was an alpha, and he certainly appeared to be a very capable individual. He was six foot five, lightly grizzled and looked to be in his forties. He was fit and lean in his untucked shirt, black trousers and hiking boots. I realised it was important that our relationship struck the right balance from the outset. I knew, from sore
