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Chapter 2 Surprise on Everest

In the summer of 1988 Andrew passed his exams, New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ was back in the charts and Melanie Griffith, the ultimate eighties’ poster-girl, was outmanoeuvring male colleagues in Working Girl. We were off again. On a hot Saturday afternoon in June we caught the Tube to Trailfinders, the Holy Grail for travellers on London’s Kensington High Street, where we purchased air tickets into Hong Kong and out of Delhi. It was the journey we had been building up to: first Canada and Morocco, now Asia.

‘It’s my responsibility to show you this,’ said the travel agent, passing us a copy of a warning issued by the Foreign Office:

Customers have been advised of a volatile situation between arrival and departure points.

‘So, travelling between China and India isn’t officially recommended?’ asked Andrew.

‘Not officially,’ said the travel agent.

‘Oh well,’ I smiled.

Tickets in hand, we walked over to Holland Park for a celebration picnic, at which point Andrew turned into a magician. Instead of pulling rabbits out of a top hat, he produced from his rucksack a tablecloth, glasses, champagne and smoked salmon. It was the most ridiculously romantic gesture I’d ever seen and perfectly suited to the white-walled gardens, the sunshine and our elated mood.

Later that week Andrew came home with a shiny copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to China and we spent hours poring over photographs of the Great Wall of China and figuring out our route. First, though, we had to earn the fare. Earlier that year I had decided that I wanted to care for the terminally ill and had been offered a place at St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, Kent. I’d realised that the part of the oncology job that I found most rewarding was when the battle and stress of chemo-therapy and radiotherapy were over and palliative care was the way forward; it was a more positive and holistic way to be with the patients, I wanted to get to know them, to treat them as individuals and I was keen to learn how to do this type of specialist nursing in what was then the best place in the UK for palliative medicine.

I’d decided to defer my new challenge until Andrew had finished his BSc, so I went back to Guy’s. That spring was spent working as a nurse from 7.30 until 3pm before rushing across London to a smoky wine-bar near Price Waterhouse in the Embankment. There, I changed into a black dress and white apron, then popped champagne corks for pink-faced city boys, who gave me 10 per cent of their tabs – the tips were insane. I was there until 8pm every night. Otherwise days and nights off were spent working as an agency nurse in private hospitals all over London. Officially this was ‘moonlighting’ but there was such a shortage of nurses then that it was easy to get extra work and everyone did it. I worked hard that spring, but it was worth it.

Eventually, it was time to go. Sometimes when I look back on our trip through China, I wonder, how did we know which trains to catch? No one spoke English. We went prepared: we had the usual jabs – cholera, typhoid and Hepatitis B – and bought bags of malaria tablets. Also, we took our own chopsticks (a precaution because of the risk of Hepatitis B) and had rabies vaccines, which can buy you a bit of time if you’re bitten by a dog. In Tibet, if you fail as a monk then you come back as a dog, which accounts for the packs of wild dogs in the temples (nothing to do with the food left lying around, of course). Although we didn’t voice our hopes for fear of disappointment, secretly both of us harboured the same dream of seeing the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the former home of the Dalai Lama.

We woke up on the descent into Hong Kong after a night flight. The plane flew so close to the skyscrapers that you could see what people were eating for breakfast! Its wheels hit the ground, it braked before tipping into the sea, the doors opened and we were met by a wall of heat.

What a shock.

We found a room in Kowloon on the mainland. A fairly grotty place. We were kept up by the all-night chatter, doors slamming and general commotion. The next morning I woke up with 25 tick bites. Things improved when we found the Youth Hostel on top of the hill on Hong Kong Island. Its whitewashed buildings were a refuge from the hustle and bustle of downtown Hong Kong and there was a strong sea breeze.

We spent our first days wandering through the streets and stalls, marvelling at the strangeness of it all, in particular the food. I am fairly sure we accidentally ended up eating animal intestines but somehow survived. After securing our Chinese visas, we caught the overnight ferry to China’s mainland: to Guangzhou, as the City of Canton was then known. Everywhere we went the Chinese were fascinated by my blonde hair, which caused quite a sensation. Women would approach with outstretched arms to touch it and I’d usually oblige. Our rucksacks were also an innovation: they beat straw ropes, which was what the Chinese used to carry everything.

Certain things we figured out pretty quickly. When you arrive in a new place, buy a ticket out immediately (demand is high). We always went hard sleeper, too. Each carriage had 20 rows of three-tiered bunks – the secret was to go for middle and bottom. If you got the top bunk, you were squashed against the ceiling where tiny fans whirred day and night. On our first journey, I opened the window to let air in and a Chinese man shut it. I opened it again. Wrong! This was a steam train and the smoke and soot blew straight in our eyes; it was even worse going through a tunnel. Those 33-hour journeys were long, with people spitting and vendors offering fried food through open windows at the stations.

But there was plenty to marvel at: light flooded the valleys and the endless green paddy fields. In fact, there was a strange tranquillity in the knowledge that you couldn’t go anywhere but just had to sit there with all those people and the train jolting beneath you and take it all in. It’s amazing how the mind can release its normal grip on time when you allow it to do so.

Suddenly a group of Chinese women appeared and motioned for me to accompany them. I got up and followed them down the train, where I found Laura, an English girl, in floods of tears. She was going to Shanghai for her medical elective. Overwhelmed by the foreignness and loneliness of it all, as well as her predicament, she couldn’t stop weeping. Alarmed, her fellow passengers had gone in search of other foreigners known to be travelling on the train. Laura cheered up when she saw me and shared her fears. How lucky I was, I realised, to have Andrew. I sat comparing travel notes with Laura until we parted at Shanghai, by which stage she was once again looking forward to her adventure.

From Shanghai our journey took us up the Yangtze River in a decrepit old passenger boat. It was filthy, with squatting toilets and inedible food (if you were lucky enough to find any) and was as hot as a furnace. We’d booked second-class tickets and found ourselves stuffed into an airless, crowded dormitory but then we met a couple of English tourists who had cleverly booked a first-class cabin with curtains and a breeze. Instantly, we became best friends and took refuge in their cabin, playing cards and chatting.

We disembarked at Nanjing and then went on to Xian to see the newly discovered Terracotta Army. Standing in a vast cavern, looking at those mythical soldiers was a surprisingly moving experience.

It was becoming increasingly apparent that the authorities didn’t like independent travellers. We had to keep avoiding the CITS (Chinese International Travel Service), who were keen to bus everyone to the foreigners’ hotels, where they could keep tabs on us all. Instead we stayed at a student hostel in Beijing University, where everyone wanted to talk to us. Big things are going to happen, we were told. We had no idea what the students meant but the following year, 1989, came the Tiananmen Square massacre. You could see the curiosity and interest in the young people’s faces as they asked questions about the other side of the globe, places they could only dream of. We felt like early travellers coming back with reports of life in faraway countries: we were the lucky ones.

From Beijing we travelled out to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall of China. Within moments of walking, we found ourselves alone, gazing out at mountains that seemed to be forever rolling on; the scale was incredible. The Great Wall snakes into the distance and I can well believe that it can be seen from space.

And all the time we dreamed of Tibet.

But we weren’t the only ones. The closer we got to the border, the more Westerners we met, all intent on making the same journey. ‘Have you noticed beer is cheaper than bottled water?’ was a common greeting. There was a sense of camaraderie among the Europeans which meant we operated as one: we were tourists from the same place – the West. We arrived in Xinning and then went onto Golmud, the end of the railway line, which resembled a film-set of dusty nothingness. It was an eerie place. Behind us the sun disappeared in clouds of dust and I fell horribly ill after eating a yak burger. Lying in the hotel bed, thinking I was about to die, I became obsessed with a need for apple juice.

‘I want apple juice!’ I moaned.

When Andrew appeared through the door, hours later, with a tin can of fizzy apple juice, I thought I was hallucinating. Gulping it down thirstily, I felt instantly better.

By the time we arrived in Golmud we were among a group of 10 Westerners from Canada, USA, Switzerland and the UK – a big bunch of backpackers. We were herded into a hotel by the notorious CITS, who told us we would have to pay £200 each for a three-day trip into Tibet – ‘guided’, of course. As we wanted to travel through Tibet and on into Nepal this represented a bit of an issue, never mind the cost. After discovering one of our group spoke Tibetan, we could scarcely believe our luck. Now we could improvise: we could smuggle ourselves over the border, which was exactly what we did.

Serendipity has a funny way of taking over in situations like this. You just need to know roughly where to look and be prepared to pay for it. Before long, we had found a local bus driver who was driving the scheduled bus long distance into Tibet. We were smuggled out of the hotel in the middle of night when it was pitch-black. At the Chinese checkpoint where we left Golmud, the driver turned off the bus lights.

No one spoke English.

It was real cloak-and-dagger stuff: we were disguised in cowboy hats and cloaks provided by the Tibetans. The biggest problem was my blonde hair, which I had to stuff inside my hat. When the bus stopped we were herded out to walk around potholes too deep for it to be driven across, some stretching 20 feet long. We were conscious of passengers being beaten by Chinese soldiers but no one asked why.

Then we passed into Lhasa.

‘Not in China now, no passports,’ the hostel keeper informed us.

Grinning from ear to ear, we dumped our bags on the floor. We’d made it, though we weren’t entirely sure how it had happened.

The next morning – a crystal-clear day – we woke up in Lhasa and gazed up at the Palace, which sits on a ridge and was framed by the mountain range with slopes of snow and rock. It was as if we’d stepped back in time. We got dressed, had some tea and went for a walk. In silence, we gazed up at the stupas containing the bodies of all the Dalai Llamas.

‘Psssst!’

We turned to find a young monk behind a pillar.

‘You speak English?’ he asked (it was illegal for Tibetans to learn English).

‘Yes.’

He showed us a book.

‘AD,’ he said. ‘What does this mean?’

‘Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. Have you heard of Christ?’

His face lit up: ‘Ah, the Pope!’

Although we always hoped to get to Tibet, the prospect of climbing the Everest Foothills had been a distant reality. It only began to sink in as we packed our rucksacks with supplies for the trip. I’ve got a photo of Andrew sitting on the bed in the guesthouse studying the guidebook. Beside him on a wooden table is a pile of cans and packets, the tallest stack being noodles. (In the high altitude, the water wouldn’t boil and we had to eat them still crunchy.) Next to the noodles are cans of spam, lychees, peas, a jar of redcurrant jam, powdered baby milk that we drank with melted chocolate squares on top (delicious!), sampa (barley rolled in yak milk to make little balls of dough like a solid porridge) and loo rolls. We had to buy it all from the Friendship Store (a store only foreigners can use) as nothing was available locally. It meant playing along with the Chinese, using their currency rather than the local Tibetan Riminbi and pretending we were just tourists there for the day.

It’s amazing to think this is what got us up 5,208 metres, along with Andrew’s quiet insistence.

‘Come on, Sally. Just a little bit further!’

After a few days in Lhasa, during which time the big Nepal earthquake had injured more than 16,000 people – and we ourselves felt the tremors – we caught the local bus to Gyantse. When the driver tried to overtake a lorry on a hairpin bend, I found myself sitting above the rear wheel as it spun over emptiness. I let out a loud scream.

‘Try not to let your imagination run away with you,’ advised Andrew, the voice of calm.

The driver accelerated hard enough to send the truck hurtling forward, away from the precipice and on into Gyantse. From there, we hitched a ride west to Tingri, lying flat in the open back of a lorry like fugitives. It was exciting, even though the journey seemed to take forever. Every so often the driver would stop, enjoy a few more bottles of beer and gamble with the householders who had provided the refreshment. Arriving with blackened faces from the exhaust, safe but sore, we felt like real adventurers now.

‘Come on, Sally. Just a bit further!’

The aim was to get to Rombuk monastery. At 5,000 metres above sea level, it’s the highest monastery in the world. By now we were a group of seven. Together, we hired a couple of yaks and a guide and stayed in yak-skin tents, which have a hole in the top to allow smoke from the yak-dung fires to escape. We drank yak tea (or ‘yuck tea’, as it came to be known). Made from tea, salt and yak butter, unless drunk very quickly it congeals on your tongue. The climb was slow and hard work; we all suffered forms of mild altitude sickness but one of our group actually had to go back as he was clearly unwell and the only cure is to descend. At one stage we had to cross a roaring river via a crumbling stone bridge that I was convinced would collapse beneath our weight. Otherwise, there was just silence and fluttering prayer flags, the rumble of prayer wheels (wooden wheels reputed to accumulate wisdom and good karma as they spin) and the occasional flap of bird wings. It’s a desert region: food is hard to come by and there is no green, just mile upon mile of rocks and Everest shrouded in mist in the distance, drawing us ever closer.

Arriving at Rombuk monastery is unexpected: after a two-day walk up the valley, you turn a corner and the ridge flattens out. There it is, clinging to the side of the Everest valley like a beleaguered fortress. The monastery is still inhabited by a community of monks and nuns whose lives are dedicated to God and survival. With their lined, weathered faces and faded tunics, they seem to belong there on the mountainside. We stayed in a platform hut built on dried mud, with Tibetan rugs and the best loo with a view I’ve ever encountered. From there, you could see Her Majesty. The monks also operate an efficient black market currency exchange and charged an extortionate amount for their eggs, which just goes to show everyone has to survive somehow.

As soon as we arrived at the monastery, I looked at Andrew and knew from his set jaw and gleaming eyes that he’d decided to go on. Now the plan was to get to North Everest Base Camp: just seven kilometres of rocky terrain with heavily loaded rucksacks away. After a fitful night’s sleep on a hard floor and more green tea, we set out the next morning.

‘Just a bit further, Sally.’

CLICK!

I took a photo to remember the spot, the exhaustion and the sheer elation of being on top of the world (well, almost!). Here’s Andrew in his Harris sweater knitted by my dad (we had one each) and walking boots. He looks every bit the gentleman explorer – no different, in fact, to George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale Everest in the 1920s from the Tibetan side. Mallory gave the infamous answer to the question, ‘Why did you climb it?’: ‘Because it’s there.’

Only Andrew’s white-framed sunglasses (oh, so eighties!) give the decade away.

We reached the British Base Camp in the afternoon. This turned out to be a bunch of scruffy huts and more prayer flags, looking ragged; there was a cairn and tents and provisions. I had expected posh tents but they didn’t look any different to the ones we saw when walking the Munros. Yet despite the low-key nature of the camp, our moment of arrival still stands out as the most exhilarating of my life: to be there on the flanks of Everest (and not on the Nepalese side on a guided tour) and all down to our own initiative and resources was a remarkable feeling.

Unloading our rucksacks, we tried to take it all in. We were so close to Everest that the view was obscured by whiteness; it was hard to connect where we were with the myths and expectations surrounding the world’s highest mountain – she was every bit as powerful as the place she holds in our imagination. No wonder men sacrifice their lives for her, I thought, cupping a hand over my eyes to avoid the glare.

I sat down.

‘No, come on,’ said Andrew. ‘I want to go a bit further!’

‘Right now?’

‘Yes.’

I stood up.

‘OK, that’s far enough,’ he said, half an hour later. ‘I want a photograph of us with Everest in the background. Can you take a photo?’ He gave the camera to our new friend Peter, a Canadian mountaineer. ‘Actually, take loads!’

Andrew had taken off his ski-jacket. His lips were chapped and his nose, like mine, was striped with sunblock. He came and joined me in front of the camera. Together, we blinked in the sun and I relaxed into the pose. Then all of a sudden, he dropped down on one knee.

‘Andrew?’

I watched him rummage in the camera case hanging from his neck then I looked over his shoulder towards the craggy face of Everest and its snow-covered slopes.

He can’t have planned this in London.

‘Will you marry me?’

I burst out laughing. As he pushed a diamond and ruby ring over my finger, I started to weep with happiness.

I had waited so long to be asked and now when I least expected his proposal and it couldn’t have been further from my mind, there it was. Insane. In the space of a few hours, all my dreams were coming true. My next thought was, get the ring back in that box before you lose it!

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Yes!’

That night we celebrated our engagement at Base Camp with the British expedition teams who had failed to scale the Northeast ridge as the bad weather had come in. The men were tired and gruff. It felt so exciting to be there, eavesdropping on their stories, that I didn’t appreciate how disappointed they must have felt at not succeeding. One of their group was part of the mountain rescue team in Glencoe and another belonged to the Guinness family. With them were the Sherpas, quite extraordinary men who get themselves and everyone else up Everest, carrying loads, while more often than not inadequately equipped or reliant on the teams to equip them. For me, it was a glimpse into a world I would never see again.

Meanwhile, I twisted my engagement ring round and round my finger. During the trip, I’d lost so much weight that my fingers had shrunk and it didn’t fit: the ruby glinted, blood red, in the firelight. We drank whisky and ate the Scottish food provided for us by the team: tinned mince and peas followed by Dundee cake. After months of rice, the food was too rich and we were all violently sick.

Once I’d recovered, I called Mum on the UK team’s satellite phone (there were no mobile phones in those days).

‘Andrew’s asked me to marry him.’

‘What is the terminal moraine like?’ came the reply.

Mum’s a geography teacher – well, she was then – and she’s crazy about mountains. My laughter echoed around the world, distorted by the thousands of miles between Tibet and Scotland. We spoke to Dad then rang Andrew’s parents. All were relieved to hear from us and also happy with our news. The evening was as unexpected as life itself. We listened to the mountaineers’ stories and felt blissfully tired and full of whisky.

I have a photograph of Andrew on bended knee and me in sunglasses, my hair in a ponytail, looking like the happiest couple on earth.

Next morning, the rest of the tourist group left Base Camp to begin their descent but we stayed put. The British expedition team lent us a tent. We wanted to celebrate our engagement and they, perhaps to alleviate their gloom, were happy to have us there. They were all a bit depressed: the anti-climax of failing to reach the summit after years of preparation and expectation must have been hard to bear. When it was time to leave, we thumbed a ride with the team to the main road. The truck driver was a maniac and the Sherpas jumped out of the back of the truck. I remember thinking, if they’ve jumped out we’re entitled to be scared but there was no way we could escape.

We had planned to continue through to Nepal but the road was blocked due to the earthquake and so we ended up with a two-day drive, again hitched. Back in Lhasa we bought some Lux soap from the Friendship Store and took long, hot showers. I’ve never felt so clean in my life! To this day the smell of Lux, that pungent chemical perfume, takes me back to then: clean, safe and the proud owner of a sparkling ring.

Two months later, non-violent forms of protest broke out in Lhasa with demonstrations led by monks and nuns. At long last the Tibetans’ struggle for independence became associated with demands for democracy and human rights. By 1989, Tibet was closed to foreigners, martial law had been declared and Chinese soldiers were positioned on rooftops. We’d got there just in time.

To be able to enjoy the adventures of each day in the knowledge that we had made this new commitment to each other was bliss. We sent postcards of Everest as engagement announcements, which much to everyone’s amusement arrived home after us. Our wedding invitations were sealed with cut outs of Everest surrounded by a gold wedding ring, embossed in gold. On the day itself we served Everest-shaped chocolates with coffee (‘Qomolungma chocolates’, as written on the menu).

Memories of our four-day trip to Everest remain part of our marriage: they’re part of our commitment to each other and the world.