Firstly sorry for the extended silence. I have been up to my neck in a couple of new book projects, and have let things slip. This hasn’t been helped by the number of people who contact me about working for them, and expect me to work for free! Seriously! One guy hasn’t got the budget to pay me to write a story for his (very large) magazine, so he expects to be able to interview me for all of the information and write the story himself. Another wants me to act as a consultant for his company in return for lunch. Things have got so bad I have even put a page up on my website to direct people to, when they suggest such things, complete with a link to a fantastic Harlan Ellison You Tube interview.

I used to be a member of the Royal Geographical Society in London. This august organisation was responsible for many of the world’s great explorers before the National Geographic Society was even a yellow border in it’s founders eye. This was where the great explorers used to come to announce their discoveries to an expectant world. In the end I let my membership lapse because I kept missing meetings when I was overseas, and when I was in London I never seemed to get round to it.

Still, there were some amazing speakers, and the sad death of Sir Edmund Hillary last month, reminded me of a talk I attended by the first man to climb Mount Everest. No this wasn’t Sir Edmund, but a mountaineer and author called Tim Macartney-Snape. Not as you might expect a raving lunatic, Macartney-Snape was apparently the first person to climb Everest FROM SEA LEVEL! He started on a beach in the Bay of Bengal, walked all the way to Everest, climbed it without oxygen, then walked back to the coast! This phenomenal achievement was carried out in 1990, and was the inspiration behind his Sea To Summit clothing and survival gear range.

Ignoring the current libel case between Macartney-Snape and elements of the Australian media (largely because despite reading his website I am still at a loss as to what it is all about), I have to say I do have sympathy with his Everest claims. I mean, how far up a mountain do can you start, and still claim to have climbed it. If you fly to Lhasa, and then get a 4WD to base camp, you might still have to do the hard bit, but mountains are measured from sea level after all! If I got helicoptered to within 50 metres of the top of Everest then hiked the rest of the way, would I too be a summiteer?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 4:54 am and is filed under Perceptive Travel, Steve projects, novel travel, weirdness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.