by Ben Fogle
When Ludo and Iona were born, I found myself increasingly careful and risk averse. I think it’s probably instinct, an evolutionary way of telling us to preserve and protect. The thing about adventure is that it has made me the person I am. Without it, I would be no one. You see, I was never really good at anything. If I’m honest, I am still full of self-doubt. I think psychologists call it ‘Imposter Syndrome’, the feeling that you are about to be called out any minute.
That time in the Outer Hebrides when I took part in the BBC TV show, Castaway, had a seismic impact on my life. I grew. It emboldened me and gave me opportunities I could never have imagined. It gave me the confidence to be who I am. Most importantly it ‘re-wilded’ me. It reconnected me to nature and created an unshakeable relationship with the wilderness. And the wilderness became my mentor.
I am not a religious type, but if I had to choose someone or something to worship then it would be nature. The wilderness possesses the power to heal and nurture, and my year on that windswept island off the west coast of Scotland was like a self-esteem rehab. A detox from the complexities of modern life.
We have such a complex relationship with the wilderness. Man has made it his business to ‘tame’ the wilderness, but I think it’s the wilderness that must tame us.
It’s difficult to explain the feeling of freedom and liberty that comes from the wilderness. Of course, there are many different ways we engage with the wild, but for me, the most profound experiences are those in which I have suffered or endured. It isn’t the only way to benefit from nature, but it has always given me the biggest returns.
The Scandinavians have a powerful connection with the wilderness; it is written into their language. Where we refer to it as ‘nature’, they always refer to ‘the nature’, which I think adds reverence and power. It shows respect and humility.
I am often asked how I would describe myself. The answer is that I am a modern-day journeyman. The journeyman of old would set out on foot on a travelling apprenticeship. In many ways, that is how I would describe my own life. I am perpetually in motion on an apprenticeship of the wild. There is a spiritual calling to nature. It is profound but sometimes difficult to explain, partly because I have no idea where it will lead.
Mine is a strange life. In many ways, it’s that of a 20th-century nomad. I have a family that I love and a beautiful home, and yet I am constantly on the move. I never stop. I rarely have time to settle and dwell, but where does the journey end? Whereas a river empties into a lake or an ocean, I have no idea where my meandering life will lead.
Most jobs or vocations lead to an ultimate goal. Perhaps that of seniority in a company or of financial success or of professional recognition. Mine has no defined or measurable goal.
I am driven and determined, but I have always been guided by instinct and chance. Opportunity has played a big part in my life. It sounds like a cliché, but I have always lived to seize the moment. I am a ‘yes’ man.
It is this combination of travel and curiosity with adventure that has been my medicine.
What is adventure? How do you define it? For me, adventure is anything out of the ordinary. It is a break from normality. It is anything that tests you and takes you out of your comfort zone. While it is often synonymous with physical challenge, I think the description is more nuanced.
My own definition of adventure has changed over the years. A little like spicy food: the more of it you eat, the more spicy you want it. Over time your taste buds are desensitised, and you need ever stronger spice.
They also say that your taste buds change every seven years or so, which sounds about right. I used to hate seafood and curry and now they make up the substance of my diet. Fatherhood has unquestionably had an impact: my whole attitude to life has also changed. I find myself looking at life and the world with a new perspective. On one hand, it’s with a little more care and diligence in the knowledge that my children will have to live on this planet for the next hundred years or so, but also there is a renewed sense of wonder.
One of the problems of travelling so prolifically is that it essentially devalues the power of my experiences. The impact is lessened through their frequency.
The first big journey I ever took, was when I was 18. I had just finished my A levels and I set out for South America with nothing but a rucksack, a Lonely Planet guidebook and plenty of young hope.
I landed in Brazil and spent the next 12 months travelling this exciting new world, experiencing the richness of the food, the people, the cultures and the landscapes. I can still remember that spark of excitement that came with each border crossing and every new stamp in my passport.
That year in South America was a game changer. I came home a different person. I had left a little of me in Latin America. In the interim, I had somehow managed to secure a place at the University of Central England in Birmingham to read Politics. I lived in a little windowless room below Spaghetti Junction and spent my days in the travel section of the city’s Waterstones bookshop, leafing through travel guides and travel books.
Two months later, I quit university and set off for Mexico on a one-way ticket.
To be honest, I had no real plans to ever come home. Apart from my family, I had no reason to. I had flunked my exams, left my studies and was working as a barman. I was still living at home and I didn’t even have a girlfriend.
Latin America represented excitement, hope and adventure. It was like a shiny beacon at the end of a very dark tunnel.
Travel and adventure have always had the power to heal and transform. The more you put in, the more you get out. The return to Latin America reminded me that the thrill, excitement and challenges of the new and the unknown were intoxicating. It was like looking at the world through a magnifying glass. Everything seemed amplified: sounds, smells, colours. It made my own culture look monotone and bland. Here, everything felt richer, and so did I. I had found work on a turtle conservation project on the Mosquito Coast between Nicaragua and Honduras. I was earning enough to get by, and I had become fluent in Spanish. I had friends. It excited me and it made me feel alive. I was so happy there.
The emotional wealth that comes from travel cannot be underestimated. Each time I returned from somewhere new, I felt like I had been given a booster. But, of course, everything comes at a cost and I couldn’t backpack forever.
When I returned to reality and the comparative mundanity of life, the come-down was immense. When I think back now, I wonder why I ever came back at all. Apart from my family, I had nothing. A couple of terrible A level results and, well, that was it.
I suppose it was the expectations of society in general that drew me home. After all, I couldn’t just ‘bum around’ forever. My parents were heroically silent. They have always allowed me and my sisters to make our own decisions carefully and quietly, helping us navigate through the complexities of life.
In their shoes, I think I might have been a little disappointed in me. Both Mum and Dad came from hard-working blue-collar families: my late paternal grandfather was a florist and my late maternal grandfather was an estate agent in Brighton. Mum, the actress Julia Foster, and Dad, the vet, Bruce Fogle, both worked incredibly hard to pay for my school fees.
Underachieving and dyslexic from an early age, I was not a good student. My parents decided to send me to private school to improve my academic levels. Alas, it didn’t work so well. But Mum and Dad never said anything. They let me do my own thing.
At the time, the ‘right thing’ seemed to be to return to Britain and try to get a degree, a job, a career, and a mortgage. I don’t want to give the ending away, but it all turned out quite well. That being said, if I were to go back in time, I think I would tell my 19-year-old self to stay where I was.
I love my parents. I love my family and I love my country, but in hindsight there was so much more opportunity overseas. Back home, I was a tiny fish in a pond with 66 million other fish, all hungry for food and space.
But that was nearly 25 years ago
. A lot can happen in a quarter of a century. And now, here I was on an airplane heading to Kathmandu for the journey of a lifetime. I was leaving my own family behind, as I set off once again on a journey to a faraway land.
As the plane pulled away from its stand, I could make out two little silhouettes in the window, waving frantically. I sat back in my seat, tears streaming down my cheeks, as I watched the shadows of my two children disappear.
Marina – Am I worried? Not yet
Having dreaded the moment when Ben left us for Everest for months, the reality was not so bad. I was launched back into the chaos of home life, of work, getting the kids to school, of teaching and recording my podcast. Because I had to keep it together for the kids, I ended up having no time to dwell on worry. I had the odd snatched conversation with Ben, but since neither of us are great on the phone, he sent pictures of his trek to Base Camp instead.
A few months before he left, he asked me what I thought of asking my father to join him on the walk to Base Camp. My father has always loved walking and adventure. It was he who took us as children, often moaning and unwilling, up the Austrian mountains during our long summer holidays. His walking boots were well worn in and he was never happier than when he had my grandfather’s old canvas rucksack slung over his back and a pair of binoculars in hand. While resting, his nose was often buried in a book recounting some extraordinary adventure. It was he who first introduced me to the genre of literature that I would become fascinated by, handing me his well-thumbed copy of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.
Ordinarily, taking a long period of holiday would have been impossible. For nearly 50 years, my father has been a GP and taking that much time off from his practice would not have worked. However, he’d made plans to retire in February and the March departure of Ben, Kenton and Victoria could not have been better timed.
My father needed little persuading. As a family, our greatest worry was that our father, who seemed to thrive on a busy and full life, would be bored in retirement. He was honoured to be asked, but wanted to check that Ben was only asking him because he genuinely wanted him along, rather than because he felt duty bound to do the right thing.
Having a 70-year-old retired GP on a trek to Everest is probably not something Kenton and Victoria had anticipated. But for years his patients had joked that he’d somehow found the secret to eternal youth, regularly drinking from some fabled elixir that prevented him from ageing. In spite of his years, he is lean and fit and his dark hair is only just starting to become peppered with grey. We were having lunch shortly before he left, after visiting an outdoor shop to kit him up, and I’m sure many people presumed that I was actually his wife.
I loved Ben for asking my father to join him on the walk to Base Camp. I hadn’t ever thought about the possibility, but the suggestion was perfect. It shows what a thoughtful and insightful person my husband is. Instead of being consumed by the stress of the preparation of such a mammoth expedition, he continued to think about our families, not blinded by what lay ahead.
The weeks before they set off, I saw the eager anticipation in my father’s eyes. ‘Well, actually I’m off to Everest,’ he’d tell people who asked what his retirement plans consisted of, his eyes twinkling with the thrill of it all. His friends, family, patients and colleagues were beside themselves with excitement. One weekend, as the children played in the garden, I set up an Instagram account so that he could keep us all abreast of his adventures. Within a week, hundreds of friends were following, desperate to follow his adventure.
It was these updates, starting with a selfie of Ben and my father, shortly after arriving in Kathmandu, with flower garlands around their necks, smiling goofily at the camera, that were the highlights of those early weeks. As their trip started, @TheWanderingGP, my father’s Instagram moniker, recounted his hair-raising flight into Lukla, the world’s most dangerous airport, where the carcasses of less fortunate planes littered the apron and hillside around; their overnights in teahouses and the people whom they encountered on the trail. My favourite showed my father with his arms around Kenton and a Nepali climber, Kami Rita Sherpa, who had summited Everest an astonishing 22 times.
‘Between the three of us there have been 33 successful summits of Everest (Kenton 12, Kami Rita Sherpa 21, The Wandering GP 0 (for now)),’ he wrote, brilliantly signing off JH (Jonathan Hunt), reminding us that his understanding of the 21st-century phenomenon that is social media would only go so far.
Everywhere I went, all anyone wanted to talk about was Everest, about Ben and how my father was getting on. And inevitably they asked whether I was worried, whether I was sleeping and how I was coping, and honestly, I responded that I was okay … for now. The reality was that I was only okay because they weren’t yet doing the dangerous bit.
CHAPTER FOUR
Baggage
I would describe Kathmandu airport as organised chaos. We navigated around huge piles of grain sacks and boxes being loaded onto the aptly named ‘Yeti’ Airlines plane. Bags and passengers were weighed. Vast piles of identical, tough North Face kit bags soared like a mini mountain range. It seemed every hiker, trekker, traveller and mountaineer had packed the equipment. And it also seemed impossible that each bag would arrive at the correct destination.
Not that it would be a problem for me, because I didn’t have any bags.
Ahead of our expedition, I had spent the best part of six months assembling the best kit and equipment I could. It began when Victoria and I had visited the Manchester factory of PHD, a company that has been making cold-weather expedition gear for years – and which I first came across when I walked across Antarctica to the South Pole. PHD provided a pair of their thick down mitts, which were the best kit on that whole trip, and I had vowed that if ever I was to return to a polar region or to high altitude, I would use their bespoke services.
Victoria and I had caught the train up from London and together crossed the city that had been the home of British Cycling and therefore also her home for many years. PHD still occupies one of the old mills that dominated this part of Northern England. On the factory floor, half a dozen women, who all seemed to be called Margaret, worked on sewing machines, making individual bespoke sleeping bags, jackets and the all-important ‘summit suits’.
Jacob, the manager, showed us around the small factory and took us into the ‘down’ room. It was only after I watched Victoria squirm when she was offered a handful of down feathers that I remembered she is vegan. Despite her animal welfare sentiments, Victoria had agreed, on the advice of high-altitude experts, to use down rather than synthetic filling.
While synthetic filling is a perfectly good substitute in normal life, up in the death zone (anywhere above 7,600 metres) temperatures regularly plunge below minus 40 ˚C, and a good quality down-filled jacket can mean the difference between life and death.
Victoria had consistently struggled with the cold during our training climbs and we knew that she needed the best insulation in both her sleeping bag and her clothing. We decided to opt for full-down summit suits and sleeping bags which we would then complement with a range of kit and equipment that could be worn underneath.
Before Marina, the children and I set off for our holiday in Sri Lanka, I filled two giant duffle kit bags with all my gear including climbing boots, crampons, harness, ice axe, jumar, summit boots, climbing helmet, summit gloves, pee bottle – everything you need to climb Everest.
I filled a third bag with enough food, treats and snacks to last me the eight weeks on the mountain. One of the side effects of altitude is a loss of appetite. Without food, climbers quickly lose weight, muscle and energy. I knew I had to pack as many things to pique my appetite as possible or risk failure in our summit bid. So, I packed fresh coffee and chocolates, Jelly Babies and kimchee to add to our food. I also bought tins of sardines and packets of salami just in case.
The bags were all carefully packed, labelled and shipped to Nepal weeks before I was due to arrive.
Only they hadn
’t arrived. Or if they had, no one was sure where they were. I was stuck in Kathmandu, about to climb the tallest mountain on earth, with just the clothes on my back – which amounted to a thin shirt, shorts, a thin jacket and a pair of sandals. To be absolutely honest, I also had a tiny carry-on bag that contained a spare pair of shorts, and my walking boots which I always take in my hand luggage just in case, but that was it.
To make matters worse, we were on a tight timeframe. Most of the climbers had arrived at the beginning of April to give them enough time to walk to Base Camp and acclimatise before their summit acclimatisation climbs – or rotations as they are known.
It was 13 April and we had to be at Base Camp by 20 April if we stood any chance of getting to the summit. Climbing on Everest is only possible in a window of relative calm, just before the monsoon season arrives and with it hurricane-force winds on the summit. This means most attempts happen from mid to late May every year. We had left little margin for error and certainly no time to hang around in Kathmandu waiting for my missing bags to turn up.
We had one day to track the bags before leaving for Lukla on 14 April. They were tracked to customs. It was Friday, a national holiday and the offices would be closed until the following Monday. We had no time to wait. I took a gamble that my bags would catch me up somewhere along the trail.
There is something rather liberating about turning up at the airport with nothing. So often in my job, I travel with a crew and dozens of boxes and bags of equipment. This flight was no different; between Kenton and Victoria there were nearly 20 bags.
This count had been substantially increased by the addition of a new member to our team. I had briefly asked a couple of broadcasters whether they might be interested in our expedition and the lukewarm response had cemented my resolve to climb the mountain without a film crew.