Thieves, Liars and Mountaineers: On the 8000 Metre Peak Circus in Pakistan's Karakoram Mountains (3 page)

Today promises much but delivers little as we continue up the valley in the direction of Concordia. This is supposed to be one of the world's great treks, with giant rock towers and ice peaks rising up all around us, but we've seen little evidence of them so far. Leaving Paiyu camp shortly after 6.30 this morning, I expect to be walking in shade for the first hour before slapping on the sun cream and sun hat and walking in sweltering heat for the rest of the day, but this doesn't happen.

There is one positive: we climb away from the dust which has plagued us for the last three days when we reach the Baltoro Glacier just a few minutes out of camp. Beginning on the left-hand side of the valley, the path slants up and across to the right as it climbs up the snout of the glacier and onto moraine. I amble along at my own slow pace again, and am slower than everybody except Bob and the Major. With no view beyond the clouds that close in around me, the day passes in tedious monotony as I climb up and down ice ridges on loose moraine, stopping constantly to let porters pass, and put on my jacket when a snow shower begins, only to take it off again when the sun peeps through cloud.

There is one brief moment of excitement while I'm traversing up a loose scree slope on a narrow path when some fool of a muleteer sends his horses down in the opposite direction before I've reached the top. There is nowhere for me to get out of the way and the first horse is panicking as it approaches me, with a steep drop below it on a path far too narrow for it to turn around, while I hurl expletives up the slope in its direction, screaming at its master not to let any more horses down. I hold my breath and squeeze as tightly against the slope as I can. There's not room on the path for both me and the horse, and it has to run straight over me to get past. It's a big horse, and if it steps on my feet that's probably my expedition over. I hold my breath. The first horse rushes past, bumping against me, but mercifully missing my feet. The second horse does likewise, and I look up expecting to see more, but the rest of the horses have now been held back at the top of the traverse. I breathe a sigh of relief and hurry to the top. I'm furious with the muleteer, but I pass by without looking at him and am in a bad mood for the next few minutes after my fright.

A few minutes later I pass Ian and Cassidy on the trail, this time without Gordon and Arian, and reach Urdukas campsite at 2.30. Sitting on a grassy bank above the glacier, in terraces sectioned off by scrubby bushes, it's our last haven of greenery for two months. My arrival is timely: all our tents have already been erected by my fellow team members, and tea and biscuits are waiting for me. I spend a pleasant hour rehydrating and looking out across the glacier from our lofty perch.

Evening meals in the mess tent are becoming an arena for Gordon's wise-cracking. He's an entertaining character, but I'm finding everything has says goes in one ear and out the other. This is quite a talkative group and with the exception of Philippe, Ian and I seem to be much the quietest members, sitting quietly while everyone else talks nonsense around us.

This morning begins with a porter strike. It's snowing when we get up at our usual time of 5.30 and pack the tents away. Everything is wet and covered with mud. As we finish our breakfast in the mess tent we learn the porters don't intend to leave camp until the snow has stopped.

“This is ridiculous,” says Anna, who has only come here on a two week trek and doesn't have as much time as the rest of us. “Supposing it snows for four days, what then?”

Gorgan is more outspoken. “The porters are gay,” he says. “We have gay porters.”

Phil thinks it's all a ploy by the porters to get a bigger tip, but surely it's more likely to have the opposite effect. When the snow finally stops and we leave camp at 8.15 after huddling in a cold mess tent for an hour and a half, I find I've lost a great deal of sympathy for the porters and become irritated by them. In previous days their start has been staggered, but now all the porters from several expedition teams are leaving camp at the same time, some 500 of them. Now if I move off the trail to let them by, as I've been doing on previous days, I find a line of quite literally a hundred of them behind, and once I've stepped off the path to let them by, none of them will let me back on it again, and I have to wait for several minutes to let them all past. So I stop letting them past, and this starts to annoy them as a line of them builds up behind me. I keep hearing the words, “excuse me, sir” behind me, but keep going because I know that if I stop, I'll have to wait for several minutes. I in turn become resentful of the fact that they are carrying only 25kg and are stopping so frequently that I have to keep letting the same porters past again and again. Why can't they walk more slowly and keep going? Why don't they overtake me, rather than wait for me to step off the path for them? I become very irritable and unable to enjoy the walking.

In the meantime the snow returns and the views are non-existent. It's a monotonous glacier trudge once again, up and down over rocks. The terrain is not quite as difficult as yesterday, but still there's a lot of boulder-hopping. My day is dominated by porters and crappy weather, and the hours pass in grinding tedium.

Army of porters and trekkers on the Baltoro Glacier

I reach Gore II camp, in the middle of the glacier, at 1.30. The sun is threatening to come out, and for the first time in five days we have tantalising glimpses of the mountains around us. We've now walked past the Trango Towers and Masherbrum without so much as a sneaky peek at them. Now ahead of us we can see the glacier branches into two, and the flanks of Gasherbrum IV rise above the junction. We can now see most of it, although the summit remains in cloud. The junction is known as Concordia, and was named by the British mountaineer Martin Conway in 1892 after it reminded him of Konkordiaplatz, a junction on the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland. The left branch leads north up the Godwin-Austen Glacier to K2, while the right branch heads south along the Upper Baltoro Glacier to Gasherbrum base camp, our destination. We will reach Concordia tomorrow morning, and it's regarded as one of the world's great viewpoints, though I don't expect we'll see anything when we get there.

In the afternoon Phil, who carries his laptop with him whenever he goes on an expedition and has an internet connection via satellite, comes to my and Ian's tent to say he's just received an email from Michael Odell, one of our British friends, saying that he's now landed in Skardu and is ready to trek out and join us, but that Mark Dickson, who was supposed to be with him, is still in London and has had to stay due to work commitments. We're both very surprised and disappointed for Mark. It's out of character for him to put work before mountaineering, and it was his idea we all come to Gasherbrum this year in the first place. It was to be his fourth attempt at an 8000m peak, and perhaps his best chance yet of climbing one with all the time we've got on the mountain and Sherpa support Phil has put together for us. We understand Mark is still talking to PIA to get another flight and join us once his work commitments have been resolved, but by the time he gets here he'll be well behind the rest of us and running out of time if he wants to attempt both G1 and G2.

In the mess tent later in the afternoon Phil tells us about the last time he and Mark attempted Gasherbrum II in 2007.

“Some Germans wrecked the mountain for us. We had s—t weather for the trek in, like we're getting this time, and when we got to base camp there was a lot more snow on the mountain than usual, but suddenly the weather was beautiful. Instead of waiting a couple of days for the snow to consolidate and stabilise, the f------- Germans went up there anyway and caused an avalanche. Everyone went home after that. After the avalanche all the area between Camp 2 and Camp 3 was rock face, and it had become a rock climb. Nobody had come prepared for this. We needed anchors and pitons and s—t, and none of us had brought any, so that was the climbing over.”

“It's actually mixed snow and ice, yeah?” says Arian.

“No, it's normally just snow,” replies Phil. “It's straightforward. G2 was ruined, but if we had permits for G1 we still could have climbed that. That's why we've decided to do both of them this year.”

It's snowing thickly again this morning, and this time the porter strike is anticipated. We pack up our things in preparation for departure, but this time we leave the tents erect to retreat into if our departure is delayed.

There's a goat in the mess tent at breakfast standing on a box to keep its hooves warm, and being very quiet and still. It's to be our dinner when we get to base camp, but for the time being people can't resist stroking it amid predictable jokes about bringing their girlfriend with them on trek. But the goat doesn't remain so well behaved, and tries to jump onto the dining table after we've left. When I return to the dining tent later in the morning I find someone has tethered it to the tent poles with a leash so short that it can't stand up. There's a cut on one of its forelegs, and the ground is so cold that it prefers to stoop against its tether than lie down. It's a pathetic sight, and although I'm due to eat it in a few days' time I can't help but feel sorry for it. I lay out the tent bags on the ground for it to lie on, and return to my tent to fetch a longer length of prussic cord from my climbing kit. I give the goat a long enough leash to stand up comfortably, but short enough that it can't reach the table. The goat waits patiently while I fiddle with the rope around its horns, seeming to know that I mean it no harm, but shortly afterwards someone notices that it's been crapping on the floor of the dining tent. It's led away to lodge in one of the porter bivouacs, where I can't imagine it being treated with any sympathy.

The snow continues throughout the morning, and by midday it's clear that we'll be going nowhere today, and settle down for another rest day. Phil brings us further bad news about Mark Dickson. Although he has some major business deal in the offing which he's had to stay home for, which could potentially earn him big bucks, he's also been to hospital for an x-ray and discovered the ankle that he twisted after I left him in Pangboche last month is broken in several places. He won't be joining us after all and wishes us luck. Ian and I are shocked. We can't believe another opportunity for Mark to climb an 8000m peak has slipped by – that guy has so much bad luck on big mountains.

“Sod's law we'll make it up both mountains now,” says Phil, “and Mark'll be gutted.”

Our climbing team now comprises five Sherpas, leader Phil, and seven paying clients. It has to be one of the best supported commercial expeditions up Gasherbrum imaginable, and I really hope we don't blow it. We have so much time available that it will be really bad luck if the weather denies us. One of the Sherpas, Serap Jangbu, will be particularly determined to get up. He has already climbed eleven of the fourteen mountains in the world over 8000 metres, and G1 and Broad Peak, which he'll be climbing with Philippe, would bring has tally to thirteen. He intends to return to Pakistan with a film crew next year to climb Nanga Parbat and complete the set. This will make him the first ever Nepali to do so. We really do have a superstar Sherpa team to help us. The achievement of a Sherpa in climbing all fourteen 8000m peaks is that much greater than that of a Westerner because they are never simply climbing for themselves – they have that much extra work to do in fixing the route, carrying kit for their clients up to the high camps and breaking camp for them. Unlike Westerners, they are rarely able to pick and choose the mountains they climb, and can only climb what is offered to them. That Serap Jangbu has been offered the opportunity to climb so many of them speaks volumes for his superiority over other Sherpas, and that is saying a great deal.

Gore II proves to be a very noisy campsite. Five expedition teams are staying here waiting out the bad weather, and our several hundred combined porters are huddled all over the camp. The murmur of voices is loud and constant, and there is human excrement all over the fringes of the camp. To help pass the time, Anna decides to start a snowball fight later in the afternoon, and seems surprised when about fifty porters respond to the challenge and eagerly begin pelting her.

Dinner time interrupts the card game Arian, Gorgan, Gordon and Cassidy have been playing in the mess tent. Cassidy takes a furtive look at the cards in Gordon's hand, but he notices.

“You can't resist, can you!” he says. “You can't resist looking at my hand, just like we can't resist looking at your cleavage.”

Cassidy doesn't seem to mind this blatant sexism, but across the table from me, I see Philippe shake his head and glance at me with a wry smile. This is the sort of conversation we've had to put up with for the last week, and although Cassidy and Anna will be departing with the trekking party in five days' time and leaving us an all-male team, I'm thinking that in some respects it will be a relief. I don't think I'd be able to put up with such working men's club conversation for a whole two months.