Hillary and the Ganges

For India’s Hindus, to wash in the sacred Mother Ganges is to take another step along the path to salvation – an opportunity to cleanse the soul and start afresh. The Kumbh Mela ceremony is reputedly one of humanity’s largest pilgrimages and draws devotees to the river from across the Indian subcontinent. This year’s event, unfortunately, exacerbated the region’s Covid woes.

In 1977 Sir Edmund Hillary, too, was badly in need of mending. Two years earlier he’d lost his wife, Louise, and daughter Belinda, in a Nepal plane crash. Given his affinity with the towering Himalayas, it was perhaps inevitable that much of the healing process would be an epic, upstream voyage of the 2,500km Ganges.

Beginning at her mouth in the Bay of Bengal, Hillary was attempting to do what no one had ever done – to get as close as possible to her