How The Hell Did I Get Here?

By Pamela Lynch

At the age of forty, simply looking for something to keep her mind occupied, Pamela Lynch enrolled in an Arts degree at the University of Western Australia. What followed was an unexpected fifteen-year journey that culminated in a PhD in Classics and Ancient History.

Not content to take life easy Pamela then decided to trek to Everest Base Camp to celebrate her sixtieth birthday, returning to Nepal again two years later to take on a more difficult route through the Himalayas.

This trek didn't go as planned and Pamela was still in Kathmandu when, on 25th April 2015, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, the largest in over eighty years, struck Nepal

In How The Hell Did I Get Here? Pamela takes us on her journeys through the Himalayas, as she reflects on her transformation from a shy, naïve young mother to the confident, outgoing woman of today. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Book Reality Experience
• Release date: Jun 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780648519843

Book preview

Prologue

I’m sitting in a big blue tent nearly 4,000 metres up in the Himalayan mountains wearing a long, black velvet dress and sneakers, and grinning as our Nepalese guides try to eject an errant yak who’s determined to take part in this black-tie dinner.

With the yak successfully back outside in the downpour, our guides and porters transform themselves into waiters and deliver an unbelievable array of delicious dishes. The group of trekkers, guest speakers and media people here have come together to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of one of the world’s major achievements: the first successful ascent of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay.

The setting for this event is the stuff that movies are made of, and I admit to being a little discombobulated today.

Earlier this morning I’d been sitting on a stone wall in front of my little orange tent sipping on hot black tea while two gilded lions, guarding the elaborate gateway to the Thyangboche Monastery, looked over my shoulder. The Tibetan Buddhist monastery is surrounded by mountains. I know they are there even though the clouds are obscuring them today. Across the track in front of me, the last Rhododendron blooms of the season cling to their branches and I can just see the first steps of the steep descent down the valley to Deboche. In front of me, a lone yak at rest keeps an eye on those of us who have invaded his peace.

As I hold the mug of tea and contemplate where I’ve just been and what I’ve just done, I turn to my left. A window appears in the clouds, like curtains on a stage being drawn back, and the main character of this saga is revealed. From where I sit I can see the highest point on earth.

The summit of Mount Everest pierces a small patch of blue sky.

If you’re trying to come up with something outside the box to celebrate one of life’s major milestones, then this would take some beating.

I’m two months short of my sixtieth birthday and I’ve found myself playing Adventure Woman up here amongst the highest mountains on earth. I’ve spent the last three weeks with a group of strangers who have become trusted companions. We’ve become close. We’ve struggled and we've kept going, we’ve been down and we’ve laughed, and now we’ve just been blessed by the Rinpoche of this monastery.

The trek to Everest Base Camp has been hard, harder than I expected and has required more of me than I’ve ever been called upon to give. My training has held me in good stead but the harshness of the terrain has been unexpected. Some of the tracks have been relatively easy to negotiate but more often than not we’ve had to scramble over boulders, climb hillsides of loose gravel, and ascend and descend hundreds, probably thousands, of roughly made steps that were at times running with mud and yak poo.

Avoiding yaks, donkeys, and porters, loaded to the nines with all manner of equipment, food, and building materials, we traversed suspension bridges slung high above the raging glacial rivers; climbed steep uphill sections of track undaunted by the sheer drop to our right; and, refusing to be put off by the effects of altitude and the less than salubrious toilet facilities (basic just doesn’t cover it), we forged our way onwards and upwards.

My legs gave way beneath me as I finally stood at five and a half thousand metres above sea level, tears stinging my eyes, unable to comprehend what I’d just done while cracking sounds warned of glacial unsettling not far away.

Now, we’re back down at the Thyangboche Monastery, 4,000m above sea level, to take part in this black-tie dinner.

Just quietly, I’m having my own little celebration. Hey mum, look at me.

PART I

Chapter 1

I’d never heard of an upside-down rainbow, I don’t think many people have.

I am high up in the Himalayan Mountains in Nepal in May 2013, not far from the border with Tibet and only minutes away from Everest Base Camp, when the upside-down rainbow appears in front of me. Its lower edges are a little blurred but there is no mistaking the distinct gelato coloured layers that normally reach for the earth but that this morning stretch up through the infinite Himalayan blue towards the sun.

Basking in its brightness, the snow coating the peaks below the arc is crisp and there are sheer drops where chunks have fallen off with the arrival of slightly warmer weather this late in May. Lower down the slope the green glacial lakes grow as sections of snow above snap from their anchor on the mountain and splash into the icy water.

To my left I can just see the tip of Mount Everest peering over the frozen ridge, the familiar plumes of powdered snow escaping like smoke signals from her summit.

As always, she is making us, her disciples, aware of her presence. From this direction she looks so much smaller than I know her to be, and so much more innocent than she really is. She’s just another mountain - albeit the highest mountain - up here among so many mountains, but her intimidating allure draws hundreds of climbers every year from all parts of the world. She seduces and then tests those intent on stretching themselves, challenging themselves, and overcoming all types of personal boundaries and family objections as they risk their lives in their determination to reach her summit.

I look back at the rainbow swinging from the rarefied atmosphere, like the suspension bridges we’d crossed on the way up here which swing between the mountain sides. The sharp peaks of this ancient landscape reach upwards in a vain attempt to pierce the smile that’s grinning down at me.

My smile, the one I've been wearing all morning, is every bit as bright as the one above me.

I’d come this far to see a mountain and to make it as far as I could along the path that some great men had walked. I’d kicked at the barriers and pushed my way out of the snug little zone of comfort that I’d lived my life in to do something that required more of me than I’ve ever been called upon to give. At a time in my life when historically many women are starting to collect crockery and linen and seem to acquire that hording instinct in preparation for their retirement, and when society has generally considered we should be slowing down, I’ve chosen to do something more physically and mentally demanding then I’ve ever done before. In the process, I’m hoping to put some of my demons to rest and prove a few things to myself.

It’s a confidence thing really. It’s a matter of convincing myself of something that everyone else seems to get but that I’ve always struggled with. My self-confidence, well known to have disappeared for long periods of time over the years and always in danger of eluding me when I could really do with it, needed a major boost. It needed something to make it hang around for a while.

It was not about convincing everyone else, it’s about making me believe in myself.

I was born a Leo but I must have been the runt of the Leo litter that year. When they were handing out those familiar Leo attributes of self-confidence, independence and courage they seem to have passed me by completely. The shy child that I was stayed with me, she haunted my teenage years, never quite letting go, always lurking and pulling at the veneer of confidence I’d draped over me. I didn’t make friends easily, particularly after we emigrated from England to Australia when I was thirteen, I rarely socialised and I agonized over my lack of boyfriends. I wasn’t clever enough, regardless of how hard I tried at school, I wasn’t pretty enough and I certainly wasn’t a conversationalist. The silent dates I had with my first boyfriend at sixteen still make me squirm when I think of them. Every couple of weeks, on a Friday night, he would call for me in his car, we’d go to the drive-in movies, he’d sit silently in his seat and I’d sit silently in mine as we watched the movie. The first time he kissed me was the last time we went out together.

Most days I would eat my school lunch sitting on the steps to the lawned quadrangle by myself, and even when I started work at seventeen I would keep to myself. I was out in the big, wide world earning a living but still locked in by my own insecurities. For the first few months in that clerical job in a government department I found it incredibly difficult to talk to anyone, to put my opinion forward, or even to join in when everyone else was chatting about what they’d done on the weekend or what they had planned with friends and boyfriends for the coming week.

In the middle of the morning on my first day at work, the tea lady pushed her trolley into the basement of the city building where I was feeling totally lost in the records section of a government department. In those days paper records were all we had and they must have created an extreme fire hazard, that nobody really seemed to worry about, in the basement of many city offices. And yes, we also had a tea lady to dispense morning tea and biscuits, anytime between 10.00am and 11.00am, depending what floor you worked on. As she clattered out of the lift with her trolley I watched as everyone else put down pens or walked away from the manila folders they were filing in the huge banks of shelving, and relaxed and chatted as they queued for tea or coffee. I watched the routine and then quietly joined the queue and managed to ask for tea. That’s where my courage ran out. I couldn’t see the sugar anywhere and I couldn’t bring myself to ask where it was. I was moved to an upstairs office a few weeks later without ever finding the sugar in the basement, and to this day I drink tea without it.

I was married at nineteen, as society in the early seventies dictated, and had both of my daughters in my early twenties. During the next few years I made a determined effort to drag the shy child out from behind her curtain, I took the girls to playgroup each week and I chatted to the mums, then when the girls were at school I joined a few mums who organised lunches but my slowly emerging confidence was often on show only when it had to be and quickly retreated when any social event threatened. I would make any excuse not to have to go to gatherings and if we did go my outgoing husband did the talking while I quietly cringed in his wake.

Eventually I began to creep out from the shadows. My emergence was a long time coming, but when I hit forty I began to get restless. Something indefinable began to prod at me. There was a niggle. The girls were in their late teens and didn’t need the attention they did when they were younger, there were no longer school and sports events to work around and I was only working part time.

I needed something, I just had to figure out what.

What made me think I could or should go to university I’ll never know. I finished school at seventeen with reasonably good leaving results but entrance to university depended on the matriculation exam. In those days the results were published in the Daily News, the local afternoon newspaper, and school leavers would be seen hanging around the newspaper office in the city on the day the results were due, waiting for the paper to come out. I was already working in the city by then and anxious to get my hands on the paper. I picked up a copy, scanned down the pages and found my name. I’d passed the leaving exam but not the matriculation, no university for me but I was fine with that, I’d never seriously considered going anyway.

At seventeen I wasn’t ready, at forty, apparently, I was. That dormant lion was now ready to test out her roar.

It started off simply enough, I had one of those wow moments. You know what I mean, those moments that generally come out of the blue with such force they knock you metaphorically off balance.

I’ve always been a creature of habit and routine has always been high on my agenda. It’s something that’s annoyed the rest of the family forever but, old habits and all that. It was early January 1994, I had my coffee made: white, two sugars (I can do tea without sugar but not coffee), a mug not a cup, and the daily paper in front of me. An actual newspaper, not a virtual one. I was sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar. If I’d looked across at the clock on the electric wall oven it would probably have read somewhere in the region of 10.00am. I giggle to myself: as I write this over twenty years later I look at the time on my computer, it says 10.02am, and to my right is my mug of coffee. As I said, creature of habit.

I read the newspaper at the breakfast bar and there were articles about students who had achieved the highest marks in the recent university entrance exams. There was one about a woman in her early twenties who’d returned to study. She’d gained the highest marks in Ancient History and said that she wanted to attend the University of Western Australia to research and write.

That was my light bulb moment; I thought ‘that’s me, that’s what I want to do’. I found the phone number, called the adult college and enrolled. Simple as that.

I managed to get through the socially challenging minefield of undergrad and postgrad lectures and tutorials, and slowly I began to realise that there were people who actually valued my opinion and that I did have a voice. I learned to use that voice, I made friends and I enjoyed myself in an environment where people actually looked up to me. I needed constant reassurance though. I needed other students to look up to me, I needed the awards that I won each year when I gained top marks, and I needed that piece of paper that said I’d succeeded.

With increasing confidence I managed to get through fifteen years of part time study and, in my mid-fifties, I finally emerged from UWA with a PhD in one hand, divorce papers in the other, and a bewildered look on my face – what the hell just happened?

You might think that after this achievement I’d proved something to myself, that I was now a confident woman, secure in herself and her abilities.

Not that simple I’m afraid.

Realistically, yes, I got it. I was smart, I was capable, and I was listened to when I spoke. But there was still that niggle, the voice of the child I had been kept pushing through, telling me I wasn’t really that smart, my success was just a fluke and I didn’t deserve the title I'd worked so hard for. I was a fraud and would soon be found out.

To this day I rarely use the title, to most I’m still Ms Lynch not Dr Lynch.

Chapter 2

So why am I here?

Up in the clouds with rainbows.

What was it that sees me here now, standing higher in the earth’s atmosphere than I’ve ever thought it necessary to stand before?

Maybe it’s the Leo in me, maybe it's the luck of being born on a Thursday with that ‘far to go’ label attached, maybe it’s just me putting everything together and coming up with reasons and excuses for making one of the biggest decisions I’ve ever made.

I was fast approaching that 'milestone' birthday, the one that saw my mother and grandmother become old-age pensioners, the one that much of society rules as the border between middle and old age. How anyone knows exactly when to amend an adjective to change a life is beyond me.

Anyway, I was pondering on what to do to celebrate. There were plenty of options:

Party?

Holiday?

Family dinner?

Holiday?

Hot air balloon ride?

Skydiving?

Holiday?

Woah, back up, there seems to be a bit of a theme here.

Okay, so it didn’t take me long to figure that I wanted to go somewhere for my birthday. I always want to travel, birthday or not and what better excuse than a major birthday.

Sorted – holiday it is.

That in itself created another problem. Where to go? Did I want to revisit somewhere that I’d been before, somewhere with great memories, where I knew the lay of the land and felt comfortable, or did I want to try somewhere new? So many places sprang to mind.

Too many places.

I’d love to go back to Italy, to Rome and Florence, to spend time in the galleries and wander in the ancient ruins that so fascinate me; or to the Amalfi coast, to those villages that hang from the cliffs and the turquoise blue seas that surround them; or to explore the unfamiliar boot of this country.

But there’s so much more that I want to see and do; The Coast to Coast walk across England, the Inca Trail and the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu. Morocco, Canada, and Cappadocia, an Antarctic cruise, the Northern Lights, Istanbul, the list is endless, life isn’t.

Most people I know aren’t nearly as addicted to travel as I am. A few years ago, I worked with someone who’d never left Australia and he and his family had no desire to go anywhere beyond their local camping trips.

'Why don’t you want to travel overseas?' I asked him one day as I was contemplating the merits of Paris and Rome.

'Why do you want to?' he shot back at me.

I was stumped and really didn’t know how to answer him. Why do I love to travel, why do I want to keep doing it, and why am I constantly on the lookout for ways to escape my everyday life and travel the world?

I’ve done heaps of travelling over the years, from seaside holidays as a child growing up in England, to a helicopter flight over the Bungle Bungles in the north of Western Australia. I’ve fished for barramundi in the Ord River and stayed in an eco-lodge in Tasmania. Travelled Europe by campervan, rail, and car, spent time camping in Brittany, house swapped in Britain, self-catered in Rome, and was lucky enough to share a luxurious private villa, complete with its own swimming pool, on the beautiful island of Crete. I’ve thrown snowballs with my excited young daughters in the shadow of the Jungfrau, and I’ve grown reflective while watching the sun setting over the river Arno, in Florence. I’ve been privileged to share a late-night cognac, one rainy Paris evening, with a native Parisian artist and a Serbian architect within sight of the Arc de Triomphe, and I’ve been transported back two thousand years in the Roman Forum as I stood in the spot where Julius Caesar was cremated. But Nepal, the Himalayas? Trekking? Hmmm ….. What has possessed me?

When I put it down on paper like this it surprises me how much I’ve done and how many places I’ve been to and it probably seems a little self-indulgent to many. But it’s what I do and, to be fair, it has been spread out over four decades and I’ve had to use all of my budgeting skills to be able to afford much of it. When you want something enough I’ve found that it is possible to give up chocolate biscuits and magazines to save a few extra dollars, and to get