Adventureholic: Extraordinary Journeys on Seven Continents by Land, Sea and Air

By Neil Laughton

More than fifty expeditions across all seven continents – by land, sea and air – have led adventurer Neil Laughton to some of the most remote places in the world.
Adventureholic tells the stories of Neil’s most unforgettable and daring adventures yet. From summiting Mount Everest with Bear Grylls and playing cricket at the Geographic South Pole to piloting the world’s first road-legal flying car on a 10,000km journey across the Sahara Desert to Timbuktu, running with bulls, and train-surfing in Myanmar, Neil really has seen and done it all.
Readers are invited to join Neil on a roller-coaster ride around the world, gaining the necessary insight, confidence and inspiration to add a little more adventure to their own lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Whitefox Publishing
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781915635471

Book preview

PREFACE

Author’s note

The definition of adventure is ‘an unusual and exciting or daring experience’ and this book is a compilation of my most memorable journeys during the last forty-odd years. I should explain that I am not a full-time professional explorer or adventurer but an amateur organiser and leader of adventurous expeditions. This has been my main hobby, passion and addiction, whilst holding down a day job, since an early age. My first expedition was a three-day canoe-camping trip on our local river when I was thirteen years old.

I hope that the true stories contained within these pages will be entertaining, informative and a catalyst that encourages you to be a little more adventurous. Placing adventure at the forefront of my life has provided me with incredible worldly experiences, stiff leadership challenges and unlimited fun!

Being adventurous has helped me develop useful skills, boosted my confidence and exposed me to the essential ingredient in life – being resilient. In addition to sharing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of each adventurous expedition, I have tried to provide an honest commentary about what went well but also to consider, when a mission failed or was problematic, why. This includes the mistakes of the leader! I reveal not only the what and when but the how and why including the finance and funding of the more costly missions. Each chapter ends with some lessons learned (top tips) and the final chapter reveals my summary reflections on a life well lived, laughed and loved.

How did I end up as an Adventureholic? Well, it wasn’t looking too likely early on as I was a child patient of Great Ormond Street Hospital with urinary problems. After successful treatment I was sent to a boarding school from the age of nine, which I didn’t much enjoy, with its culture of corporal punishment, bullying and ‘fagging’. As a ‘fag’, in the 1970s, a junior boy was expected to ‘clean up’ after a senior boy. To avoid this, I volunteered to run the tuck (sweet) shop which gave me my first taste of independence, responsibility and of being an entrepreneur.

When still in junior school, I spent three incredible days at sea on the commando carrier HMS Bulwark thanks to my father who was a Royal Navy Captain. Inspired, I felt my destiny lay in a career with the Royal Marines. A few years later I completed a junior military parachuting course a year before being allowed to start driving lessons.

Academia wasn’t my forte. It took me three attempts to pass Maths O Level (GCSE) and a handwritten school report still exists from my Geography teacher: ‘Neil is trying very hard but achieving very little.’ Like many a naughty schoolboy I got caught making illegal ‘hooch’, set the Chemistry lab on fire and organised a massive rave which resulted in eight lashings of the cane and my being expelled. Weirdly, I was allowed back the following term and made head of house and appointed a school prefect! I got back on the right track …

Instead of going to university, I filled a gap year with exciting work placements – instructing inner-city kids on survival courses in the highlands of Scotland, working on a P&O educational cruise ship as a school’s liaison officer and travelling across two oceans on a cargo ship to undertake a recce for Operation Raleigh. This was to search for a ‘fire-breathing dragon’ on a remote island in Papua New Guinea on the instructions of Colonel John Blashford-Snell, who was to become a lifelong friend and mentor.

My call-up papers to join the Royal Marines as a young officer arrived whilst I was hitch-hiking across Australia. At the time, my dad, whom I loved and adored, was battling throat cancer, having smoked for most of his life. He died whilst I was in the middle of the arduous Royal Marines Commando Course. I passed and proudly wore the commando’s green beret but mentally, I was lost in a world of grief, my focus and concentration gone. Eventually I was called in for an ‘interview without coffee’ and released from my duties. Devastated and depressed, I travelled to London and signed up to a freelance sales commission job whilst living at a YMCA hostel in Stockwell. I was at my lowest ebb.

A series of unfulfilling roles as a salesman and sales manager followed. My first boss was defrauding HMRC and committed suicide in his Rolls-Royce before reaching Wormwood Scrubs. My second managing director spent the company’s money on fast cars and it went bust. I had high hopes for my third appointment as sales and marketing manager for an up-and-coming commercial interiors business. In the course of eighteen months I helped increase the company’s turnover from £1 million to an order book of £15 million. Then at 0730 hours one Monday morning I was called in to see the boss. My expectation for this meeting was a pat on the back and possibly a pay rise but incredulously, I was unceremoniously fired, handed my P45 with the words ‘It’s not working out.’ I learned later on that my replacement was the managing director’s best friend. He wanted my job now that the company could afford his salary demands. I decided then and there that I would never again rely on others for my employment and financial security.

Meanwhile, like many, I had been mesmerised by the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London during the spring siege of 1980 by the Special Air Service and on the 10th anniversary there was considerable interest in the SAS. Queues of fit young men formed down the King’s Road seeking an opportunity to join the regiment. I was one of them and after a long gruelling selection process I joined 21 SAS as a reservist and trooper for six years (the lowest rank in the British Army). Someone at headquarters must have discovered I had held a Queen’s commission in the Royal Marines, so I was recommended to attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and served a further six years in the regiment as a troop commander. This is where I met Bear Grylls and many other special people.

The elephant has a long memory. Still infuriated by being ousted unfairly from a good job in the construction industry, I founded a company in direct competition to my former boss. A decade later, with my industrious and trustworthy business partner Andrew Russell, we were pitching for and winning multi-million-pound deals. After delivering a stunning twenty-million-pound refurbishment of BAA’s new headquarters building at Heathrow Airport, a FTSE 100 company made an offer to buy our company and I was then free to explore other business (and adventurous) opportunities. These included founding companies in property development, leadership development, event management, a bicycle club and even an international airline!

Despite the demands and pressures of being a company director and family man, travel, sport and adventure have always been and remain for me non-negotiable in my life. I have the most wonderful, understanding and supportive wife Caroline (‘Management’) and this book is dedicated to our three amazing children, Oscar, Scarlett and Amber. I thank them all for their love, support and generous understanding of my adventure addiction.

INTRODUCTION

Russian Roulette

‘Dear Mrs Crosthwaite, I am so sorry but your son is dead.’

I played these words over and over in my mind as I descended the steep couloir below the Balcony on Mount Everest’s South-East Ridge at 27,500 feet above sea level. Mrs Crosthwaite’s son Mick was lying lifeless at the foot of the icy slope, having just fallen around 750 feet. The accident had happened within spitting distance of me. And I was to blame, being his climbing companion and our expedition’s team leader.

The crazy pastime of Russian roulette gives you five random chances out of six to survive the one bullet. Climbing Mount Everest in the 1990s gave you similar odds. The statistics were clear-cut from the previous seventy-five years on the mountain. For every six successful summit bids, one climber would die. Most of us were aware of these numbers before heading to Nepal in order to attempt to climb the world’s highest peak.

In the third week of May 1998 my team of four (all serving soldiers) were attempting to climb the highest mountain in the world. All of us had acclimatised successfully to 25,000 feet and our equipment was in the correct camps high on the mountain. However, Bear Grylls and Geoffrey Stanford had contracted a flu virus and were in no shape physically to commence a summit bid dictated by a half-decent weather forecast.

So Mick (Bear’s best friend) and I had left base camp and, after ascending the three camps on the Nepalese side of the mountain, we spent an uncomfortable few hours in a yellow tent at the South Col. This is a snow-packed saddle between the massive rock summits of Everest and Lhotse, the fourth highest mountain in the world. We rested and took on as much liquid as possible and a little bit of food, preparing to leave the tent for what would normally be an 18-hour round trip to the summit and back.

Using head torches, we had navigated our way slowly up the steep couloir in the small hours of the morning. Breathing was difficult due to the lack of oxygen pressure at that height despite the help offered by our oxygen systems that would deliver us two or three litres a minute through an open, non-sealing mask. We changed cylinders at the Balcony with the help of our Sherpa team mate Pasang, a fine young man keen to make his first summit of Mount Everest. (Sherpa wages increase substantially if you are an Everest summiteer.) We continued climbing up the 60-to-75-degree slope of the South-East Ridge leading to the exposed South Summit pinnacle. I took a photo of Pasang as he rested on top of the second-highest peak in the world whilst we waited for Mick to catch us up.

It was a fine morning, blue skies, a light breeze and I could see 100 metres or so ahead on the ridge to a slightly intimidating forty-foot section of rock and snow. Known as the Hillary Step, it was named after the New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, who with Sherpa Tensing Norgay was the first to officially climb Everest back in 1953. Both men were strong and proud members of Colonel John Hunt’s British expedition team. After ten stationary minutes, our bodies were starting to freeze so we stood up and stamped our feet to generate some heat. Mick was obviously taking his time. We must move or risk getting frostbite and so I cautiously led the way down the other side of the South Summit, passing the body of Rob Hall who had died two years previously during the horrific storm of 10th–11th May 1996.

Unroped, I broke trail, moving carefully along the left-hand side of the narrow snow ridge towards the Hillary Step, with the ground disappearing sharply away on my left. One slip here and I would make the longest toboggan run in history. With no one ahead or above me, I remember thinking that I was the highest human being on the planet at that moment. Then the reality of what I was doing, soloing one of the most dangerous sections of this route on Mount Everest, sent a shiver down my spine. I turned around to check I was not alone. Pasang was thirty feet away and signalling me. He came a little closer and shouted through his oxygen mask: ‘No Mick. No rope!’

I looked back towards the South Summit and realised Mick was still nowhere to be seen. Where was he? I calculated roughly how long it would take to reach the top from my current position – maybe forty-five minutes to an hour? Soloing without the protection of a climbing rope to a partner or fixed lines would be pretty foolish, but I was sorely tempted. This was now my second attempt climbing this legendary mountain and I really didn’t want to come back again for another expensive three-month commitment. However, without knowing what Mick was up to and where he was, there was only one decision to be made. I turned around, placing my feet backwards into the footprints I had just created and started making my way dejectedly back towards the South Summit. We would find Mick, reassess the situation, find some rope from somewhere and try again, I thought somewhat optimistically.

It was just before ten o’clock in the morning, so we still had plenty of time in the bag and the weather could not have been much better. Clambering back over the South Summit and a little way down the other side we came upon a figure slumped in the snow. To my horror, I realised it was Mick. He was in some distress and having trouble breathing. Was there something wrong with his respirator, perhaps a frozen air tube or maybe his oxygen had run out? Pasang and I had a cursory look but could not work out what the problem was with his equipment.

It was generally accepted that above 8,000 metres, in what is dubbed the ‘Death Zone’, you were on your own. It is not physically possible to carry anyone off the mountain at this height. Earlier on at base camp, one of our international climbing friends had told me to my face: ‘Above 8,000 metres, even if you are lying on the ground, I will step over you to get to the summit.’ I had been quite shocked as it was not said in jest.

On paper our situation was pretty dire. We were at 8,745 metres or 28,700 feet, about 100 vertical metres from the highest piece of land on earth. But the thought of leaving Mick there to die on his own did not even enter my mind. Pasang and I helped Mick to his feet and held him upright between us. With continuous shouts of encouragement, the three of us staggered and shuffled our way back down the mountain.

Resting frequently, it took a good few hours to get to the Balcony at 27,500 feet where we rested and checked to see if there was any oxygen left in our previously stashed tanks. They were mostly empty but Babu, a strong Sherpa from another team, was there and kindly gave us a spare cylinder for Mick to use.

Now we needed a plan to get Mick down the next steep section below the Balcony. To carry him was out of the question and a human sled would be extremely difficult to manage on a 70-degree snow slope.

After ten minutes of sucking in fresh oxygen, Mick was in slightly better shape and starting to speak again but he was drowsy, lethargic and slurring his words. A decision had to be made and quickly. I asked Pasang if he would attach a short rope to Mick’s harness and close haul him down the couloir, with Mick a few feet below. Pasang was strong and could act as an anchor should Mick slip or fall. Mick cautiously stepped down off the Balcony with Pasang keeping the rope tight between them.

With Mick now slowly downclimbing ahead of Pasang on the short rope, I gave directions and encouragement from above whilst not getting in their way. It was painfully slow going but every step was twelve inches closer to the relative safety of our tents at the South Col, from where we could all recover, drink fluids and have our first morsel of food since leaving at midnight, some fourteen hours earlier.

And then it happened. In slow painful motion.

Mick appeared to lose consciousness just as Pasang had turned to look up at me. Mick’s twelve-stone dead weight fell headlong down the slope, the short rope whipped taut and instantaneously pulled the smaller and lighter man off his feet. Both of them were now falling away from me at a frighteningly quick speed, tumbling in chaotic fashion with attached ice axes and razor-sharp crampons on each of their boots flailing wildly.

Please God, make them stop! But they kept tumbling over and over, still attached to their short umbilical rope. Neither of them were wearing climbing helmets and I could see they were bouncing towards a section of jagged rocks jutting partially out of the snow slope – but in a few seconds, they had sailed past these too.

The odds of either surviving this fall seemed to me very slim indeed. Beyond the rocky section was another 100 feet of gradually reducing snow slope leading onto the upper section of the South Col plateau. The speed at which they were falling began to slow until eventually both bodies lay in a heap at the bottom of the couloir.

A deathly silence engulfed me and the mountain.

CHAPTER 1

Drama on Everest

‘The first question you will ask and which I must try to answer is this; What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.’

—George Leigh Mallory

WORST STORM IN 100 YEARS

One year after starting my own company, Office Projects Ltd, I had the tricky task of asking my business partner Andrew Russell for ten weeks’ holiday in order to attempt Mount Everest. In late 1995, my mountaineering friend Paul Deegan had secured a place on an international expedition team being organised and led by Henry Todd, a seasoned Himalayan campaigner with a reputation as a bit of a hardman. Paul wanted a climbing buddy and asked me if I fancied a crack at the big hill the following spring.

Whilst I had intended to tackle Mount Everest last on my list of the Seven Summits (the highest mountain on each of the Continents), opportunities like this were rare and I felt compelled to grab it. I’d known Paul for a number of years through my fellowship at the Royal Geographical Society and he had previously climbed to 8,000 metres on Mount Everest whilst conducting a big clean-up expedition. He was and is a meticulous, dedicated and friendly companion, if occasionally a little ‘serious’ at times. But he also has a wicked, dry sense of humour. I recall someone boasting about how ‘fit’ their girlfriend was and Paul asked if there was any photographic evidence. When a negative response came back he simply said, ‘Would you like to see some?’

Attempting a climbing expedition to Mount Everest is not an inexpensive business and I needed to raise around £20,000. Twenty-five years later, it can be double this figure! I started fundraising as soon as I had committed to going and I managed to obtain a few low-level cash sponsors in return for flying their flag on the mountain. In the mid-90s it was fairly uncommon to bump into someone going off to climb Everest.

During the Christmas holidays I found myself sitting next to a businessman called Lewis McNaught on a flight and I started up a conversation. It turned out he was head honcho at Gartmore Group Ltd, a British investment management company. We hit it off, bonded over our shared love of adventure and eventually he became my headline sponsor. I often watch people on planes, trains and Tubes with their head down, looking at their mobile phones the whole time. These people have no idea who is sitting next to them, nor do they think of the potential opportunities that could present themselves if only they bothered to make eye contact and strike up a conversation.

I met with other members of our team in Kathmandu, including Graham Ratcliffe who had already climbed Everest from the north side and Brigitte Muir who was hoping to become the first Australian woman to summit. Amazingly, this was to be her third attempt. We also had a sixteen-year-old American lad called Mark Pfetzer, who was solidly built, six feet tall and confident of becoming one of the youngest ever summiteers. There were a few more ‘independents’ from other nations including Denmark, US and Spain.

Our hotchpotch team flew in to Lukla airport from the capital Kathmandu in a Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter. Statistically, Lukla is the world’s most dangerous airport. It has a relatively short runway with a granite cliff at the top end and a 3,000-foot precipice at the other end. This is fine for helicopters but fixed-wing aircraft pilots needed their wits about them on landing and take-off. An hour or so after arriving at Lukla, the mountains of kit we had brought had been transferred onto the backs of a dozen or so yaks, the local beasts of burden that would take most of our heavy gear all the way to base camp.

We began our eleven-day trek slowly, feeling the lack of oxygen for the first time as we were at just under 10,000 feet above sea level. The walk was fabulous, mainly due to the beautiful blue skies, the majestic snowy peaks towering above us and the colourful rhododendron bushes lining the footpaths between the mountain villages. However, a few days into the trek at only 4,000 metres elevation, Paul started to feel unwell and needed an extra day’s acclimatisation before he could continue. It was not a particularly encouraging development and I wondered how he would cope at double this altitude. The next day, however, he seemed much better and didn’t appear to struggle from then on.

When we reached base camp, Paul and I discovered a somewhat tense atmosphere. The official South African team, which included a delightful young black female climber called Deshun, was in complete disarray. A number of their top climbers had mutinied against their British-born team leader and had returned home. There were rumours of an ice axe being used as a threat. We had met their team leader over dinner at a restaurant in Kathmandu and I can’t say I was surprised by their decision to mutiny! Sometimes you just get a feeling.

More worryingly, there seemed to be unrest amongst the community of Sherpas who felt that the omens for the season were not good. There had already been a lucky escape up on the mountain. One of their own, a member of the ‘Icefall Doctors’, a special team of experienced local climbers whose job it was to create and maintain a pathway through the labyrinth of crevasses in the Khumbu Icefall, had fallen into a crevasse and broken his leg. A large group of Sherpas went up to rescue him and he was brought back to base camp and helicoptered away to hospital. Another climber was stretchered off the mountain after suffering a heart attack.

There was also a distinct air of competition rather than collaboration between teams and team leaders. The commercialisation of Everest was in full swing and every guiding organisation wanted the best success rate in order to compete commercially and to survive financially. Only a few team leaders including Americans Scott Fischer and David Breashears and New Zealander Rob Hall seemed to have access to accurate weather reports and after the usual rotations of acclimatisation on the mountain, all teams were preparing for their summit bids from early in May.

However, there were rumours of a storm heading towards Everest and a blazing row erupted with every team leader wanting to get their clients up high first. It was finally agreed that the American, New Zealand, South African and Japanese teams would go up in the first wave and the rest, including our international team, would follow a day later with our summit day being 11th May.

The Khumbu Icefall is a terrifying place. It is a slow-moving glacier of gigantic shattered ice boulders that collapse randomly, killing anyone in its path. Over fifty climbers have lost their lives buried under tons of ice or lost in huge crevasses. The one-kilometre-long steeply sloping icefall must be navigated as quickly as possible but this is made more difficult by a series of ladders used horizontally and vertically to get across the broken terrain.

Your lungs scream as you push your body through the danger zone to get up into the more serene Western Cwm valley. From Camp 1 at the top of the icefall, it’s then a gentle four-kilometre trek uphill to Camp 2 at the foot of Mount Everest. From there you climb over the bergschrund and onto the steep ice and snow of the Lhotse Face. Reaching Camp 3 at approximately 7,300 metres takes up to eight hours on your first attempt but on your second (due to the acclimatisation process having taken place) that can be halved.

On the morning of 10th May as I emerged from my tent at Camp 3, I saw clouds whipping from left to right and a massive plume of spindrift coming off the summit ridge. Paul, Graham and I decided to hang fire at Camp 3 as we felt the weather was not suitable for a summit bid but at the midday radio call with Henry, he insisted we get going ASAP! We started plodding up thinking that we could always turn around if it got any worse. From this point on we would be using oxygen and it took a while to get used to having a mask over your nose and mouth even if it was delivering a trickle of lovely oxygen. My hands kept freezing and I’d have to stop and swing them around in vigorous circles to get the blood circulating, which was hideously painful every time.

I was the first of my team to arrive at the South Col (Camp 4) at circa 8,000 metres. The time was 6 p.m. and the camp was quiet with lots of clusters of tents flapping in the howling wind. This is the last camp before attempting your summit bid, commencing normally around midnight after a few hours’ rest and recuperation.

I stood forlornly on a patch of bare snow that had been cleared of rocks by a previous team and it wasn’t long before two of our Sherpa team arrived and the three of us just managed to get two tents erected despite the strong gusts of wind. Paul was nowhere to be seen and our radios were not working. Graham and Brigitte arrived and we hunkered down for a difficult night, realising that a summit bid now would be suicide. For most of the night, we had to push our backs against the tent wall to stop it from being flattened by hurricane force winds that developed during the night. Never have I experienced such power and noise before or since.

At daybreak, after a miserable night, there was a short lull in the wind and we heard a rustling at the entrance to our tent. Then a tired and weary face burst through the zipped entrance. It was Anatoli Boukreev, a big beefy blond-haired Soviet and Kazakhstani mountaineer renowned for climbing many of the tallest mountains without using oxygen. He explained that most of his team mates had spent the night out on the mountain and that he had been trying to save them. Could we possibly help? Shocked, I quickly got out of my sleeping bag, levered my frozen climbing boots on and emerged from the tent. A man was standing looking pensively out towards the east, in the direction of the Kangshung Face.

It was a member of Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants team. As my eyes adjusted to the scene, I asked what he was looking at. He said he had just returned from that location, where he’d found Yasuko Namba dead and his team mate Beck Weathers beyond help. Starting to comprehend the gravity of the situation, I went in search of a radio as none of ours were working. I heard some noise in a yellow tent 30 metres away, walked over and stuck my head inside. I was greeted by members of the South African team and I stated my business.

‘I’m trying to contact base camp to help with the rescue. Can I borrow your radio?’

‘No, we need it for our summit bid,’ said the team leader.

I was stunned by this selfish response. There was no chance of a summit attempt in the near future and whilst climbers lay dead and dying on the slopes above, it was not the answer I was expecting. I went back to my own tent to discover that Graham had fixed one of our radios and was in discussion with Henry at base camp. We were told that a rescue team had been assembled and should reach our location early on 12th May. We were also informed that Paul and other members of our team had turned back before reaching the South Col. Thankfully, they were all safe and accounted for.

The storm continued but not quite as ferociously. Henry had asked Graham to escort Mark off the South Col and they left in swift order. I decided that I would stay on to assist any survivors as may be required. Various people arrived back at Camp 4 during the remainder of the day but the most dramatic moment was hearing a commotion and learning that Beck Weathers had crawled to within 30 metres of camp, having literally been given up for dead some eight hours previously. Quite extraordinary was his will to survive. Something in his subconscious had triggered a self-help response and he began crawling in the direction of the tents.

After another torrid night the rescue party arrived in the morning and led a procession of frostbitten and exhausted climbers off the South Col, including Beck Weathers. I assisted where I could and he was clearly still in a bad way, asking me repeatedly, ‘Where’s my locker?’

I followed them down off the Yellow Band below the Col and then legged it down to Camp 3 where I stayed for a number of days, trying to process what had happened. I should have descended to base camp but just felt I needed time on my own. Eight people had lost their lives during the last forty-eight hours and many were badly injured during what was the worst disaster in the mountain’s history.

THE WORLD’S HIGHEST RESCUE

I went home and back to work in June 1996 but my mind kept taking me to those dark days on Everest. I knew that I would have to return to face the demons and to make a second attempt. But it would be two years before I could take another two and a half months off work, to realise the dream of climbing the world’s highest mountain.

Mount Everest was never far from my mind, though, and I had already tipped off Henry Todd that I wanted to get my own team together for the spring of 1998. Regimental whispers ensured people got to hear that I was planning another attempt and a young trooper from E Squadron in Wales got in touch asking to meet me.

Trooper Bear Grylls explained to me that he had had a poster of Everest on his bedroom wall from a very young age and that it was his lifetime ambition to climb the mountain. He was exceedingly keen, always a positive sign, but I wanted to know what mountaineering experience he had. He explained that he had climbed lots of trees and buildings but not so many mountains. I explained that this mountain could be savage and it was no place for the inexperienced. I told him to go away and climb a big peak such as Mount McKinley, Aconcagua or Ama Dablam in the Himalayas. And that if he did, he could have a place on my team the following year.

So he went off to climb Ama Dablam and returned, asking me for confirmation of his place. Eventually our team comprised Bear, his best friend Mick Crosthwaite and Geoffrey Stanford who was serving in the Grenadier Guards. All four of us were therefore serving soldiers in the British Army.

With the team established, it was then down to some hardcore fundraising. Mick and Bear would meet up in London and cycle around the City looking for prosperous people or businesses and simply cold-call them. On one occasion Bear noticed a shiny brass sign on the wall of a building. It read ‘Davis, Langdon and Everest’ so he walked in and sweet-talked the receptionist who promised to pass his proposal on to her boss. As luck would have it, the firm’s founder was actually the Surveyor General George Everest after whom the mountain had been named. A few days later, the senior partner rang Bear to arrange a meeting. He thought that an exciting project like this could be useful for his staff to rally around and support. Bear left the building clutching a large sponsorship cheque in his sticky mitts.

My technique was a bit more subtle and traditional but equally effective. I would initially write a letter outlining my ambition to (rather grandly) lead the British Mount Everest Expedition 1998 and I’d list a few of my credentials and experiences including the Everest 1996 climb. I would also explain that we were raising funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital for sick children. A gentle tug on the old heartstrings normally helps. A few days later, I would pick up the phone to confirm my letter had been received and seek a meeting.

I managed to secure sponsorships of £5,000 from half a dozen businesses and a few individuals including Richard Branson. Most people were happy to make the donation up front, helping to actually get us