A higher love: Hong Kong Standard, May 1998

HongKongLife, Hong Kong Standard newspaper, May 1998

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Rex Monroe. A grizzled Australian in a broad-rimmed Indiana Jones hat with a healthy distaste for English cricket, he is Crocodile Dundee reborn, but in a later stage of life. Aged all of 50 by now, the old crock will happily tell you in unwelcome detail about his thrombosis, rhinitis, demolished feet and hearing problems. The biggest miracle is that he keeps walking at all. Oh, and by the way, this man is your guide across the Pakistan Karakoram range, some of the highest mountains in the world, many days from electricity or the nearest road, in a foreign country not far from a war zone. “I always like to describe the Karakoram as a dynamic area,” he will tell you, as a rock slide thunders past. Good luck.

Rex has been leading tours in Pakistan’s Karakoram and beyond for a decade (hence the ailments), representing one of a growing number of professional organisations specialising in Himalayan trekking. He is in many ways a fitting guide for this sort of eccentric holiday: an able and reliable professional despite the appearance of a lackadaisical wreck, just as treks in the region are serious and challenging expeditions with the appearance of haphazard carnivals.

Their customer base is broad: our trek, a three-week haul over the Baltoro glacier in northern Pakistan to Concordia and the K2 Base Camp in the centre of the Karakoram range, attracted an age range from 25 to 57, mainly teachers and civil servants – two of the only professions that will give you three weeks off at a time. But although that range shows trekking on this scale is no longer an elite sport, it’s also no pushover.

K2 base camp stands at over 15,000 feet. The trek involves a week of camping on a glacier and two weeks away from any town or settlement. And most of all – in Rex’s ‘dynamic area’ – the course of rivers changes frequently, washing away well-trodden lower routes and requiring trekkers to push to higher, more exposed and less established paths. The route you go up is not necessarily the route you come back down again. That’s because the route you went up might well have disappeared in the meantime. It is the job of Rex and his 60-strong entourage of local porters and guides – required by law on any expedition on the Baltoro – to take these novices across terrain they’ve never experienced before, fulfill their dreams of standing at the foot of K2, and then get them down again alive and more or less intact. In truth, many trekkers have no idea quite what they are letting themselves in for.

After all, trekking on glaciers is an odd thing to want to do with your morning. Glaciers melt, for a start, what with being made of ice and all. They move, too. And if your mental picture of a glacier is a great mass of brilliant white ice, think again. While that mass of ice – maybe three hundred feet deep – is certainly there, it is buried beneath moraine, the debris generated by the movement of a glacier down a valley. This takes the form of boulders and grit, and makes for difficult walking, as each rock challenges you to roll and twist an ankle. It is also hell to sleep on. If inexperienced trekkers are shocked to find high-altitude walking strenuous, they are downright stunned to discover that sleeping on a glacier is uncomfortable. It is like putting your sleeping bag on refrigerated coal. Rex’s favoured wake-up regime didn’t help: 4.30am rise on a normal morning – packed and walking by 6am, with an alarm call at 3am if there was some special event such as a river that needed fording.

But comfort apart, the group was confronted with more mortal considerations early in the trek. First, a porter slipped while guiding trekkers across a traverse, a scramble across rocks high above a washed-out trail. Sickeningly, he fell, bounced, rolled; fell, bounced, and fell again, smacking into rock and plunging like a rag doll almost three hundred feet down a cliff face. The first man to reach him, skipping recklessly down the cliff, was his brother, who howled desperately for us to do something to staunch the bloody pouring from the man’s head. So far away from a doctor or hospital, he miraculously, almost unfathomably, survived.

A few days later, one member of the group started to show such severe symptoms of altitude sickness, he had to be led down the hill, then carried down on a stretcher by eight porters. Finally, he was airlifted out by the Pakistani army. (One of the more oblique advantages of the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, the world’s highest war, is that you can call for help. A single telephone line, frequently snagged on rocks and tied together with dog-eared ropes, runs the length of the Baltoro glacier for the army’s use.) His attack of AMS (acute mountain sickness) had been so severe it had brought on a mild stroke. Both porter and customer were treated in hospital and have made full recoveries.

But these instances brought home to the group just how easy it is to get into real trouble in such exposed surroundings. The worst didn’t happen, and there was nothing to suggest that this was down to luck – groups carry a full medical kit, leaders are trained in altitude-related emergencies, and the remedy for AMS (quite simple, descend and descend fast) is a fail-safe one if carried out quickly enough. Rex’s war cry against dehydration, “Keep your bloody fluids up”, had become a trek joke long before it became so important.

But this and the frequent accompaniment of avalanches on the valley sides, distant but audible rock falls, and the constant clatter of rocks slipping as the glacier melting, were great reminders that humans are breakable things. Not to make light of the injuries that took place, many see this tangible danger as a plus of the trek. I came to appreciate the reminder that the petty tribulations of commercial Hong Kong, of irritated bosses and inflexible deadlines, electricity bills and people who stand still on escalators, are nothing when you think: “If that boulder falls, I’ll be dead.”

I assumed it was the same for the others – the Berkeley physics tutor, the Leeds school assistant, the Surbiton civil servant and the Colorado librarian. Eventually, nine of us reached Concordia, Galen Powell’s “Throne Room of the Mountain Gods”, surrounded by the 8,000 metre peaks of K2, Broad Peak and the Gasherbrum series. This is where you stand and look around, waiting for a religious experience to happen to you, blinking at the staggering flanks of ice and rock that glare ominously out of the fog on every side. This is where you come to feel dwarfed and humbled, the perspective you walked for nine days for. But from there, only four people set off for the grueling day round-trip to K2 Base Camp: only two of us made it all the way.

There, we sat at the Gilkey memorial, three hundred feet up on the side of K2, where climbers have placed tributes to their colleagues – over 40 of them – who died on the mountain. We looked back down the Godwin-Austin glacier to Concordia at some of the mightiest mountains on earth, and up at K2. We left our names in a notepad at the memorial, amid the steel plates and plaques to Americas, British, New Zealanders, Pakistanis, Koreans, Japanese, Spanish, Ukrainians and Slovenians, a remarkable United Nations of the eccentric, ambitious dead. None of us on the trek were ever going to try to things that the Slaters and Hargreaves of this world – both of whom were commemorated at the Gilkey memorial – had spent their lives doing. Instead, we carried off bits of rock to take home and show to unimpressed visitors.

But treks of this type still represent lifetime highlights for many who attempt them. There is a certain snobbery among mountaineers about trekkers, the ‘tourists’ who come all this way just to walk and not climb. But these treks bring lifelong dreams of standing among the world’s tallest mountains within reach of unexceptional people.

Still, little call for wide-eyed dreaming in the company of Rex Munro, cackling at the news from the Ashes series from Trent Bridge through his short-wave radio, and ever the smooth-tongued bon vivant. “Last night I started burping, then I realised I wasn’t burping anymore,” he confides, one mealtime. “Fortunately, it was liquid, so I was able to swallow most of it back down.” A strange lack of activity afflicted the dinner group. “Why aren’t you eating? That’s a sign of bloody dehydration!”