Back to Kathmandu

It was with no little concern that I found myself back on a Gulf Air plane back to Nepal. Despite all our efforts at Christmas, and all Nir Lama’s considerable efforts over the following weeks and months, with 3 weeks to go we still hadn’t been re-granted full permission. We had individual permissions from just about every relevant ministry in the Nepali Government, but were being floundered by some corrupt politicians and the sticky power-share arrangement currently in power.

I’ve actually been stressing this ever since Christmas. The regular updates from Nepal have on some days been reassuring, and some days deeply concerning. Something I have not felt I can share with the rest of the expedition. Cuzza knows some of the concerns, but even he not all of them.

It’s difficult to keep this stuff from Wes. However, I am aware of his ongoing problems with anxiety. I don’t get anxious easily and some nights this keeps me up all night. Really don’t think it would help if Wes knew and the last thing I want is him getting sick again. Besides, unless you’ve been to Nepal and seen how they operate I think it would be too easy to take wrong conclusions.

Anyway, here I am. I love this City and it’s always great to be back here. However, I’d like to come back and spend time here when I can actually enjoy it!

So, the score is that various ministries now want to send liason officers, at our expense. The home office want to send security, at our expense. They also want a Royalty payment for each team. This amounts to rather a lot of money. Money we don’t have. So my job over the next few days is to negotiate all this down to something we can afford without blowing the permissions all together.

Essentially I am in a bit of a corner as if they don’t give permission in the end, we can’t do it. I also can’t reimburse anyone as we have spent all the money getting this thing this far. No pressure then. This will certainly be an interesting few days!

Bath Half Marathon. In Pads.

It’s with no little disappointment that I admit to how difficult I made this bloody race on myself. Complacency is not a strong enough word. What should have been a fairly pleasant 13 mile run in the sun I categorically ruined.

First of all, the addition of cricket gear. Well, I kind of had to do this. Having already run the Asics London 5km, Nike and Gyro 10Km’s and the Cardiff Half Marathon in pads, it sort of made sense to finish strong and do this race padded up too. Even that might have been ok.

However, with the race on Friday, Cuzza and I decided to go visit Vicks Nichs at her family pile for dinner. This resulted in a 4am wine-drenched bed-time, and a morning after with a stinking hangover. This would be fine. We’re all fit and recover well.

Mistake number 2 came when we decided that we’d go to Cheltenham to watch the rugby, overnight there and head down to Bath the following morning. Stupid.

A couple of beers at Cheltenham Cricket Club watching the rugby soon turned to a few more and a visit to bar and wok for some greasy Chinese food and more beer. Why knock it on the head there? More beers in a pub with a late licence. By midnight I’d spotted that enough is probably enough. Wrong. I hadn’t counted on Victoria ‘I run better with a hangover’ Nicholson. Eventually I crawled into bed at 1.30am, leaving the rest to it.

6am start. Get up. Dead rat in mouth. Get everyone else up. Dead badgers in theirs. Finally we’re on the road heading to Bath for a half marathon. However, it’s also the hottest day of the year and we’re the most dehydrated people north of the Tropic of Cancer. What preparation!

The traffic into Bath is hideous, leaving us little time to pad-up and find the start line, let alone the rest of our bunch or indeed re-hydrate.

However, eventually us Cheltenham piss-heads to eventually find the others and we are soon under way. For the first 10 minutes of the race I am joking around. Kossak dancing for the crowd, just generally having fun. Then it dawns on me. I’m knackered and I have at least another hour and a half to go. Oh dear.

I’m pleased to say we all made it round. My time wasn’t great, but all things considered we did well. However, never ever am I going to make something that difficult again. If ever there was a lesson in why complacency is bad, consider it learnt!

Nets

One thing I’ve really loved about this expedition is the nets sessions with Hillary. Getting uber fit is brilliant too, but for me just to have coaching on my cricket is an amazing thing. Kiwi and Glen are great coaches. Essentially if you just listen to what Kiwi says and just do it, he’ll make you a better cricketer!

Cuzza has got me bowling leggies. Now I’m starting to surprise myself with the turn I’m getting. With Kiwi’s input on line and length and some help from Glen too, I’m starting to feel quite confident. Had an awesome session up at St Pauls last Sunday and was giving Glen all sorts of problems. Tom Sharland wasn’t enjoying them either.

The batting is coming along nicely too. Whilst my bowling is still prone to infuriating ‘yips’, the batting is much more consistent. Again, this is all Kiwi’s work. However, the net effect of all this is that I’ve started really looking forward to nets and can’t wait to play for the Drovers this season, and hopefully contribute more than just awesome tunes!

Back with a Bump!

Coming back from Nepal to redundancy took a while to sink in. It’s been a tough month but am finally finished with Nice Group. Am now doing some work with Captive Minds. They have been great to offer me some work. Wes was concerned, and rightly so, that this might form a conflict of interests and potentially he might be right. However, this is no strings stuff as I see it. The key is to find sponsorship for the event so that we can afford to pay CM more money. However, CM obviously have other work for me which is great.

It is bloody tough out there sponsorship-wise. Every lead eventually leads down a dead end. I don’t get it. This is a great property and to be honest I’m getting to the stage where any offer in the region of £25K would do it! £25K for this, what an unbelievable bargain.

Every company just seems the same though. They’re all so anxious about the next few years that they’ve all frozen spend. We seem to have alright leads still in with Vodafone, McCain Frozen Foods, Bremont Watches, but nothing firm. I’ve spent the last 3 weeks cold calling any company I can think of. It’s all the same story: ‘We love it, and in any other market we’d snap it up, but orders are no uneccesary spending. Sorry’. So disheartening. I’m sure we’ll get there though! Got to keep the faith!

Kirt and Curry's Kathmandu Chrimbo

After what had been an exceptionally hectic year, the time came for everyone to have a nice, relaxing Christmas break. Everyone except Cuzz and I that is. It had been apparent to me for some time that I was going to have to go to Kathmandu for the purposes of the expedition. There were too many loose ends over there to tie up from here via phone or email. So, I went to Cuzza to book me a flight. However, you can't discuss something like this with Al without sparking the man's interest, such is his love of travel. Within minutes of asking him to check flight availibility he came back to me with some options in general and one that would enable him to tag along, would I mind? Well, obviously I was glad to welcome him along but I didn't know then how grateful I'd really end up being having him there.

The flight was relatively painless and we arrived at 6pm local time on Christmas day. Nir, MD of Peace Nepal Treks our trekking company, awaited us with a sign 'Mr Kirt Lee' . He was joined by one of his guides, Billy. We were greeted with some quite fetching orange garlands to be warn around are necks. Without much said, we were whisked in a taxi into the madness that is Kathmandu. Within a few minutes though we were holed up in thick traffic. 'We will have to walk the last 10 minutes to the Hotel Mr Kirt' On further enquiry it became apparent that this was due to Thammel, the area we were staying in, being comletely blocked of for a Christmas festival.

Now, there's a few things that these politically correct wazzoks over here could learn from Nepal. I'm talking about the idiots that ban the use of the word Christmas and insist we call it 'Holidays' in case we offend people from other religions. Well, for starters I'm not a yank and therefore will never in all my born days refer to it as Holidays. Secondly, Nepal is a Hindu country with a strong Buddhist influence. Christians make up ess than 5% of the population. However, the party that these guys were having in the name of Chistmas makes anything we do over here look like a gathering for AA. We had to fight our way through about 20,000 people partying like it was 1999. What should've been a 5 minute amble was turned into a 20 minute battle against merry-makers determined to eat, drink and be merry. Just to finish my point though even Bahrain airport was decorated with more festive cheer than most of London.

After dropping our bags, it was off to dinner with Nir and Billy and then on for beers. After a while, the two of them really loosened off and it became clear that we would get along. However, there was much business to do over the coming days so we behaved ourselves pretty well. Oh, except Billy, who within no time at all was dancing around. In about 5 minutes he went from the quitest man around to just about the most talkative, his English also noticibly improving in the same time-scale.

And so to business. Well, first up was the Himalayan Rescue Association at 11am the following morning. I had been a research volunteer with these guys on my last outing to Everest and had kept in touch since. These guys are one of the leading authrities on Altitude sickness research and treatment and have a growing presence all over the Himalayas. As well as providing well-neeeded rescue services they also offer general health treatment in the mountain regions - this is free for all locals and guides. I had asked them to offer the support of a doctor for our trip in return for a suitable donation. We discussed the trip in detail and they stated that they would be happy to support us and would put together a proposal, and that now we must go to lunch.

In our talks to Nir, it became apparent that he was a very stressed man. The process of gaining us permission to do this had gone from being straight forward and certain to convoluted and unsure. There a numerous reasons for this which I won't bore you with, but essentially the goal posts had been moved substantially and it was getting Nir down. 'If I can't gain you permission you're project will fail and I will have to close my business in shame.' 'Err, chill Nir. Nobody is closing anything. We'll work through it.'

Well, that comment was akin to opening Pandoras box during a sand-storm. From that point on our days were filled with visiting numerous Government buildings, buttering up Nepali civil servants and convincing most of the nations management that we are good people, with good intentions and an awesome product. Luckily the project sells itself pretty well and people didn't need too much convincing. However, as was explained many times, there is a process which much be adhered to. With such a young democracy, that process is not set in stone and hence the constantly moving goal-posts. All we could do is see as many people as possible, which we duly did. At some point we even managed to squeeze in a visit to Mr Pandi, the head of the Cricket Association of Nepal (CAN). Mr Pandi is a very influential man who liked our idea very much and offered to help us 'unblock any bottle-necks' an offer we will surely cash in.

So other than the inside of government buildings what did we do? Well, we saw a lot of Kathmandu, including the incredible Durbar Square. Anywhere else in the world this amazing collection of 486 Hindu and Budhist shrines and temples would be an oasis of peace. Instead it'sone of the busiest throughfares in all of Kathmandu and you have to dodge motorcycles as frequently as you have to dodge industrious tour-guides. We hooked up with my old mate Dharma and showed Cuzza the delights of Tongba (hot millet beer - see my earlier blog) as well as sampling various local cusines, including Dal Baht which is rice and lentil based and something that we will all be living off in the mountains. Under local custom they will keep refilling your metal dal baht plate until you are satisfied, which is a result. We also managed to catch up with Team Hillary's own Charlie B-N and his sister for a few drinks.

We had the usual antics - lots of cards, no small amount of beer, got to know a few of our guides for April, met plenty of people etc. After a couple of really good nights out we were genuinly looking forward to our last night -New Years Eve. However, with a couple of hours to go until midnight we were both struck down with some horrendous illness. Without going into too much detail, this was a truly unpleasant episode that left us fighting for our rooms lavatory. I sepent the stroke of midnight passed out with stomach cramps and a fever. This illness, whatever it is, escorted us both back to the UK. Truly the worst plane journey of my life. I'm still not 100% now. Rubbish.

And that was our trip. Mostly busy, no little fun and a small amount of horrendousness. However, I am exceptionally grateful that Al came along for the ride. His input was invaluable and he was, of course, great fun. Cheers big man!

Anyway, Happy New Year everyone. Should be a bit special, this one.

Injuries and addictions.

Inevitable that you pick up the odd niggle with this level of training. Quite annoyingly it's my turn now. An inflamed achilles tendon is stopping me from doing anything but swim.

It seems I have some sort pre-disposition to this particular kind of problem. Previously I have had to suffer tendonitus in my left shoulder, left wrist (not what you think - I'm right handed!) and right hip. The hip was by far the worst and I spent a long time ignoring it. In the end it took about 6 months rest and a steroid injection to sort it. For that period I hobbled round like some sort of pensioner. In fact it was that injury alone that caused me to ever take a desk-job!

I'm particularly annoyed with this though as I was getting to a really satisfying place with my fitness. Ihad to sit out the Merrell Mudman last week, which was gutting as sounded like a ridiculously hard but fun event. My priority now is to get the tendonitus down as quick as possible, at least so I can compete in the Grim Challenge in just over a week, even if I don't do as well as I could have.

Unfortunately with this kind of injury rest is the only solution. However, I am apparently now hooked on exercise as the last ten days without running have been like going cold turkey on a ten year crystal meth addiction! I'm crawling the walls, and every now and then need to sneak down to the swimming pool for the only kind of hit I'm allowed. Swimming - a poor man's trim-trail, methadone to the smack that is proper training with Team Everest!

Morale

It's never easy when people drop out of things, especially as far into a journey as we have already come. In the last few weeks we've actually lost 5. Tenzing have lost a couple of players (Charlie Meek and Charlie Brewer) and our support crew, The Trektators have lost Laura, Elaine and Greg.

All had really valid reasons, and it was a tough decision for all of them to come to. We always knew we'd lose a few before even getting on the plane, I'm just grateful that these guys did the hard thinking and made their choice early enough for us to find suitable replacements.

This has all come as a disapointment to many and of course morale is some quarters has dipped a little. When this sort of thing happens, innevitably questions are asked - what could we have done differently? It also throws focus a little on the project as a whole.

In setting up this expedition, Wes and I have created an environment where people can get involved as much or as little as they like. Those that step up and make the effort will and already are taking more out of it. It's impossible to hold people's hands through all this, but we're always available to hear concerns.

As much as I'm gutted to lose those members of our little project, I have amazing faith in the principle members of this expedition. We're already massively on the case filling the spaces and should soon have a full medical team, along with DOP, photo-journalist and round the world yachtsman!

In the meantime, just in case anyone's marale is still flagging, can we remember that we're going to be playing cricket on Mount Everest almost 5 months to the day from here. If that's not enough, check the photo that I took last time I was there (taken from Kala Patta, which overlooks our cricket pitch as well as Everest Base Camp.)