Christopher Macklin's Diary
Chris Macklins diary entires
3rd June 2009
I have now returned home after a fantastic experience in the Himalayas. I was fortunate enough, with a lot of help from my team, to summit Mt Everest.
It was an incredible mental and physical challenge and I believe that I have learnt a lot from my experience. I was unfortunately quite ill on summit day and our team also reached the summit during a storm so I am afraid and sorry that the photo is not the best. There was not a view from the summit but I can assure you that it is the top of Mt Everest and not Ben Nevis!!!!!
Many thanks to erveryone who sponsored me and in so doing supported the great work of The Passage.
Chris Macklin
16th April 2009
We are now at base camp at the famous Khumbu Icefall, which you can see behind
me in the photograph, going through an acclimatisation programme. We hope to go through the
icefall within the next two weeks on the next stage of our ascent of Everest.
Chris Macklin
2nd April 2009
We are now in Namche, a cool little town built on the side of a horse shoe shaped valley. There are no roads up it so everything comes by foot or yak and there is a really good vibe here.
On Monday we took the dreaded flight from Kathmandu to Lukla, which sounded like a lot of fun. Twelve or so to a plane, twin engined and like a box with wings. We take off and the plane shakes but the views are immense. I had been told that the flight would be an hour and a half long, but as I was settling in and gathering some of my nerves, the plane started falling into this valley very quickly only to land after twenty minutes. The landing strip is a steep hill and apparently there is a fatal crash every three years. I heard that the last one was last year when the whole plane went down. So we were fine because the law of probability was on our side! In spite of this it was a cool experience and the views of the peaks were stunning.
From Lukla we started the trek and it was a real buzz to be moving on foot finally. Again the views were stunning. Last night we stayed at a simple tea house. Then up today at day break to trek to Namche (the main trading town in the Khumbu valley). All uphill, crisscrossing the river four or five times on these extraordinary suspension type bridges.
I met this lovely south African couple called Minney and Gillard from Cape Town. He is a management consultant who twenty years ago after the apartheid set up this company to find intelligent black people with business acumen to sit on the boards of large corporations. Needless to say he has been tremendously successful. He asked if he could take my photo on the summit as we would be climbing together. Thought that was really good of him as I had said to him I was fairly nervous. After lunch I wondered down to the town for a bit of a wander in the stalls and shops.
That’s all for now. Hope everyone is well back home.
Christopher