If there's one thing I really hate - which there isn't 'cause there's millions of things I really hate - it's when someone asks you what the view's like from the summit of Mount Everest the instant you mention you've climbed on Mount Everest. Why do they all ask the same inane question as if they're the first person ever to imagine asking such a thing?
(Yes, we climbed on Mount Everest, 'cause we had a bit of spare time, wandered about all the most remote bits of Northern India and Natasha - who suddenly refuses to be referred to as "Fifi" any more - caught sight of a lumpy mountainoid and instantly said we ought to climb it, since, in her exact words... "Everest - we haven't done that yet." So naturally we immediately set off, found ourselves in the foothills of Nanda Devi and with blistering insight I suddenly said "Sod, we're on the wrong sodding mountain." But we found the right one eventually by means of high, scientific processes like reading maps, compasses and blind guesswork. Thing about the Himalayas is they're all sort of big, tall, pointy things made of stone. All a bit interchangeable when you're clinging to a rockface really.
SO, we climbed on Everest. You'll notice that at absolutely no time did I in any way infer that we climbed all the way to the top, nor held any mad intention to. Like we WANT to go clambering about on some freezing cold, Yeti-infested middenheap 27,000 feet in the wind-tormented air getting frostbite and stuffing raw oxygen up our noses with all the bulge-eyed mentalism of depraved gas junkies.
No. The higher you go, the lower the temperature - and we don't do low temperatures. Hate low temperatures.
We got just far enough up it to definitely be in a position to say we were on it and then went back down into the forests where there were more interesting animals to be found. (But we did spot a Yeti. Actually it was a small yak-like thing, but it was shaggy and in the Himalayas and so we immediately called it a Yeti despite its lack of any true Yetiness whatsoever.)
Oh, and we didn't find a single King Cobra for the whole first two weeks. But then, we abruptly found a fourteen foot specimen in our tent in the middle of a rainy night, trying to jam itself between us in the sleeping bag. All was thus well with the so-called expedition and we soon found ever more and better venomous animals, usually in our tent.
And, what's more, I didn't get deported by the Indian authorities for being overly fixated with cane baskets as Vineeta suggested I would be...
