‘Basically, this trip is throwing together 14 people who desperately want to climb a mountain, and seeing if they want to enough.’ That was Chris Watts’s assessment as we sat chatting in our room. He was still feeling obscurely guilty about coming on the trip while Sonja stayed behind, ‘though I know she’d do the same in my position. There’s a lot of thinking climbers on this trip,’ he continued. ‘That’s good and bad – you can expect to see a certain amount of tactical manoeuvring once we get on the mountain.’ I nodded. I’d seen the forces of individual ambition and joint effort play off against each other on the Mustagh Tower, and between the lines of practically every climbing book. A big expedition is a choir composed of soloists.
Mal had suggested we all made a point of rooming with someone different at each stop on our journey through China and Tibet, so that by the time our trucks arrived at Base Camp we might feel more like a team. Thanks to the Chinese having created a ‘road’ to Everest, there’d be no long walk-in on this trip; and the walk-in is normally the phase an expedition uses to become fully fit and cohesive as a group. ‘I see myself as the loner on this trip,’ Chris said, ‘I’ve climbed with no one on it, I’m not part of a pair.’ From remarks the others had already made, I was beginning to wonder who did not regard themselves as outsiders. ‘I suppose I associate myself with people like Bob and Allen, despite being younger. I like to see the sensible rewarded …’ And with this remark he fell asleep, slumped over the jacket to which he was sewing a Pilkington’s logo.
Peking looked less bleak the next day, probably because we were less grey with fatigue and jet-lag. People walked into the hotel with masks over their faces. In Britain this would be a cue to hit the floor, here it’s a precaution against biting wind and swirling dust. On the streets we started noticing the occasional flash of colour in younger people’s clothes; one or two girls had high heels, and the local wide-boys aspired to rolled-up jeans and wrap-around shades. Only the older people still wore the once-compulsory Mao tunic in dark blue, black or bottle-green. The many small stalls along the pavements, selling everything from Coke to combs to cabbages, were another sign of changing times in China.
The Chinese Mountaineering Association (CMA) had organized an excursion to the Great Wall. It was another chilling day. Clouds of grey dust blew through the city and across the utterly flat countryside; cyclists and workers on foot struggled head-down into the wind with their fur caps’ ear-flaps streaming behind them, disciplined and determined, getting there.
The Wall itself is impressive enough, but to our minds it was slightly disappointing. The only section open to the public was entirely rebuilt 37 years ago. In effect, we were looking at a replica. There seemed to us something very Chinese about this wish to demonstrate what good condition everything is in, as if ruin would be a loss of national face. It’s rather like rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall, or those endless blocks of Workers’ Apartments – an impressive but mis-aimed effort. Much more fascinating were the miles of out-of-bounds ruined Wall, snaking into the furthest distance along the wild crest of the hills.
For the first time we saw Kurt and Julie at work. They wanted a shot of someone climbing on the outside of a guard tower. Tony volunteered. The Arriflex camera was set up, Kurt crouched over it, Julie directed the bazooka-like microphone, Danny did the handclap that would enable later synchronization of sight and sound, and off Tony went. He climbed nimbly up the Wall, crawled through an arch, and ran round to the bottom again, his film career over. But Kurt coughed and said ‘Vun more time please?’ We would come to loathe and dread those words.
Tony climbed the Wall again and again under Kurt’s direction while we huddled in the bitter wind, at once amused and apprehensive. When the climbing take was done to Kurt’s satisfaction, ‘And now, Tony, one more time for the close-up of the hands, yes?’ The hands were turning blue, but Tony complied. Then the cameras were carried to the top of the wall for close-ups of Tony’s face. We began to realize that this film would not be a hand-held camera cinema vérité job. Instead Kurt had a very clear idea of what he wanted; he was manufacturing a reality, and directed his actors accordingly.
Someone remarked that if it was this cold here, imagine what it was going to be like on Everest. Kurt jumped on the remark, ‘Good, that is good! Vill you say that again please … Yes, and then he say …’ So Nick and I made our ‘spontaneous’ remarks half a dozen times while camera and sound were co-ordinated and we finally got it right.
Mixed reactions in the team. Jon admired Kurt and Julie’s professionalism, Sandy was fascinated by the imaginative and technical aspects of filming. Some were amused (particularly those who weren’t being filmed), while others felt unease and the first stirrings of resentment. Are we going to have to do this on the hill? Bugger that. Acting made us feel foolish because we were very bad at it, and that too generated irritation.
‘When he gets behind a camera,’ Jon noted, ‘amiable Uncle Kurt suddenly becomes Joseph Goebbels.’
Signs of private enterprise at the Great Wall included women and boys selling I CLIMBED THE GREAT WALL T-shirts, Red Guard hats, postcards and paintings, at considerably cheaper prices than the official Tourist Shop. This was clearly permitted; our impression was that whatever happened in China was permitted. If it wasn’t permitted, it didn’t happen. Smiling was permitted, and the Chinese tourists at the Wall seemed to be having a marvellous time, taking pictures of the Wall, each other, and of the strange, jabbering foreigners climbing up the guard tower.
Then on to the Ming emperors’ tombs, with lunch on the way, ready and waiting for us in a barn-like restaurant. The tombs are approached by a long, wide avenue lined with giant guardian warriors like 20-foot-high chess pieces, and a menagerie of stone elephants and camels. Inevitably some of the lads tried to climb these. The smooth, rounded backside of an elephant proved too hard, but Chris made his first ascent of a camel, leaping for its ear and mouth then pulling up from there (’Very necky’). He tried to repeat it for Kurt but found himself running out of strength – he’d been much too busy in the last two months to train at all – and had to be assisted by a leg-up from someone remaining out of the shot. ‘Film is to snaps what the Himalaya is to Scotty,’ Jon wrote that night. The tombs themselves are all underground and in the end only Rick, Nick and Sarah, who had managed to escape the filming, had time to see them. Jack checked his watch. ‘And now we go back to hotel.’
Meanwhile Mal, Allen Fyffe and Dave Bricknell had gone to the CMA offices to check over our ‘protocol’ for the Expedition – part schedule, part financial agreement, detailed down to the last Yuan and yak for carrying gear from Base to Advance Base. Then they went shopping for the kind of common, heavy things there had been no point in bringing from the UK: pans, kitchen utensils, kettles and stoves. With a poor interpreter, this turned out to be a struggle.
They were taken to a store that sold electric toasters. Mal eventually explained that these would be of limited use at Base, and said we wanted the kind of stoves rural people used to cook with – thinking of the paraffin stoves used in Nepal and Pakistan. He was told that in that case we’d need to buy an awful lot of coal. It appeared there were no paraffin stoves in Peking, and precious little paraffin. This was baffling, because most of such stoves one finds in the Third World are marked ‘Made in China’. We were assured we’d be able to buy them in Chengdu (our next stop in southern China) or in Lhasa.
The shopkeepers also appeared taken aback when they heard of the one huge and five medium-sized cattle we wanted to buy. Even when the cattle resolved into ‘kettles’ we had little satisfaction, so they too were put off till later.
Back at the hotel, a demonstration of Chinese punctuality. Jack announced, ‘It is now one minute to seven. At seven o’clock we will eat dinner.’ We sat in silence for some forty seconds. ‘Now we go to dinner.’ We descended the stairs and entered the enormous, empty dining room on the stroke of seven.
Dinner as always in China was a survival of the fastest;