25 years! Silver! Hmm. I understood it was traditional to buy each other a silver present to celebrate 25 years of marriage. Fair enough, but it sounds a bit pricey. Mary was obviously thinking the same thing, because when we broached this tricky subject it turns out we both had a similar idea. Rather than line a jeweller’s pocket why didn’t we do something more interesting, namely a holiday of some sort? This sounded good, but what sort of holiday? We assessed the building blocks… it could be fairly expensive, we would not have to take offspring, we could go long-haul, we could go for maybe three weeks. What did we like to do? Where did we like to go? Well, walking in the Lake District was definitely a favourite holiday, so how could we do something similar, but better? We needed a trip with the “plus factor”.

Inspiration struck. What about trekking? That’s walking+, right? How about the Himalaya, they’re Lake District+, right? Right! It didn’t take long to discover there are a multitude of treks available in the Himalaya, from the low-level and relatively flat, to the slightly more strenuous. One took my eye straight away, namely Everest Base Camp. “Everest”, the very name is a magnet for thrill seekers and thrills were what I was seeking.

Searching the ExodusTravels website the following phrases stood out for me…

• “For those confident of their physical fitness, this is a challenging grade trek”
• “There are 12 days point-to-point walking with full porterage throughout”
• “anyone with a strong fear of heights or vertigo may find them difficult”
• “The maximum altitude on this trek is 5,545m and the average is approximately 3,900m”
• “there is a genuine risk of being affected by Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS). If left untreated AMS can be life-threatening”

Ok – this sounded serious. We would need to practice. Lots. So we planned a high altitude walk on the Dorset coast near Lyme Regis. Golden Cap is the highest point on the entire south coast of England. It stands at a mighty 191m (627ft) above sea level. We risked the Acute Mountain Sickness and went for it. No yaks, no porters, no overnight stops. Well it was easy. The day after our expedition my knee hurt badly, really badly, so I invoked my hitherto unused private medicine insurance and went to see a knee specialist. I had dislocated my knee back in 1990 and I anticipated problems later in life. But this was really bad timing. I told him I was planning to ascend Everest in about 2 months’ time. I think I neglected to say I was only going to the bottom, not the top. He seemed impressed. Recognising a top mountaineer when he saw one he ordered an MRI scan. A week later I had this and went back to see him again. By this time my knee was fine. He looked closely at the scan result and concluded there was nothing wrong with my knee at all. He prescribed some super strong pain killers and wished me luck.

So, the preparation was complete. A single ascent of Golden Cap was our only practice. By this time (due to some social media magic) we were in mild contact with some of the others who would be on our trek. We could see they were all frantically going to the gym multiple times a week and walking long distances every weekend. We kept quiet and said we were pretty much doing the same. How hard could it be? We didn’t want to peak too soon. We reassured ourselves with the thought they were probably lying too.

This is going to be my first retrospective blog. This one you can read from the top down. WiFi was hard to come by on this walk – and expensive too – so blogging as we went was out of the question. But it was such a fantastic trip that it deserves to be immortalised. For some reason it has taken me seven years to get round to doing so. This may impact the immediacy of the writing and the freshness of the anecdotes. We will see.