An older man, sitting after every other step, a fierce looking man in a green jacket who could have been Toshiro Mifune in the Seven Samurai, and a young woman of 26 with rosy cheeks, 'unusual for a Korean' I thought.
They were the “Dream Everest Expedition”. The woman, Ms Jeong Hye Kwak was, we later were told, some kind of pop star, and other members of the team were filming her progress up Everest. The older man, probably their leader, looked exhausted by the effort of labouring under the burning sun of the Western Cwm.

The second time we met the Koreans was seven days later when our little team were back in the Cwm wilting under the sun at Camp Two. They were camped next to us and I had just been over to ask when they thought they would be making a summit bid. The Mifune character gave me an agressive stare as if I was a spy. The older man, Mr Sang Bae Lee, was apparantly their leader, but too tired to be rude. Ms Kwak stared into the distance looking bored with the whole thing.

It was 15 May. The day before 60 people were report to have summitted from the North side, including my Chamonix colleague, Shaun Hutson. A further North side wave on trhat day included Mark Ingles the double amputee. Meanwhile an Englishman, David Sharp, had been left behind high on the mountain on 14 May and somehow was still alive on the 15 May. Forty people passed David in the dark on their way up, not noticing that he was curled up in a small cave. Forty people including Sherpas, yet the gutter press would later choose to focus their blame on Ingles. Weird, really. Thirty nine able bodied people pass by and the journalists were later to pick on the only guy with no legs. Bizarre. We spent the day resting at Camp 2, where Andrew, who had been so quiet thus far began to regale us with his special brand of humour;

Holmes “What do you deduce when you look up?”
Watson “I see the night sky filled with constellations.
Each constellation a collection of thousands of galaxies.
Within the galaxies exist a million stars. There are an infinity of planets many hundreds, if not thousands, of which will support forms of life. I deduce that as we gaze in to the dark sky a being is even now turning to gaze in our direction... what Holmes?”
Holmes “No Watson you fool! Someone has stolen our tent!”

Meanwhile we were surprised to hear of so many summiteers from the North as the wind appeared to be blowing hard and plumes flew from the summits, and no one had yet reached the top from the South.

On 17 May the AC team made it's way up to C3 in perfect weather. Meanwhile my good friend and fellow UIAGM guide Kenton Cool made a memorable climb with his team, reaching the south summit at 2pm, when he was heard to say on the radio;

“Before anyone says anything, I know what time it is, and we are going for the summit.” He reached the top at 3:15, and was back in C4 by 18:30. It had been perfect weather. I cannot help thinking that sometimes the better mountaineers just make their own luck. They were the first summiteers from the South this season and running out of rope on the summit ridge had fixed alength of 4mm cord above the Hillary step; 60 metres of shoe lace.

The next night a member of the IMG team reached the top at 3 am and returned to C4 by 5 am at dawn! The Korean Dream team also set out for the summit the same night but making much slower progress.

On 18 May we laboured from C3 to C4. We planned to leave for the top at 9 oclock the same evening, but the weather turned wild and windy. The weather forecasts were deteriorating from all sources. The Swiss had raised their prediction of wind from 3 knots to 30 knots. The British was too vague to be of any use. An American forecaster predicted a “spike” of 50 knot winds (60 mph) at 5 pm. It was a prediction that concerned us enormously. It turned out to be completely wrong, but it strongly influenced our choice of plan. We needed to to be back in our tents before the predicted storm winds arrived.

At 9pm on the night of 18th the wind was still blowing across the South Col, clouds had set in, it was snowing and a white-out. Guy, Dean and I agreed to reconsider our options every hour till 11pm. At 9:30pm I heard shouting in the distant whiteness. Paul and Ang Dorji set their head lamps on the tents and soon the shouting began to sound nearer. We did not know it, but it was the Korean Dream team returning... very late. We would find out why later.

At 11pm we looked out and saw the clouds had lifted and felt the wind has dropped a bit. The weather forecasters had indicated that the weather would only get worse during next two days. We woke the rest of the team and shortly before mid night, in moderately strong winds the team gathered in front of the tents, suited up in down, carrying two bottles of oxygen each. The walk from the tents to the bottom of the Triangular Face always takes longer than you imagined it would. There the fixed ropes disappear into the darkness above. We all began to exist in pools of torch light. Step by step. I had stripped my footwear to one pair of thin socks to give my toes the maximum free space in my boots and now I began to clench and reclench them to keep the blood moving in my feet as I climbed, rythmically and slowly shifting weight from one heavily cramponned foot to the other. In a way it was like meditation. Buddhist mantras kept floating through my hypoxic mind.

Om a hum, benza guru pema sidhe hum!
Om a hum, benza guru pema sidhe hum!
Om a hum, benza guru pema sidhe hum!
Om a hum, benza guru pema sidhe hum!

This is the mantra for the Guru Rinpoche, who will look after you in the present life. (The prayer for the next life is Chenrezi's “om mani padme hum”). Om a hum... was also the prayer that the Sherpas were using as they passed through the ice fall.

The balcony is four hours from the tents. It is a long road at over 8000m. We were heading due north. The 'long road to the north' is also the name of that volume of travel writing by the eternally great Basho, author of the most popular ever Haiku. I kept thinking about Basho as I wriggled my toes, panting with each breath. In this slow rhythm I recited his famous little poem

furu i-ke ya
kawazu tobi komu
mizu no oto

time and again till rewoken by the crackle of the radio.
“Who is at the back?” Guy asked. It was me of course.

I went back to the meditation and slow stepping. Two breaths, left step. Two breaths right step. I remembered there was once an English Haiku by Ezra Pound that I kept trying to recall, I think it went something like this

On a Paris Metro
faces peer through the window
Petals on a wet bough

I probably got it all wrong, but I just could not make it scan, neither with my steps nor within itself. Surely Haiku should be in three lines of five, seven and five sylables, shouldnt it? As they say in Haiku;

It is so very
difficult to write a poem
in only seventeen syl...

Stange how meditation always begins with the sublime and drifts inexorably towards the ridiculous. Slowly the hours passed by till sometime during the night Paul began to have problems with his mask and decided to return from just below the Balcony (8500 m). I watched him descend with great sadness, I knew how hard the decision must be have been for him. Now I had to try and catch up with Chris and Steve who were perhaps 150m above.

The team reached the balcony with the first light of dawn.
At last we had turned a corner on the mountain would be out of the wind till near the south summit. Only four mountains were now higher than us by now. Sonam pointed down the valley to show us the overnight snow level, it had snowed down to Pangboche.

Ana, Andrew, and Guy were now at the front of our group. A few other climbers had settled between us. Dean, Steve, Chris and then me at the rear. A man in a huge yellow duvet jacket was stuck between me and Dean for much of the time between the Balcony and the South Summit. Only the next day did I discover the coincidence, it was Karl, a professor of medicine who had been in the ant-arctic during the same period as our Vinson expedition. We were nowing sharing our second summit together.

At the south summit we were no longer protected from the wind, though by now it had dropped to 20 kts. From here you look at the view that Evans and Bourdillon saw in 1953, the view that turned them back. Till now Everest has been physically draining, but not too technical. Suddenly you come round the corner and for the first time you see an alpine climb. A ridge; a barrier, the Hillary Step, then the corniced summit ridge reaching out into the distant sky like a springboard.

Our team reached the summit in ones and twos shortly after 10:30am. It was still very cold and windy, and after 15 minutes and as many photographs as we coud manage before freezing our fingers, we hurried down.

At the balcony a short length of fixed rope was missing, without thinking too much about it I went down the first few metres of the triangular face, cut off some loose coils and finished off the fixed line up to the balcony. It must have been there that the Korean dream had begun to unravel the night before.

On 21 May our team safely reached base camp; the only injury being Chris who tripped on the last ladders of the descent and broke his arm. On the radio Guy to Luis about the accident;

Guy; Chris has got a broken arm. Fell off the ladder.
Luis; Was the ladder loose?
Guy; No. Slipped on his dick.
Luis; That big?
Guy; Small ladder!
Luis; Oh. Which arm?
Guy; Right. 'll ruin his sex life.
Luis; Can always play the stranger.

Whith his arm bandaged Chris soon aquired the soubriquet...Chicken Wing. About this time rumours began to circulate about the Italian Uber-Athlete Simone Moro. He had climbed from South Col and descended to the Tibetan North Col on 20 May. Some how he managed to blag his way through the Chinese border post by saying he got lost on the summit and found the wrong way down. And as a coincidence he also happened to have his passport in his back pocket. The rumours turned out to be true.

Chicken Wing was able to catch a lift with a helicopter on 22 May from base camp. The helicopter had been called up to to transport several serious frostbite cases including the young Korean, Ms Kwak. The unfortunate woman had fallen from the balcony, presumably at the missing stretch of rope, and continued 300 metres down the Triangular Face, where she remained, becoming severly frost-bitten in both hands and feet. It was six hours before she was picked up by her team members. Ms Kwak had no rescue insurance, and the Korean team began to haggle over the cost of the Helicopter. It was a sad and disturbing sight, the woman was in danger of losing her hands and feet, and her team members were refusing to pay her share of the Helicopter. In the end they paid only part of the $ 3500 cost leaving the rest of the bill to be picked up by others. That was the third time I saw the Korean team. I expect it will be the last.