"The mountain Mandala rises 15,400 feet above the dense tropical jungle of New Guinea." "Last year, Bruce Parry and Mark Anstice set off to attempt its unclimbed south face." "To get there, they would have to travel through some of the world's most unexplored terrain, a lost world still inhabited by cannibals." "My God." "Quite a scary sight." "Bloody hell." "Let's get out of here." "I know deep down that this expedition's a big one." "Where we're going and the fact that we're so far from anywhere is gonna put some stresses on the both of us." "If they get into your eye..." "blind you within a couple of days." "We're quite different in character." "There's bound to be a little competitive edge which will start up." "Some of them are snapped there." "They took with them two video cameras." "This is their extraordinary story." "Mark Anstice is a former tank commander." "He left the army six years ago, and ever since has devoted his life to going on expeditions to far-flung places." "But funding such a lifestyle isn't easy." "Between expeditions, er..." "I dangle from buildings and fix things." "Friends, and those I was in the army with, are working in the City and they've got good high-paying jobs." "Getting a good income, owning a house." "This is the price I pay for going on expeditions, which, it's well known, that doesn't pay very well." "Bruce Parry is also an ex-officer." "I've been outside of the Royal Marines now 12 years." "All of that time, pretty much, I've been doing expeditions." "The thing I love about my life is getting away and travelling, and the excitement that brings, and so the by-product is that I have to rough it, and I don't like roughing it much, but that's my lifestyle, I've chosen it, and I wouldn't swap it for anything else." "I've got friends who've got big mansions in Chelsea, I crash there." "Other times, I've used up all my credits with my mates," "I'll often end up in mates' offices or places I worked before, offices, floors, anything." "I've led now 15 quite large expeditions to various parts of the world, and I've always got one up my sleeve, but that's the hardest thing, is thinking of the next place to go and the next exciting journey." "But there's always one bubbling away inside my head." "The next expedition was to Irian Jaya, the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea." "He asked Mark to join him, and their objective was to climb Mandala, a remote and mysterious peak lying near the Equator." "It was climbed in the '50s by a Dutch team, who reported that it was so high that it had a permanent snow-cap." "Together they set about finding out as much as they could." "The mountain has hardly appeared in any literature." "We found one reference in a book written in the '50s, this old dusty hardback found in the back recesses of the Royal Geographical Society." "We found a quote from one of the guys who'd first climbed this mountain." "He looked over the south edge, having climbed climbed up the north side, into an abyss." "As we read that, we both thought, "Right, we're going up that. "" "But to get to the south face, they'd have to travel from the coast up rivers by canoe and then on foot through some of the most inhospitable and unknown terrain on earth." "This is just a blank." "If there's gonna be anyone anywhere, it's gonna be there." "That's the place." "It's almost undoubtedly still uncontactable." "We knew Irian Jaya was full of these amazing, colourful and flamboyant tribes with this notoriety of head-hunting and cannibalism right up until the '50s and '60s." "But the more we looked at our route, the more we realised that we could find something that no one's ever seen before, we could find a tribe even in this day and age." "Bruce and Mark's plan was to travel light, carrying their equipment and supplies." "In six frantic weeks before Christmas, they assembled their kit and all that remained was to say goodbye to their friends." "Christmas pudding." "What d'you reckon?" "It would be six months before they saw them again, if all went well." "Bye-bye, London." "Nice bar." "Good pint." "The first stage of the expedition was to get as far into the interior as they could, up the Eilanden river." "There are virtually no roads in the whole of the country, and people move around by water." "They bought a second-hand dug-out canoe in need of some maintenance, Irian Jaya style." "We're burning this boat so that it will seal in some of the areas where water might seep in and make it quite heavy." "We wanted to do the whole thing under our own steam." "It had to be a canoe, and a dug-out canoe, not some bright-orange fibreglass thing." "It had to be a proper dug-out canoe." "We didn't want to be an overbearing presence in each village we came across." "And we wanted to be approachable." "We didn't want people to be afraid of us." "But the further we got upstream, the fewer signs there were of westernisation, and going into this territory where we didn't know what was around the next corner." "We didn't know what would happen the next day." "The further upstream they got, the more snippets of information they picked up about some of the tribes they might encounter on their route to the mountain." "Irian Jaya is made up of an extraordinarily diverse mix of peoples, speaking over 250 different languages." "These groups are historically fiercely territorial and many have traditionally eaten the flesh of their enemies as part of their ritual practices." "Bruce and Mark were travelling through territory belonging to a tribe called the Asmat, now famous for their carvings but until very recently, infamous for their cannibalism." "They were practising head-hunting and cannibalism till the '50s, and possibly beyond, and the Indonesian government went to quite major lengths to cut back on these practices in the '60s." "But further up-river, where they were heading, government influence was weaker and the peoples were rumoured to be still living by their traditional ways." "If Bruce and Mark were to encounter any trouble, they couldn't expect help from the Indonesian authorities." "In fact they were avoiding them." "Large swathes of the interior are off limits because of simmering civil strife and require special permission to visit." "They had no permits." "To do an expedition there, especially with a camera, invites all sorts of problems." "You're gonna have to tell a few fibs to get into the areas that you want to get into." "If you're caught there, and you've got permits but they won't allow you to be where you are, you haven't got a leg to stand on." "Local people, even though they're in the middle of nowhere, have a strong feeling for politics, so they don't always necessarily like visitors either." "Their plan was to move as fast as possible up-river avoiding, the authorities, and concealing their ultimate intentions." "That wasn't the only threat to keeping the expedition afloat." "When you see the power of these rivers, and they whisk away massive trees, all the branches and all the roots come hurtling down, if you get in the way of that, you're scuppered." "It's well known that crocs will often be on the bank." "If you get between them and the water, they'll have a go at you, they'll come dashing down and drag you into the water." "We were already in the water in a canoe... which hopefully was going to put them off but, given the stories that we've been told by the locals, in every village we went through, there was no guarantee of that." "And resting at night in whichever village they found themselves, they had travelled 150 miles up-river." "But a potential obstacle lay ahead that might sink the expedition." "Today we're gonna reach a village which has got the last police post in the Asmat." "From there on in, we're gonna be entering into territories where we're supposed not to be." "We can't ask too many questions about these parts where we're not supposed to be going." "So it's limited our planning quite substantially." "Not only that, but much more seriously, because our friends, Indonesian friends, we don't want to incriminate them, we haven't been able to get them to sponsor us for extended visas, so we're here on a tourist visa which is gonna run out in 28 days' time," "and our expedition's gonna take a lot longer than that." "The police presence meant that they couldn't continue further by canoe." "The only way forward was through the dense jungle on foot." "They would carry their own equipment but needed to engage local people to act as porters to help carry their food." "Their first hiring was Supratman, nicknamed Superman, who acted as their guide and negotiator." "We've got four." "We're looking for one more." "We're just talking about the price now." "Persuading the locals to enter a neighbouring tribe's territory wasn't easy." "No one was certain of what reception they might receive ahead." "Eventually, five porters decided to risk it." "We're gonna need more." "They're not happy with the weight." " Call him Spider." "We'll put Spider on the thing." " Spider, OK." "And then draw one as well, so he knows what..." "Eight legs, mate." "This is it, we're finally off into the "utan", the jungle." "We always knew where we were but it made no difference." "If you're following a local path then your map is useless." "The path doesn't go in a straight line, it'll follow contours, or go to where local knowledge says there's an easy place to cross the river and it might zigzag around and you'll go in the opposite direction to the one you want to go in," "but the path will eventually get there, you hope." "The danger about the jungle is the fact that it isn't so instantly nasty and aggressive that you can relax." "If you relax, then it does become dangerous because there are a fair few things out there." "But if you're aware of it, you stay switched on, then you're OK with it." "Their most immediate problem didn't come from the jungle but from what was on their own backs." "They were carrying 90 pounds of weight each." "It's lunch time on our first day of trekking, and we've only been going four hours and already we're feeling it." "It's been a reminder of what trekking in the jungle's like." "These boys are so agile and so strong and this to them is home and so they walk and run across these logs carrying their packs and it means nothing to them, whereas we, with our slippery boots and our very..." "less of a sense of balance, are finding it quite tricky." "Although we're loving it, I know that it's gonna be a bit of a slog getting up that hill." "So we've got a long, long journey ahead of us." "And if one thing is definitely apparent, it is that certainly I am carrying too much." "Way too much." "I think I need another porter." "Offload some of this useless junk." "But it's not useless, we need it all." "That's the problem." "And that was their dilemma." "They had to carry equipment for two completely different environments - the jungle, where temperatures hover around a sultry 35 degrees Centigrade, and the mountain, where it often snows - but what to persevere with and what to ditch was a big decision." "Mr Mark, thank you." "Mark's just given away half his kit to Supratman." "If you're carrying 37 kilos, or, you know, 80 or 90 pounds, it's a real struggle." "And all day, you're walking for 12 hours a day." "I did think it was asking for a sprained ankle." "Asking for an easily avoidable accident in the early stages of the expedition which might lead to a broken bone, and that's the end of the expedition." "And they had to be on guard against some of the jungle's less friendly inhabitants." "Hundreds of leeches." "Look at these naughty little things." "If these little ones get into your eye, and you can never feel them, they'll blind you within a couple of days." "The jungle ensured that progress was slow, sometimes very slow." "Look at the size of that boot!" "After a week's walking, wet feet weren't a laughing matter any more." "A new insidious problem began to emerge - immersion foot, better known as trench foot." "Our boots, we thought at one stage we were gonna need to put crampons on them." "So we couldn't have jungle boots." "We knew that whichever boot we had would be better in one area and worse in another." "I chose to have boots that are better for the mountain." "They were too thick and they soaked up the water and didn't dry." "So I got immersion foot quite badly." "And basically the skin rots, and your skin is white and soft, and folded up, and it just comes off, so basically I had no skin around my toes or along the underside of my foot." "We had painkillers to deal with the pain but the only painkillers we had were ones that your body starts to get accustomed to, so they weren't a great deal of help in the end." "There was little chance of them ever getting their feet dry." "The biggest physical obstacle were the rivers." "These rivers are exceptionally dangerous." "There's no doubt that... one false move in one of these rivers is tantamount to death." "There's lots of rules to crossing rivers, but they went out the window, cos we couldn't physically do it the way you're supposed to, so we just had to get in there and struggle." "Just one river could involve crossing as many as 19 different water courses." "We tried wading with a safety rope on but that was hopeless, because the rope would just drag in the water behind the person crossing and start pulling them off balance." "All three of us were swept away at one stage." "And for Bruce, a seemingly routine crossing suddenly turned ugly." "Give him lots more rope." "More rope!" "That doesn't look much, and some of the other rivers look bigger, but that for me was without doubt was probably the scariest..." "It's so incredibly powerful that it just took me right under." "I was so, so tired, because it's like being in a fight, when you're using every muscle, that I was just shattered and shaking with adrenaline." "They couldn't turn back even if they wanted to." "It was the start of the wet season and every passing day the rivers were rising, making any retreat extremely hazardous." "After two weeks in the jungle, they were on the fringes of the territory where the Korowai lived, the tribe who were still reputed to be practising cannibalism." "To stretch their meagre dried rations, they started to rely on the hunting and foraging skills of their porters." "They all have these goggles and a sharp stick powered by an elastic band." "And there were some tasty surprises on the menu." "Another one!" "Shrimps, lots of baked bananas and we've got these delicious berry type fruits for... for pudding." "Look at that for a shrimp." "Less than five minutes between the river and my belly." "Can't go wrong." "That's pretty good." "Wow." "Suddenly, they realised they had company." "There was someone on the opposite side of the river." "We saw the boy on the river..." "the two boys." "They were playing on the riverbank, or they trying to get berries from a tree." "It was just a very, very exciting moment." "They've seen us." "Although we'd decided to go into this area, we had no idea what our first meeting would be like." "I always thought that we were gonna stroll into a village, but it was never gonna be like that." "It's slightly naive." "So even though we took all this surreptitious footage of this boy trying to find these berries, it struck me instantly that we were doing something that was a bit special and maybe that what we were doing..." "There was question marks rising in my head." "That we were actually there voyeuring this little kid doing this thing." "The young boy was not alone." "Oh, my God." "Scary bunch." "We had by that time been told so much about these people and had so many snippets of information saying "Don't go there" and "No one goes there" and "They eat people"" "and they're still completely "Asli", or original, that we just couldn't fail to feel that we were beginning to really explore." "Well, these people have just arrived." "It was a very awkward little moment, me trying to shake their hands." "But they've come and I've asked them to sit down." "One of the porters could speak Korowai dialect." "Yeah." "Yeah." "They didn't have their bows and arrows with them so I asked them if they could go back and get it and they said that their home was a long way away." "We persuaded them to go and get them, and they'd just hidden them in the bushes, but but they've just brought them back now." "Yeah, they've got three different types of arrows here." "Possibly even four." "This one's for birds." "Straight and thin." "No barbs on it." "And this... is for men." "They came and met us, and it was incredibly amicable, very friendly, a heart-warming and beautiful moment where we were able to communicate with these amazing people." "But they were very stern, and we weren't able to go across the river and see their homestead, which was what we wanted." "The initial friendliness encouraged Mark and Bruce to go deeper into Korowai country to see if they could find other untouched clans." "But their porters weren't happy about going any further." "They were against it." "Even though they are from Korowai origins they did not want us to go and see them." "I think that's for their own self-preservation as much as for ours." "They probably thought that if they went in there people would shoot them because they'd see it as like an act of war, maybe." "It would just be the three of us, Mark, myself and Mr Supratman who are gonna be going into the Korowai area itself." "Leaving their main supply of provisions, so that they could travel light," "Bruce, Mark and Supratman headed off with enough food for four days." "Korowai territory is surrounded by near-impenetrable swamps and fast-running rivers." "Behind these barriers, time has stood still for millennia." "Bruce and Mark were truly entering a lost world." "You OK?" "Of the two of us, I am the less big or the less strong." "There have been ample moments when I have been visibly physically shattered." "What in God's name brought me back to the bloody jungle?" "I have no idea." "Not enjoying it today?" "No, well, we're almost there now, so one hour more, eh?" "We've just gone through a boggy stretch, and it just exhausts me." "The only time they could stop properly was when they made camp in the evening." "It was then they could assess their personal damage." "Ah." "They started off as scratches, but if they're getting constantly wet." "They're in just the right place to catch every passing branch and vine." "They're turning into tropical ulcers, going deep..." "But they're not too bad." "They didn't always see eye to eye on the menu choices." "Even my eyes are sweating." "This delicious chicken and pasta has been... sabotaged." "Chillis in it." "A whole bloody chilli I just ate." "Can't even eat the rest of it now." "It's too hot." "Mark hates chilli and Superman and I love it." "Supratman, I'm gonna... drown you." "They pushed still further into the unknown." "We both agreed that we could easily be being watched, and we'd be none the wiser." "We were clumsy, making a lot of noise, falling over, chopping things." "They could have been watching us all the way." "We wouldn't have had a clue." "And they probably were." "It was supposed to be just a two-day jaunt coming down to where we thought these tribes people were, the Korowai." "But it's about our fifth day now, and we're roughing it quite a lot." "Mark's feet are in a lot of pain at the moment so Superman's carrying his bag." "That's put him in a bad mood, cos Mark's rucksack weighs a ton." "We were low on food." "We were eating a couple of bananas each a day by that stage." "We didn't know whether we were gonna meet these people." "We'd been walking for a long time." "One thing's for sure." "This is a manmade path we're on." "This wasn't done with a machete or any metal object." "I think, and Superman agrees, that this is done by a... a stone axe." "We've just spotted the roof of a house." "And... we're gonna see if someone's in." "Hello?" "Hello?" "This is the first hut we've found." "There's no one here." "We've heard voices but we couldn't get close because the path went off in a different direction." "Superman says with confidence, "Oh, yes, over here, over there,"" "but then admits that he doesn't have the faintest idea." "So, um..." "They're the ones we're looking for." "We've... we've just heard some people, or what we think is people, cooing and wailing, from that direction over there." "So that's where we're heading." "This is a well-hidden path anyway." "It feels like we're getting really close now, really close." "Oh, no, look." "There you go." "Oh!" "We called out the usual greeting before we could see it." "We couldn't have expected what happened next." "We could see instantly that they were terrified of us." "Superman suggested that we copy their actions to show that we had no aggressive stance." "So we were doing all these things trying in some way to placate these people." " Mr Bruce?" " Yeah." " Mr Bruce?" "Oh, oh!" "Oh, oh!" " Oh, oh!" "I think if they hadn't been 25 feet off the ground in their house, they would've run away." "But they couldn't run away." "They were trapped up there." " Oh, oh, oh!" " Oh!" "From within the doorway, he was pulling his bow back and pointing an arrow at me." "Bloody hell, let's get out of here." "He was drawing his bow." "Did you see?" "There was an arrow pointing at me for a second." "Don't know." "Lots of question marks." "Why don't they want us to visit them?" "What do they..." "What are their main reasons?" "Are they still..." "doing some of the things we heard about when we were in... on the river?" "Are they still at war?" "Do they still hunt heads?" "All these things we don't know." "Somehow I think we're not gonna find out just now." "But they were being followed." "I don't think they'd ever seen people with boots on." "Where were our feet?" "Did we have toes?" "We had these enormous rucksacks on our backs." "You know, if they had any concept of alien life forms, then we must have fitted the bill." "From what I've read, they probably think that white people bring about the end of the world, and that's in their culture, which might go some way to explaining what all of the pointing to the sky and holding their heads was all about." "It's not the last time it's gonna happen." "I think there are still people out there who have not been seen, but those people we came across, yeah, are certainly among the last." "Six weeks after setting off," "Bruce and Mark were approaching the foothills that led to their ultimate goal, the 15,420-foot mountain Mandala." "It is not the highest peak in that part of the world, but it is the most remote." "No one had ever attempted to climb its south base or the punishing approach from the south that Mark and Bruce were taking." "The foothills instantly gave us an impression of what was to come." "There was no gradual rolling hills." "It was instant terror." "All of a sudden, the rivers were just cutting massive deep ravines." "It was sharp, it was nasty, it was jagged, and the paths, lots of the time, were just sheer precipices." "And some really nasty, nasty trekking." "Trekking wasn't made any easier by the fact that they still had no porters." "The plan was to reach a village six days away to try and hire some more." "In the meantime, with the change in terrain, the nights were getting colder." "The others have gone to bed, it seems." "Bruce is about 20 yards back up behind me." "Supratman's just about the same distance down towards the river." "We had to move on to higher ground because the river was rising dramatically" "It's been a really tough day today." "We've been going up and down these impossibly steep slopes with tangled roots, and tree bridges, all very slippery, and I reckon about one in three footsteps, your foot just... my feet certainly just went one way and I went the other." "Lots of falls and as usual the rucksacks weigh an absolute ton." "And again, my feet are wet, Bruce has gone to bed with... his right foot's playing up again." "So hopefully we'll make our destination, which is a small village, which is supposed to be a couple of hours from here but at the moment we're both down near the river, and it's raining again." "The next day brought good and bad news." "In the village they succeeded in finding some new porters, but Supratman decided he could go no further." "The weeks of hard living had taken their toll and he was ill with malaria." "It was time to say goodbye." "Superman had a tear in his eye then." "It was very touching." "Despite the extra help, they were very run down." "Their infected cuts got worse, and in the humidity never healed." "And they were trying to save their dwindling dehydrated food for the mountain." "In the meantime, the only thing they could do was live off the land, with their new porters providing the menu." "As soon as any wild creature would cross their path, they snap it up and eat it." "So we partook in some of these little meals that they had not for any cultural reason, but because we were starving." "I think I got more fluff than I did meat." "Very rich." "I've eaten some really rough things over the years, and that meal..." "We're eating the intestines, we're eating the genitalia, the skull and the brains." "There is not a scrap that isn't eaten." "Claws and all, mate." "There's nothing that's come off this..." "I'm not sure if I want to, really." "Ugh!" "That was grim." "I've got a bit of liver, and that's kidney." "The liver's very good, actually." "Like duck liver." "At least the rivers were easier to cross in the mountains, or so it initially seemed." "We weighed more than anything that had ever gone across that." "Even though we were getting thin by that stage, we still weighed more than most of the locals, and we were carrying huge great bags as well." "Some of them are snapped there." "As I was going across it, some of the little bamboo ties were snapping." "There was not much I could do about it." "I couldn't stop." "I just had to keep going." "They went with a bit of a twang." "Even above the rush of the water you could hear them, even if you couldn't see them." "After 50 days of hard expeditioning, it was not surprising that at times their relationship was feeling the strain." "There are times, especially when we're walking along, and we don't talk to each other and if it's a pretty tough path that your mind naturally, as has been written by many other expeditioners in the past," "naturally needs some sort of energy to feed on so that you can lose some aggression on the path and the only natural thing, quite obviously, is... is your partner, and just the little things about him," "and it's only because we're in this situation now that these things may be raised." "It's quite important to Bruce, I think, that this expedition is as hard-core as possible." "And, er, and this comes out in what we carry, which is quite a major factor for me on this expedition because I am, undoubtedly, less fit than Bruce and, probably, just less strong than Bruce is, physically strong." "Erm, so I have been, I've been struggling at times." "Erm, I think my rucksack is a ludicrous weight." "I, sort of, mull over the fact to myself as I wrench it over a rock here and over a log there and think, you know, hard-core expedition adventurers like Heinrich Harrer, who came here 50 years ago," "he balked at carrying half the weight we're carrying." "But, er, but he wants to carry everything." "He wants to..." "It's very important to him that he carries everything that he can and no on else helps him do that." "To the trained eye, it would be quite obvious who was in the Royal Marines and who was in the Cavalry because, er, Mark's had a a little bit of bad luck at times on this expedition." "It's mainly due to the fact that he, probably, in his military training, was used to having a big tank and having a big bucket he could throw all his kit into." "Whereas I've, of course, always been used to having a rucksack and am quite good at looking after my kit." "Considering what we've been through, where we are and what we've got to come, it's just such a minor thing." "It's not important." "The next bridge was built over the lip of a waterfall which plunged 120 feet." "I heard it snap before it actually went." "It was one of those slow motion things." "I just felt my right foot plunging down." "I knew that, if I leant any further back, the water was gonna grab the pack and flip me underneath." "But my fingers managed to get into a crack in the rock face." "And I was just conscious of one thing, and that was, erm, the other bit of wood was fine, that wasn't gonna give, I didn't think it was gonna give but I could feel the water tugging at the... at my pack." "Yeah." "OK." " So sorry, mate." " Well, that's the second in about half an hour where I've felt that I was going." "Bruce and Mark were making slow progress, covering an average of only three miles a day." "Their next objective was a well-earned break in the village of Tibasig." "To take advantage of all the facilities for rest and relaxation it could offer." "Penis gourds are worn throughout the mountainous areas of Irian Jaya." "We were always gonna be strangers and people from a strange land with odd kit and different outlooks on everything." "That was just one very easy way of losing the mystique." "Of who we were and what we were and where we came from and what our motives were and why were we there and it could finally open the last barrier between us and them from their point of view." "And Bruce is hung like a brontosaurus so, erm, they couldn't find one to fit him." "So, eventually, someone dashed off into their hut and came back with this thing which, I think, it was blackened from smoke." "It'd been hanging up in the rafters for years and was completely black." "I think it'd been used as a tobacco pouch, or something, in the past." "But they drilled the right holes in it and threaded string through it and that was his..." "... that was his penis gourd." "Well, we had a bit of a fitting session and I..." "That was the only one..." "Remarkably, a lot of them are quite small, the guys there aren't well-endowed and I'm not saying that Mark isn't but I just happened to fit in a bigger one." "There was an element of going up-river, going native, but it was all tied in with just the people we were with and just that feeling of wanting to be a part of everything they did and going at it wholeheartedly," "rather than just being observers." "We became much more at one with the people that we were with." "Also, we got to know each other much better and some of the problems we had, initially, were swept away and we chatted more and we were much more a good couple, so to speak." "70 days after setting off from the coast, Mandala was, at last, in sight." "But the final approach was formidable." "We stopped for a rest and they started spreading..." "That's not the path, is it?" "Oh, shit." "Often the paths come across these sheer rock faces and, so, the only way that they have of climbing these is by making a tree scaffold, which they pin to the rock in some fashion and climb them." "And they're all, obviously, bound together with rattan and, in places, they've been there for years and so they're a bit rotten in places and often couldn't take our weight." "I often wonder what these people think of us, me and Mark, as we're slipping and sliding all over the place." "And, er, they're just so much more agile and so much more strong in many ways, as well, when it comes to these sort of paths, that they must just think that we're disabled, really." "They insisted on making these, like, beautiful little bridges for us to keep our feet dry." "And we were happy with it and they were very proud and pleased to do it for us." "It was great." "Besides the physical journey, there is definitely a voyage into yourself, into your own psyche, and life becomes very simple, in a way." "You have a task, which you want to achieve, and you have your companions who you also need to achieve that task." "And you grow very close to those companions and it's, er, in many ways, it's a very simple life, even though it might be full of hardship or challenge or whatever." "But we..." "Life is simplified." "And it gives you a chance to, sort of, step back and look at, er, look at everything around you with new eyes." "At last, they reach the foot of the mountain." "Before, it had just been on a map." "You couldn't actually see what it was all about and now we can see this stupendous abyss that had been written about and it looked awesome." "It was one thing to reach the mountain but quite another to climb the 4,500-foot sheer south face." "Their porters had serious doubts about them carrying on any further." "They looked at us and saw the state we were in, the great sores all over our legs and feet and hands and arms." "We were skin and bones, compared to them." "We'd no muscle on us and they were very concerned." "They didn't want us to climb at all." "You could see their point." "We didn't look capable of climbing anything, let alone that mountain." "We were both aware that time was running out." "We knew, you know, we couldn't live for another three weeks and still keep losing weight like this and still have a go at it." "We had to do it, had to do it now or never, really." "Leaving the porters, they pushed on up the mountain." "After two days, they established a camp at 12,000 feet, at the base of the unclimbed face proper." "But picking away, up the rock face, toward the summit was a constant challenge." "Every day brought new torments, in that we didn't know whether, the next day, we would be able to make it." "There were so many false summits that you'd go forward a little bit one day, have a look, see if you can climb it, come back, get your kit, climb that bit, only to think that the next day," "there might be just one last little cliff that we couldn't climb, which would have meant going all the way back and try it from another route." "Their ropes were meant for crossing rivers and were useless for holding a climbing fall." "They could only aid descent." "Because we couldn't use our ropes for the climb itself, we had to free climb, which is just, like, scrambling up it as best you can with absolutely no protection." "We knew that, not being attached at all to the mountain, that any fall, of course, would be instantly fatal." "And then ahead, we could see, was the final ridge." "And it was definite this time, that was the final cliff, the last ridge line and, thereafter, once we got to the top of that, we were, as near as damn it, there." "Suddenly the exposure was just huge, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of metres below me." "And I remember pulling off a stone and dropping it into the cloud and just watching it bounce once and then disappear into this cloud below, knowing that there was all that beneath me and I wasn't tied on." "We didn't get any rain last night." "So we just had enough water to cook by last... well, this morning." "But my word..." "I haven't got a drop of moisture." "Get through." "I think this is the one, mate." "I can't see anything higher." " Brucey, my boy." " Congratulations, Mark." "Shake my hand." " Good call, mate." "Congratulations." " Congratulations." "Oh, I almost feel like..." "Ah." "That is such good news." "I've always wondered what it felt like to get to the top of an in-your-face mountain." "Really struggle to get up there, spend ages doing it and finally reach the top." "And now I know." "Bollocks!" "When I first saw this little dot on a map many years ago," "I knew I would get here but I didn't think I would have so much fun." "And I didn't think it would be such a, such an amazing experience, the whole of the expedition just coming to one little place." " Yeah." " And, er, it's cool." " It really is the icing on the cake." " Yeah, yeah." "The cherry on the icing on the cake is what I was trying to say but I'm not very good at English."