The little summiteer

Sixteen-year-old schoolboy Temba from Kathmandu becomes the youngest mountaineer to scale the Everest.

WHEN a neighbour telephoned Lakpadhiki Sherpa at 6 a.m. on May 24, her heart was in her mouth. Her young son Temba was in the mountains of Tibet. Her fears were unfounded. Temba had accomplished what he had set out to do - climb Mount Everest, the world's highest peak.

"I was so relieved", said Lakpadhiki, who spent an anxious six weeks while Temba, his father Chhouwa Sherpa, and elder brother Mingma Tshering Sherpa, were away in the mountains. "Now that he has accomplished what he set his heart on, I hope he concentrates on school," she said. Just four days before he set out for Tibet in early April, Temba had completed his Class Eight examination. "While studying for the exams, he would sit with his books spread out before him. But he would be gazing into space, his mind far away. He was extremely anxious. Sometimes he would tell me that he had dreamt he was on the summit," said Lakpadhiki.

It has been more than three years since this close-knit Sherpa family from Tashigaon, Rolwaling, a Sherpa village northeast of Kathmandu, was caught up in Temba's dream of becoming the youngest person to climb the Everest. On May 23, the dream became a reality when at 7-04 a.m., Temba stepped on the summit. He was 16 years and 32 days old. During the ten brief minutes at the top, he savoured his triumph, gazed on all below him, and posed for the customary photograph. He then began the rapid descent.

It was windy and the summit was crowded, Temba said while studying the photographs back home in Kathmandu. Apart from a runny nose, a voice still hoarse from the Tibetan cold, and a wind- and sun- burned face, he appears none the worse for wear - though in desperate need of a bath and a hair-cut.

Conditions were not conducive for climbing earlier in the season. A late break in the weather saw relieved climbers make a beeline for the top towards the end of May. It was unbearable at times, said several climbers who made the ascent this season - the waiting, the uncertainty. At times, the snow was so heavy and the winds so strong that climbers were stuck at Base Camp for days together.

Waiting it out at Base Camp, Temba was haunted by memories of his ordeal last spring. Climbing from the south side (Nepal), he was forced to turn back just 50 metres short of the summit, owing to bad weather and five frost-bitten fingers that he later lost in an operation in a Kathmandu hospital.

But last year's ill-prepared attempt had taught the 16-year-old a serious lesson - Everest was not child's play. It required focus, strength of will and above all a strong support group. He still wanted to have a go.

There was no dissuading him, said his father Chhouwa Sherpa, a short, sturdy man who went through his own private ordeal each time he watched his son disappear behind the mountains. Chhouwa, 45, accompanied Temba, on both occasions as expedition kitchen staff, and helped him carry his gear to the higher camps, a mammoth task in the oxygen-rarefied atmosphere. "I hope he is happy now," he said.

Chhouwa's appeals to Thamserku Trekking, one of Nepal's biggest expedition organisers, paid off when managing director Lhakpa Sonam Sherpa agreed to sponsor Temba's second attempt. It was hard to refuse the appeal, says Lhakpa Sherpa. In 1993, his wife Pasang Lhamu had become the first Nepali woman to reach the summit of the Everest. But she perished on her way down. "She was so keen to climb. I remember how we sought sponsors and were disappointed so many times," Lhakpa Sherpa, who later set up the Pasang Lhamu Mountaineering Foundation in her memory, said.

Temba, in Lhakpa Sonam's perception, expressed a similar ambition and drive. Growing up in the shadow of Mount Gaurishankhar, in the beautiful and lush mountain valley of Rolwaling, young Temba was exposed to tales of adventure and climbing exploits recounted by hordes of sturdy men of the mountains descending from the high valley to join expedition groups around the country.

"During the trekking and climbing seasons - March-May and October-December - the women and the young remained at home. The men would pass through our village and tell us these amazing experiences in the high Himalayas, the climbs, the adventures," recalls Temba who along with younger brother Nima Narru, attended a village school that was a day's walk from the village.

The brothers would help their mother plant potatoes, or graze the animals while the father and elder brother would be away for days at a stretch, accompanying trekking groups in some remote part of the country. When the family moved to Kathmandu in quest of better schooling facilities for the youngsters, Temba, then 13, joined a basic mountaineering course organised by the Nepal Mountaineering Association. It was the same year, in 1999, that 15-year-old Nepali schoolboy Arbin Timilsina, had attempted Everest but returned 98 metres short of the summit. He suffered snow blindness.

"It was around then that Temba told us that he wanted to climb the Everest. We thought it was just small boy talk. But he was determined. He had a fixation for the mountain," says Chhouwa. It is hard to believe that the lanky, sun-burned teenager, who blushes at the mention of girls, whose only thought is to show his climbing equipment - including an oxygen bottle he has saved from the climb - to schoolfriends and who keeps a teenage scrap book scribbled with adolescent dreams, successfully took on a challenge that has proved too daunting for so many. In the bargain, he became a local if not an international celebrity.

In the cramped three-room flat he shares with his family, Temba graciously accepts flowers from a neighbour he has never met before and patiently answers the most trivial of questions.

"Neighbourhood kids ask me what I eat, what I wear; some people ask me what people are like up there," said Temba with a grin on his face. But he has taken fame, with all the burdens it imposes, in his youthful stride.

In his triumphant homecoming, Temba received an overwhelming reception from family, friends and admirers at Kathmandu's domestic airport. Crowds jostled to get a glimpse of the youngest person to set foot on the world's highest peak. Despite an overcast sky, senior students from Siddhartha Vanasthali School turned out to give their young hero a rousing welcome before he was swept into a waiting truck by the crowd and accompanying police escorts.

"We are ever so pleased. It is as if I reached the top myself," said school Principal Laxman Rajbanshi. Since last year, Siddhartha Vanasthali, one of Nepal's well-known schools, is sponsoring Temba's and Nima Narru's high school education. The school has decided to name a 600-seater hall in Temba's name.

"I wouldn't say he is an excellent student. But he is good. He is very amiable and well-behaved," said a teacher at the school. The accolades coming the way of this bright, brave young schoolboy are many. There is now a song about him, written and sung by a Nepali pop group which was moved by his earlier attempt to climb the Everest in the spring of 2000.

Bertrand Roche, the French climber who reached the summit of the Everest at the age of 17 in 1990, was one of the first to congratulate the young climber. "Down at Base Camp, he shook hands with me and told me I had done a great job by breaking his record," said Temba.

Roche and his wife Claire, also members of the International Tibet Everest Expedition 2001 along with Temba, managed a record of their own this spring when they successfully paraglided from the summit of the mountain down to Base Camp in a record eight minutes. "It was so cool," said Temba who got a glimpse of the couple as they wove their way down in the wind. Temba was then well above 7,000 m, preparing for his final ascent to the mountain peak. Shortly afterwards, he had made his own tryst with history.

IF Temba was the youngest, Sherman Bull, a 64-year-old physician from Connecticut, became the oldest man to reach the top of the world. On May 25, Bull, accompanied by his son Bradford, also achieved another record. They became the first father-son duo to reach the summit. Both were members of the National Federation of Blind Allegro Everest Expedition. On the same day, another member of the Allegro expedition, Erik Weihenmeyer, became the first blind climber on the summit. Weihenmeyer lost his sight due to retinoscheses at the age of 13.

The climbing season this spring also saw a tragedy on the Everest. Babu Chiri Sherpa, who holds the record for the fastest man up the Everest (he took just 16 hours and 56 minutes from Base Camp to summit) died on the mountain. Three other climbers also lost their lives. Nearly 1,000 people have climbed the Everest so far. This season 94 people climbed the mountain from the Nepal side. Still more climbed from the Tibet side.

Ramyata Limbu is a reporter with the Kathmandu-based English weekly Nepali Times. She is also a rock-climber and mountaineer.