Life of Wry

Three weeks ago, I sent an email to Peter Hillary, son of famed Mt. Everest climber Sir Edmond Hillary of New Zealand, inquiring about a trip he leads to Mt. Kilimanjaro.  I wrote about that here. 

I was getting a little discouraged, since I’d not heard back from him.  I tried again last night, forwarding my initial email and asking how best to get information on his various trips, but specifically Kili, since we’re looking to go in August of next year.

And…. he wrote back immediately.

My first email inquiry must have gotten overlooked..  and I guess that’s because he’s still on the road: he climbed Kili in August and is now in Tibet with a National Geographic group doing something. He didn’t go into detail, other than to say he’d be back home in three weeks and he’d contact me then with info.  And jovially sent greetings from the Tibet plateau, 12,500′.

The life of an adventure traveler…

Anyway, I’m very excited.

This isn’t like getting email from Barack Obama inviting me to dinner, which he did this past week. (And which I even fantasized about… going so far as to think I’d certainly have plenty to say, running down the list of potential topics in my head, including seeking his advice on how to deal with wackadoodles, and I’d just have to get over the shyness of sitting in the company of such bigness, because it’d only be a couple hours of awkwardness afterall, and would be the experience of a lifetime and I’d just have to do it. I did go that far in my thinking, even though this was an e-blast sent to gazillions of his supporters and is part of a fundraising campaign, etc etc.)

No, the exchange with Peter Hillary was real people sending real email back and forth exactly half-way around the world from one another.  If it goes nowhere, I’ll still be smiling at having had a human conversation with the guy. Smack dab in the middle of an adventure, no less**.

Last week, I bought his book, In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge.  This is what the jacket says:

“Peter Hillary’s harrowing account of his attempt with two companions to complete Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed journey to the South Pole makes for powerful reading.  A masterful story of an expedition’s precipitous collapse and a study of a life lived on the brink, this is a vivid tale of physical endurance, heartbreaking loneliness, and ultimately the triumph of a man over the cruelty of the Antarctic wastelands and the ghosts of his own past.” 

Moving it up in the stack.

The picture above: That’s the Hillary family in 1962.. Ed, Louise, Peter and his sisters Sarah and Belinda.

This is Peter now, about 57:

I borrowed both from his website, here.

** I see on the website that in September and October (now) he is leading a trip from Lhasa (Tibet) to Kathmandu, “the best road journey in the world with stunning landscapes, rich culture, wonderful people and the greatest mountain range on earth.”   

So, there’s that.