Michael Thexton

You can't really imagine, again, it's hard to remember how hard it was.

I mean, we'd all been fantasizing about decent meal.

We were very cheapskate expedition.

In deciding what provisions to take with us,

And our quartermaster, I guess you'd call them, they said, well, what do the porters eat?

Well, we'll have that.

And by the time we realized that really wasn't enough, we were a long way from a shop.

And so we'd spent two months up the mountain or six weeks up the mountains eating rice, dal and chapatis and precious little ales.

And we were just desperate for a decent meal.

And I had lost probably a fifth of my body weight, 35 pounds, maybe something like that.

I looked like a complete wreck and I had never been ill.

I was the only member of the expedition who never got any sort of diarrhea and vomiting.

Most of them got something.

Well, everybody got something at some point, but I never did.

And yet I was emaciated.

And I spent the morning going round all of the airline offices desperately seeing if I could get home for work quicker than the rest of the expedition.

And there was...

There was one ticket, basically.

I know for a fact that I've been in British Airways, I've been in Lufthansa, I've been in Swissair.

In the Pan Am office, there was a woman who said, yes, I've got one ticket from Karachi tomorrow morning.