Michael Thexton

They'll get you to Frankfurt.

Then you'll have to negotiate a flight to London.

But I thought Frankfurt's the right continent.

So she sold me this ticket, which was a business class ticket.

I mean, it was astonishing how much I spent on that.

It was more money than we had spent on the whole of the expedition's food for the whole of the previous two months.

But I wanted to get home.

But it was a very strange thing also that I then said goodbye to the rest of the expedition that day.

And these are people that I've been living in the pockets of for the last two months.

To suddenly be on my own and have to get myself from A to B without somebody telling me where to go and a couple of porters carrying my luggage, that was a very strange thing.

And so a couple of them came with me in the taxi to Islamabad Airport to get a connecting, an internal flight down to Karachi.

Then I got an airport bus to the airport hotel.

The person in the Pan Am office had booked me a room for the night.

And then I was supposed to get myself down to the airport again for three o'clock in the morning.

I had these two big kit bags with Expedition gear in that we were trying to get home, managed to get rid of those.

I'd got the Expedition's film, which in those days was not a little thing.

It was a 15 kilo hand luggage bag, you know, full of cassettes of tape.

And that was precious to me.

I was carrying that as hand luggage and trying to make it not look any heavier than it was supposed to be.

And I had two cine cameras around my neck.