Time Code

Speaker

OCEAN TO SKY  - TRANSCRIPT  ( Final Version 04 /01/ 2020)

01:00:42

Peter

What an incredible journey we were on, India was flowing by.

01:00:49

We were half way through the journey; the Himalayas were still out in front.

01:00:54

But what had happened in the past was still very heavily upon our hearts.

01:01:05

And in a more distant past two big moments had combined to bring us here.

01:01:19

In 1953 Mount Everest was first climbed by Tenzing Norgay and my father Edmund Hillary.

01:01:28

And that same year in New Zealand a radical new kind of boat was invented – the jet boat. A boat that blasts up rapids propelled and steered simply by a jet of water.

01:01:46

In these boats, my father, you know, climber of the Himalaya’s greatest mountain would also try to be the first to climb the Himalaya’s greatest River, the Ganges.

01:02:16

For my father and I though, the journey would be deeply personal. For the turbulence of the rapids we faced would be nothing to the turbulence of our recent past.

01:02:28

You know really, for my father, and for me, we were on a pilgrimage. Not just a Hindu pilgrimage up the river but one of trying to deal with the losses of my mother and sister.

01:02:48

And on this journey, on his final climb, my father too would stare death in the face.

01:02:56

I’d lost my mother and sister. Here I was high in the Himalayas again.

01:03:02

Was I about to lose my father as well?

0:03:21

And yet for the rest of his life Dad always said this was the best, the most memorable expedition of them all.

01:03:30

This journey from the Ocean to the Sky.

01:03:56

Boy

Oh blast!

01:03:59

News

reel

These are the ‘River Jets’ from Hamilton. They go where no other boats will go. 

01:04:06

‘Planing in a scant four inches of water.

01:04:13

Mike H

Jet boats were invented by my granddad, Bill Hamilton, back in 1953.

01:04:20

He wanted to get up into the backcountry waters of New Zealand and explore the rivers there.  And he did that with his son, Jon Hamilton, my father. Together they explored many of the rivers of New Zealand.

01:04:35

TV

As those who followed motor racing in the ‘20s will know, speed is nothing new to Bill Hamilton. But speeding under power down a rapid river where it has just cut a new channel through willows is something new to anybody.

01:04:48

On turns, the boat banks correctly. Now upstream, with plenty of power, agile steering and no propeller to be fouled, this is an invention that can open up new holiday territory along many a hitherto unnavigable torrent.

01:05:18

At 20 knots, channels must be spotted quickly. Power comes from a motorcar engine driving a special centrifugal pump, which feeds the jet.

01:05:34

And so there he goes against more currents than one. An outstanding industrialist and inventor, whose choice it is to live far from the cities through the snowy winters and dry summers of the remote Mackenzie Plains.

01:05:56

Mike H

My Dad became a very good driver and in 1960 he led an expedition to America and they ran up through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River, through the big rapids there.

01:06:09

The only time it has ever been done.

01:06:34

Old film

The first boat ever is over the lip of Vulcan. A rooster tail of jet boat victory was never more proudly thrown.

01:06:43

Mike G

Ed got very interested in jet boats because he was always interested in technological stuff. He liked taking tractors to the South Pole, for example, as opposed to taking dogs.

01:06:54

And when he came across jet boats in the South Island. He suddenly thought, “Yes -I could use these in Nepal”, and he had this idea that he could create a transport network of jet boats running from India up to Kathmandu.

01:07:10

Peter

So some years before his Ganges expedition he took two jet boats to Nepal. One driven by the inventor’s son, Jon, and the other driven by an old climbing friend, Jim Wilson.

01:07:23

Jim

Well Ed was above all an adventurer. And he just loved having adventures with his close friends.

01:07:30

And I think he thought that since he’d driven tractors to the South Pole with his friends so we could drive jet boats.

01:07:38

And he came up with the idea of trying to go up the Sun Kosi River from the Indian border to Kathmandu.

01:07:47

He said that this might be a very good form of transport, local transport. I suspect that was an excuse for an adventure, but I think he was semi serious about it.

01:07:57

We took Jon Hamilton as chief driver, of course. The best jet boat driver in the world.

00:08:01

But he decided that one of his mates should drive the second boat, and for various reasons the lot fell to me.

01:08:08

And I duly rewarded him for this privilege by sinking one of the jet boats, halving his fleet.

01:08:14

Mike G

Ah..ha..Yes…

01:08:17

It was flat water for the first kilometer and then it turned into rapids and they became more and more violent, the rapids. And the boats were having to go backwards and forwards.

01:08:27

Jim

It was fairly lively water, and I hadn’t had much experience at all.

01:08:31

And we came to two really big standing waves with a very, very big dip between them.

01:08:39

Jon of course got to the top and instantly knew what to do, and gunned the boat and leapt the gap.

01:08:45

Jet boats can hover motionless to the bank on fast enough water. I’d got into the habit of coming to the top of the wave and pausing to have a look around to see what I might do next. And this was fatal because I didn’t have enough momentum. When I gunned the boat its bow pointed down into the dip and I drove it straight into the next wave.

01:09:06

Mike G

I was in the front boat, driven by Jon Hamilton and John was saying ‘I hope Jim is alright.”

01:09:13

I kept looking behind me and I said, “They’re sinking” and the boat disappeared.

01:09:25

.

Jim

So I, crawled out of the water and went up the bank to apologize to Ed. But one of the many things I love about Ed is that, as long as he thinks that you’ve done your best, he’ll never blame you.

01:09:39

And all he said was ‘C’est la vie”. French for ‘That’s life”

01:09:43

Now I’d halved his fleet, but he forgave me just like that, and being Ed, he simply reorganized, and we did the rest of the trip up the Sun Kosi with just the one boat.

01:09:53

The idea came to Ed that if a tributary of the Ganges, of Mother Ganga, had given us such excitement, how would it be to drive jet boats up the whole length of the Holy river?

01:10:04

We’d almost be making a pilgrimage and we’d be going through the land we’d all grown to love.

01:10:10

And so the Ocean to Sky trip was born.

01:10:16

This time there would be three boats. Jon Hamilton again would be the chief driver.

01:10:21

Mike, his son, the driver of the second boat.

01:10:25

And Ed, ever forgiving, chose me to be the third driver, the driver of the third boat, and also, rather tongue in cheek, since I had a PhD in Hinduism from an Indian university, he appointed me spiritual adviser to the expedition.

01:10:45

My first piece of advice, as so called spiritual advisor was that we had to start the trip at Ganga Sagar - where the Ganga meets Sagar, the sea.

01:10:55

This is the divinely sanctioned starting point for pilgrimage up the Ganges

01:11:00

And to go on pilgrimage in India, you must have a religious blessing before you start.

01:11:06

Fortunately there was a very charming Pujari (Hindu priest) and he willingly agreed to come and bless our boats.

01:11:17

As an additional safeguard against my lack of driving skills, yeah.

01:11:23

He put the tikka on the foreheads of all the members of the expedition.

01:11:29

But it gave me a great feeling of wellbeing to be blessed by this wonderful little Hindu Pujari.

01:11:34

And then he took a wee (little) while to decide what was the forehead of a jet boat. I think he decided it was the bow, but it might have been the windscreen. But he did a wonderful puja for us

01:11:45

Mike G

I thought he behaved as if he was blessing jet boats every day!

01:11:49

He just put it on the nose of the jet boat and we took off into the surf

01:12:00

Ding

Jon Hamilton, as the expert on jet boats hated the sea for jet boating and so the waves were getting bigger and bigger.

01:12:12

Jim

I’d never driven in surf before, and I hit a huge wave.

01:12:18

Ding

And there was a terribly expensive noise at the back as the engine leapt off its mounts.

01:12:29

Jim

Ed, who never misses a chance to tease, said, ”So much for you puja, Jim!”

01:12:35

I snapped back at him, “ If it wasn’t for the puja we wouldn’t have got past the first wave!”

01:12:43

Mike D

To add to the challenge, Ed had a young film crew - us! Waka and I were beside ourselves with excitement, to be on this magic carpet ride with our hero, Ed Hillary and his friends.

01:12:55

Sherpa friends.

01:12:57

Indian friends.

01:12:59

Mountaineers like Graeme Dingle and Murray Jones, biding their time until the river turned to ice.

01:13:11

And Ed’s son, Peter, was with us too.

01:13:14

Peter

The trip was actually planned with my mother and I think they felt it would be this wonderful expeditionary adventure that they could share together.

01:13:26

Look, I couldn’t believe my luck. I mean obviously it was my father who was leading it, and it was a special time for the Hillary family.

01:13:34

My mother and sister had recently died and in some ways this is exactly what Dad and I needed.

01:13:49

Mike G

The great tragedy of Ed’s life was the death of his wife, Louise and his youngest daughter, Belinda in 1975.

01:13:56

And he blamed himself terribly for it, because he had arranged that the whole family would live in Nepal for a year. And they would fly backwards and forwards into the Himalayas.

01:14:12

And on this occasion the pilot had not done his proper security checks. The flaps weren’t working. He took off and the plane was unflyable. And it just suddenly slewed off and drove straight into the ground and killed everybody onboard.

01:14:45

And Ed was shattered.

01:14:56

Jim

He blamed himself. It was on one of his hospital building expeditions.

01:15:12

I think in Ed’s mind it was not just ‘Here’s another adventure to get my teeth into.’ But he may have felt that Louise was quietly saying in his ear “ look, just go ahead and do it.”

01:15:24

And we thought that even the planning of the expedition started to lift Ed out of his terrible depression.

01:15:32

And that the trip itself

01:15:35

might restore to us the old happy Ed.

01:16:16

Jim

Our first adventure was to explore the Sundabans, which is a huge area full of mangroves.

01:16:23

Peter

Imagine you’re in this vast mangrove swamp that is the size of a small country.

01:16:29

And amongst all of this, amazingly, are crocodiles and most incredibly, tigers.

01:16:37

Jim

And the stories we heard about them, were quite alarming.

01:16:39

They could leap twenty or more feet from the bank and they’d developed the charming habit of doing so, hoiking (grabbing) fishermen out of their boats and eating them.

01:16:49

Peter

They’ve adapted to living there. I mean from habitat loss further up in Bengal, they’ve retreated into the mangrove swamps. They can drink brackish water, eat fish and occasionally the odd fisherman.

01:17:02

Mike G

Jon started to show off how the boat could ride across a muddy promontory, travel across mud for thirty meters ,and I don’t know what a tiger would have thought of that had he seen it.

01:17:14

Jim

We felt that any self-respecting tiger, once it saw our antics would refrain from eating us for fear of contracting contagious insanity.

01:17:26

But we did do some probably fairly silly things and we did worry the Indian Forest Service people who were with us, and were armed with very ancient rifles - rifles we thought were probably rejected by Queen Victoria’s bodyguard.

01:17:42

Ding

And he looked at me and he said, ‘Oh! If Sir Hillary gets eaten by a tiger, I will lose my job.’

01:17:50

Mike G

But nevertheless, had a tiger decided that he was really hungry, I suppose he could have jumped inside a boat without any trouble and eaten whichever one he wanted to.

01:17:59

Who would it have been? Would it have been Ed, who was older, or would it have been one of the younger people like Waka?

01:18:06

Waka

The local villagers would never go up these side channels because the tigers would possibly leap from the canopy and take people.

01:18:18

Peter

And when I look back on it now, it was extremely gung-ho. You know, the esprit de corps buoyed us on.

01:18:24

And we just felt ‘ What could possibly go wrong?’ Well of course, everything could have gone wrong. The tides would suddenly rush out. We had difficulty getting out of some of these narrow streams.

01:18:57

Waka

We went up these side channels, of course on a falling tide

01:19:02

And so we just about got landlocked

01:19:10

Jim

We were very keen to see a tiger, not quite so keen to be eaten by one

01:19:18

Mike G

Has anyone got a gun?

01:19:20

Ed

Hey I’m disappearing. Hang on!

01:19:28

It was a great idea coming up this creek!

01:19:34

Peter

And suddenly someone pointed out that there was what looked like a coconut moving strongly across the current.

01:19:43

Mike D

I grabbed my camera and we raced towards this thing in the water and soon we could see that it had stripes!

01:19:49

Jim

And we were quite close before we saw that it was a tiger, later identified as a female swimming across the river.

01:19:55

Some were trying to encourage Mike and me to get between the tiger and the shore and cut it off. A very severe attack of cowardice prevented either Mike or I agreeing to this.

01:20:09

But we did come cautiously behind the tiger as it went over and pulled itself up onto the bank covered in mud, and almost immediately disappeared into the mangroves.

01:20:20

And we thought that was it, but then suddenly we heard

01:20:23

an amazingly magnificent roar, that just sent shivers down our spine.

01:20:30

Ding

And out came striding, this huge male tiger

01:20:36

And it was rippling muscles

01:20:40

And I remember when we gave the engine a bit of a roar the tiger responded immediately with an

01:20:50

even greater roar.

01:20:55

And I realized, watching this animal that if it decided it was going to have you, it was going have you. Because we could see how far the bloody thing could jump.

01:21:09

It was an impressive athlete.

01:21:12

Jim

And we were extremely lucky because one of the Forest Service people who’d been working in the area for, I think, 15 years, had never seen a tiger.

01:21:20

So of course, as spiritual adviser, I explained to everybody that this was because of the puja we had had before we left Ganga Sagar.

01:21:37

 Peter

We roared in our jet boats into the great city of Kolkata under the Howrah Bridge. And the crowds were absolutely mind-boggling.

01:21:48

We believed we waved at the population of people that exceeded that of all of New Zealand. Three or four million people.

01:21:55

Lining the banks and in the trees,

01:21:57

Up on buildings and shrines.

01:22:00

All of them waving at us.

All there to get a glimpse of the amazing jet boats.

01:22:05

and my father, you know, the climber of Mount Everest.

01:22:12

Jim

Ed was widely known throughout India, and here as a history book figure

01:22:19

Suddenly coming to life, and people flocked to see him.

01:22:24

Ding

The children were a total wonder to us, totally inquisitive faces looking at people they’d been told were great.

01:22:38

Particularly Ed Hillary the first person to climb Everest.

01:22:43

Looking at boats that were, to them, rockets.

01:22:49

And coming up to us and saying things like.

01:22:53

‘Are you the same men that went to the moon?’

01:22:57

The whole thing was a cocktail which made your head spin.

01:23:05

Murray

Well I was just a humble boy from rural New Zealand, you know, and I had never ever before encountered crowds and adulation like we were given. And a lot of people, to be honest, didn’t quite understand what jet boats were.

01:23:21

They knew of jet planes and they sort of thought we were flying up the river.

01:23:27

Mike G

When you go mountaineering, you know, you’re not going to see crowds all over the mountain watching you climbing, but here we were on what we thought was a solitary adventure, but we were actually being joined by many millions of Indians as we went up the river.

01:23:43

Mohan K

And when Indians climbed Everest in ’65, that was perhaps the biggest expedition in India in those days.

01:23:58

But as a total impact on the population of the country, the way the people came

01:24:05

after days and days of travelling on foot

01:24:09

to have a look at these funny machines going opposite the current,

01:24:15

And I think the total impact on the nation was perhaps the biggest and most publicized expeditions in the history of the world.

01:24:33

Jim

This text book figure

01:24:36

to all intents and purposes was making a holy pilgrimage up Mother Ganga.

01:24:44

I was particularly worried, as spiritual adviser.

01:24:47

I thought we could be resented by roaring up the Holy River in polluting, noisy, mechanical craft.

01:24:56

But that was dispelled, I didn’t feel the slightest hint of that.

01:25:04

My feeling is that all the Indian crowds who came to see us, genuinely felt that we were making a pilgrimage.

01:25:11

Ding

We were starting to realize through these sort of encounters that people really regarded this expedition as something very special, almost sacred, and people wanted to come with us.

01:25:32

Jim

One young man, a very enterprising young man, was so keen that he converted his bike into an amphibious craft and came pedaling out over the water.

01:25:54

Also, we were hassled for autographs. At first, we humbler members of the expedition, at first took this rather flatteringly, you see. But after one day we were sick of signing autographs.

01:26:05

Ed never, ever turned anyone away. He was simply amazing. He kept his good humour as crowds pressed in upon him. Clamoring for autographs

01:26:15

The adulation of the people was interesting. And Ed handled it very well, but he didn’t himself, think he was particularly special. He was a genuinely modest, humble man.

01:26:33

But the people thought he was divinity itself. An avatar come down to earth, and there’s an ancient belief in India that if you are in the presence of a great person or of a divinity

01:26:47

you acquire merit simply, almost osmotically, by being in their presence. Its called ‘darshan’. Having ‘darshan’ of a great person.

01:26:54

And I’ve no doubt at all, that played a large role in the adulation of Ed and in the tremendous press of people trying to get

01:27:01

close enough to acquire some of Ed’s merit.

01:27:05

Peter

Often there were just mere tens of thousands. On many occasions they were hundreds of thousands. And it was overwhelming. They’d go over the hills.

All these people. All intent on coming to see what was happening.

01:27.19

Mike G

These crowds were so dense; they’d been waiting a long time, sometimes three days. And of course the crowd gets restless.

01:27:26

Peter

There was this sort of tension in the air and there was this really large, mustachioed man beaming away as he’s looking across at my father, Ed Hillary.

01:27:37

And there was a policeman with a two-meter lathi stick and for some reason he hit this man with the stick.

01:27:45

And of course he went from this great beaming smile to looking pretty upset about this.

01:27:51

And just the emotion in the crowd suddenly changed.

01:27:55

I mean it really got quite tense. And most of us were trying to jump back into the boats and get away, because we felt this could become very unpleasant.

01:28:03

But not my father. He pushed past the police man,

01:28:06

reached out to this big guy with the moustache, and shook him by the hand and patted him on the back.

01:28:13

And a big smile came back on his face. And he just instantly defused that tension. It was, it really was, vintage Ed Hillary.

01:28:23

Obviously the focus was on my father, the first man to climb Everest, you know, a world entity.

01:28:30

But there was also an emphasis on his son, and that was me

01:28:34

And I, I didn’t feel that comfortable about it, because, as I said, I felt, you know, what have I done really to deserve all of this attention?

01:28:43

And I remember on one occasion - I was a twenty two year old student going on a climbing and jet-boating expedition.

01:28:50

And an elderly villager came up to me and knelt down and touched my feet,

01:28:57

obviously wanting the ‘darshan’, but you know, what did I have to offer

01:29:02

as a twenty two year old? And I found this very, very difficult because I thought, ‘What have I done to, to earn that?’

01:29:09

And in many respects philosophically, I felt ‘What has anyone done to really deserve someone touching your feet?’

01:29:18

Mike G

For Peter Hillary going along to be the son of god was very difficult.

01:29:24

And Peter, on his own, was a highly successful person. He was a great climber, very strong climber, a good athlete. He had so much going for him.

01:29:33

Jim

He had his pilot’s license, he was a very accomplished mountaineer, and so to be sought out, not for any of these things, but simply because he was Ed’s son, was not a very happy thing.

01:29:47

Murray

Yeah, he even went through a stage in New Zealand, where he’d call himself ‘Peter Hill’, so people wouldn’t recognize him as Ed’s son, and so he wouldn’t get favours, and that, when he was trying to get a job.

01:30:01

Ding

It was particularly galling to see beautiful young women wanting to meet this young man.

01:30:09

But I think Peter was quite disturbed by the whole thing.

01:30:13

Murray

I remember, many, many pretty girls in India wanting our autographs. But unfortunately we kept travelling all the time so I never had time to really talk, to get to know them, which was unfortunate.

01:30:54

Jim

For long periods once we were out on the main bosom of Mother Ganga, we were going through seemingly sparsely inhabited areas, and the peace of the river, and sometimes temples actually in the middle of the river.

01:31:10

Peter

One of the brilliant things about the journey was the contrasts. I mean, the great crowds of Calcutta, and then

01:31:17

out on the Gangetic Plain, roaring along in our jet boats, the country boats with their great patchwork quilt sails, moving along, and the singing of the boatmen.

01:31:35

Jim

We saw one sail that definitely had more holes in it than cloth. But by some magic, probably they’d done puja, it was drawing the ship along perfectly, just as if it had been a full sail. It was absolutely magical and to be in this

sublime, peaceful atmosphere was just wonderful.

01:32:00

The absolutely stunning, big river boats carrying cargos of rock and sand for building.

01:32:07

Mike G

It was as the river had been ten thousand years ago. And the boats we were seeing were very old boats. They were like nothing else you ever saw. I’m sure you’d go back there

01:32:18

in the twenty-first century and there’ll be motorboats. But they were not motorboats then.

01:32:32

When it was getting a bit difficult to sail they would simply put these straining young people on the end of a long rope and tow the boats up the river

01:32:45

Murray

Like they used to do in England, in the canals and that, but instead of using horses they were using people.

01:33:15

Jim

Every night we would choose a spot, usually by a village, and go and respectfully ask the villagers could we camp near their village and always, of course, eagerly agreed to.

01:33:37

And this is the case just for ordinary mortals, but of course, with Ed, being considered a god, we were now involved with hospitality to god her or himself.

01:33:51

They welcomed us not just warmly, but very self sacrificially.

01:34:13

Peter

The incredible thing about the Ganges River, the Ganga, is it really is a living, breathing river.

01:34:19

It moves around on the surface of the Great Gangetic Plains, cutting away at the banks

01:34:26

of the river. And not infrequently, we would visit villages where extensive amounts of the village and their fields had been cut away by the river.

01:34:36

Jim

A village which had already lost half its houses had not sufficient flat ground left for us to camp on that didn’t have crops on.

01:34:44

So without a second thought, seemingly, they proceeded to cut down some of their precious corn crop

01:34:51

to give us room to camp, which struck me as the most extraordinary hospitality we’ve ever been privileged to be offered.

01:35:02

Both with crop cut down, and camping, we would offer to pay and this was firmly refused. This was hospitality that was not something you could buy. This was given.

01:35:19

The Ganga is not just a symbol of life. It is actually, to many, many hundreds of millions of people, literally life itself. It is water for irrigation, water for drinking, water for transport.

01:35:33

And of course, I think this underlines the spiritual significance as well.

01:35:40

It’s Mother Ganga that laid down the fertile soil that supports the vast population of the plains of Ganga, every flood.

01:35:49

But its Mother Ganga also, that in floods, cuts away that land and redistributes it down river.

01:35:57

But we felt that the villagers accepted this. And if the river took, whether lives or houses, you had to accept that.

01:36:07

The thing is to adjust your inner attitudes and to accept life as it is, both giving and taking.

01:36:14

And Ganga is, in my view, the most superb symbol of this. Which explains of course, at least in part, its great holiness and why it’s reverenced so deeply.

01:36:27

Peter

I remember Murray and I going off into the village, and it was like a time warp. Going into the quiet little lanes.

01:36:37

People milking their buffalos, going about their daily chores.

01:36:44

And they’d just look up and smile at us, and we’d wander on.

01:36:54

Mike

But there was something very restful about them. It just felt as though those people had been there for thousands of years. And I think they had actually.

01:37:03

Jim

There’s no doubt in my mind that although we were just rough, skeptical New Zealand mountaineers,

01:37:10

the gentle wisdom of Hinduism was sinking into us through this trip up Mother Ganga.

01:37:21

And we were definitely beginning to drop that Anglicized name, The Ganges, and calling her Ganga or Ganga Ama - Mother Ganga.

01:37:36

And so we would spend the night with perhaps a few village children coming around peering at us.

01:37:41

Wondering what Max Pearl was doing when he was shaving with an electric shaver.

01:37:46

But very respectfully left on our own, and it was sheer bliss after the crowds.

01:39:06

Mike G

Wherever you went, you were aware how important Hinduism was to these people and how it was completely linked to the river because you saw

01:39:17

ritual bathing all the way up the river.

01:39:20

Jim

Mother Ganga, because of all the population, was, even in our day, polluted.

01:39:27

And it’s even worse, much worse now.

01:39:30

But in Hindu belief, it is completely pure.

01:39:34

I believed this for a while, and drank some and came down with amoebic dysentery.  But that shows I wasn’t spiritual enough.

01:39:41

Murray

I didn’t go along with the Indian philosophy of self-purification in the Ganges, because it didn’t look like it to me.

01:39:49

Jim

The proper explanation is the Hindu explanation - it’s a sacred river. How could any pollution get in a sacred river? Anything that falls in is purified. If I fell in and died there I would go instantly to heaven.

01:39:59

But there have been attempts to explain it scientifically by saying that it goes through some deposits in the river bed that have antibiotic properties and so on.

01:40:11

I wouldn’t

01:40:13

dare pronounce on the truth of the matter but, it’s certainly regarded as pure.

01:40:28

Murray

You definitely kept your head above water, and I actually don’t remember having any problems. I don’t know whether I’d do it now.

01:40:37

But we were a lot younger and a lot more stupid then you know, because its not the healthiest river in the world to swim in, with all due respects to India.

01:40:50

Peter

We knew the water could actually kill us in the bouldery rapids ahead.

01:40:54

And we knew the higher the river level, the more chance we actually had of getting through. So we were here at the tail end of the monsoon when river volumes are thirty times the dry season volumes.

01:41:07

Mike G

And these vast black clouds were always with us.

01:41:20

Peter

There was water, water everywhere.

01:41:24

Some towns we passed were living semi aquatic lifestyles.

01:41:30

And the river itself sometimes looked like a sea.

01:41:35

Mike H

With the river being so wide and not much current showing ,we couldn’t tell which way was upstream, or whether we were going sideways or upways.

01:41:46

It was very hard for us to know what direction even to head in sometimes.

01:41:51

Waka

We were, honestly, right in the middle of nowhere. It was like horizon to horizon. You couldn’t see land either side. We were taking compass settings in the middle of the Ganges.

01:42:01

Mike H

And in a lot of places, big tributaries came down, and where the rivers joined, it was very difficult to know even that you were on the right river.

01:42:12

Reading the water depth was almost impossible.

01:42:16

Mike G

And you’d be driving along in this brown water and be not sure how deep it was.

01:42:23

Jim

So between 30 or 40 meter depth and a few millimeters depth, there is nothing to show you on the surface. Nothing at all. No ripples, nothing.

01:42:35

So consequently we had a terrible time knowing where the deep water was, and these boat go about 30 miles an hour, 15 or so kilometers and hour, I think.

01:42:44

Mike H

So most of us were on edge.

01:42:47

Ding

Jet boats hate sand. They love mud

01:42:52

but sand will just stop them dead.

01:42:56

So there was one occasion, when I was lounging on the front of the boat, enjoying the sun and tearing along at 50 kilometers and hour.

01:43:08

And suddenly, Womph!

Ding

Thanks Jim! I felt like a swim!

01:43:17

Jim

Boy, we had some terrible groundings.

01:43:20

Peter

People and equipment would be thrown either overboard or forward inside the boat, and people would be injured.

01:43:28

Murray

There were many groundings. Many. Mingma was thrown off,

01:43:35

and his whole lip was cut, and Max Pearl had to stich up his lip.

01:43:40

Waka

Yes, the only doctor to set up practice in the middle of the Ganges.

01:43:46

Peter

Max Pearl was a very close friend. In fact he was our family doctor, and began to go on a number of my father’s expeditions, to help with setting up the first hospitals up in the Mount Everest area in the Himalayas.

01:44:00

He was one of the most loved members of the expedition and just a few years later,

01:44:06

tragically, he was back in a river in New Zealand fly-fishing when they raised the level of the river, and Max was swept away to his death, a terrible tragedy.

01:44:35

Mike D

Now we were halfway, from the Ocean to the Sky, entering the holy city of Varanasi. And no one could be happier to be here than Jim Wilson.

01:44:44

Jim had actually trained for the Christian ministry but then his spiritual life had taken as many twists and turns as his jet boat and had led him here, where he did a doctorate in Hindu Philosophy.

01:45:08

Jim

Eventually we came to Varanasi, where Ann and I lived for two years

01:45:14

It was one of the most, if not the most, sacred city in the whole of India. And I think the reason was it was on a bend in Mother Ganga.

01:45:25

The sun rose, straight across the river, a magnificent sight and so the two great symbols of life, the heat from the sun, the liquid, the water from the river, combined.

01:45:39

It is a truly magnificent, very moving place and people come from all over India, of course, to bathe here.

01:45:47

If you bathe in Mother Ganga there, with the right attitude, one would hope, you get rid of all your bad karma, all your demerits, all your bad deeds are washed away by the purity of the river.

01:46:05

Peter

Jim was really excited about going back to Varanasi, but I think for all of us, it was really like the halfway point. We were halfway up the river. This was one of the world’s oldest living cities. And it was the heart of Hinduism,

01:46:20

you know, very much the theology of this great river. And so there was great excitement amongst all of us, and I have to say it did not disappoint.

01:46:34

Jim

And if you add to that that it had been continuously inhabited at least from the time of the Buddha, so at least for 3000 years. And has been a holy pilgrimage place for all that time. And then add to that, the sheer wacky

01:46:47

colourful chaos of it all, then you end up with the fact that Varanasi is a very powerful place indeed. It makes a deep impression. Its just such a

01:46:58

crazy kaleidoscope of colour and sound and constant intermingling of human and other animals. So it was a city that seemed chaotic, but people were nice to each other, just in a very stimulating way and actually I mean, it operated very well.

01:47:49

Peter

Each morning these young guys would come out and do calisthenics and literally tie themselves up in knots.

01:47:57

On one occasion I joined them and I was reasonably flexible, but not as flexible as them, that is for sure.

01:48:07

And that was part of the magic of it. Engaging with what the people were doing. And we were received by them wonderfully.

01:48:52

Jim

So at Varanasi we had a second puja.

01:49:01

Peter

I think that puja in Varanasi was incredibly important.

01:49:09

We were half way through the journey. The Himalayas were still out in front. But what had happened in the past with the loss of my mother and my sister was still very heavily upon our hearts.

01:49:30

So I think that little puja that we had there on the Ghats of Varanasi was a very important occasion. I think something happened for Dad. And I think there was a bit of levity that came out of that. And in a way it put to peace just a little bit of what had happened to us in the past.

01:49:54

Jim

Something in the puja seemed to sooth Ed and take away some of the pain he was suffering.

01:50:01

And it was good to see the light come back into his eyes, particularly seeing the most exciting part of our expedition lay just ahead.

01:50:09

Waka

I think Ed changed before us, actually before our eyes.

01:50:14

It was a very powerful moment.

01:50:16

Jim

The climax was floating fragile little leaf boats with lighted candles in them out onto the bosom of Mother Ganga.

01:50:26

And we took it as a symbol of the fact that shortly our boats would be as frail as these little leaf boats when we tackled the white water of the mountainous gorge of Mother Ganga.

01:50:54

Finally we reached the end of the plains and were approaching the mountains. The river was steepening here, but not yet too steep for the local milkman to make his delivery run down the rapid, without spilling a drop.

01:51:12

But just beyond, the serious white water starts. The river steepens drastically and the banks close in in deep gorges.

01:51:25

Our spirits rose at the same time as our trepidation arose

01:51:31

At Rishikesh all the local people were of course quite certain that we would sink.

01:51:37

They were divided into two. The pessimists thought we would undoubtedly sink in the first rapid round the corner. The optimists thought we might get about ten kilometers up and then sink.

01:51:51

We thought we’d get a little further, but this did sort of dent our confidence a little bit.  So we took the canopies off because if a boat did sink, it might make it difficult to get out of the boat with the canopy on.

01:52:06

Holy man

And we wish you all the best on behalf of our master Swami Sivananda, and all our prayers with you. We wish you happy and safe journey. Come back .

01:52:35

Jim

We set off, and immediately around the first corner if I remember rightly from Rishikesh, we came across a horrendous rapid.

01:52:43

Mike H

It really did have some very big waves in it, particularly near the bottom.

01:52:47

Mike D

It really looked like the pessimists might be right.

01:52:58

We lightened the boats and carried gear to the top of the rapid and set up our cameras.

01:53:10

The drivers, Jon and Mike Hamilton and Jim Wilson, decided that they’d risk taking just one passenger each. And lionhearted Mohan Kohli, Everest mountaineer, made the necessary preparations to go with Jon.

01:53:28

Mike H

My father led the first boat up through the rapids.

01:53:33

The first path he tried he found he couldn’t proceed because of the waves.

01:53:39

He ended up having to cross to the far side of the river, over some huge waves.

01:53:48

 And then made his way up through the rapids, crossing back again up near the top.

01:54:03

And finally making his way out successfully.

01:54:13

Jim

Ed, in addition to allowing me to drive the third boat, travelled with me in the dangerous water. I think he felt that if I was to drown, it would safer for him to drown too than go back and face Anne and tell her what he’d done to me.

01:54:27

So Ed was with me in the boat. And we had to go across the river between huge breaking standing waves and go up the other side.

01:54:36

And as I tried to sidle across between the two breaking waves, the boat lurched, and I fell off the accelerator and of course then the boat just wildly gyrated down over the next standing waves. I managed to get back onto the accelerator.

01:54:50

Mike D

It was scary just filming, knowing that if the bow went under, they were probably gone.

01:54:55

You know, Ed didn’t have to be in a boat at all, and certainly not with Jim, the least experienced driver, who’d lost a boat on a scarily similar rapid on that first expedition.

01:55:07

I realized I wasn’t just filming a boat battling a rapid. I was filming an incredible act of courage and loyalty.

01:55:26

Jim

I think, for all of us involved, this was the ultimate expedition, the ultimate adventure.

01:55:35

Partly because it brought together so many cultural and religious and mountain and adventure themes.

01:55:44

But above all because we were with a man whom we all really loved.

01:55:51

Ed was not only a great adventurer and a tremendous organizer but he was a very lovely man.

01:56:01

And once you’d won his trust he was the most loyal friend you could ever hope for.

01:56:06

The fact that he travelled with me in my boat regardless of difficulties and danger.

01:56:13

The fact that he wanted his friends to be part of the expedition rather than bringing in experts.

01:56:19

The fact that he could change plans at a moment’s notice if circumstances demanded.

01:56:26

They all added up to a man who was a very lovely man, and who remained throughout very humble about his own extraordinary qualities.

01:56:36

So its small wonder that we loved him and we’d go anywhere with him.

01:57:04

Mike G

After the first big rapid we saw Mohan taking much longer over his prayers than he had previously. And it worked, because next day the rapids were easier and we had a superb day.

01:57:32

Mike H

It was really nice jet-boating. We were travelling up through a high sided gorge with swiftly flowing water underneath. And it was really good fun, just driving the boats along when everything was going well.

01:57:52

Mike D

It was amazing! So unexpected. Sometimes the river was calm enough for the dead buffalo boatman to have a nice day out.

01:58:08

They’d inflate their craft to just the right pressure and share the river with us.

01:58:36

Ding

For petrol heads like us, the Chevrolet 5 litre V8 was just a perfect noise. But that was just the sort of background to the roar of the river

01:58:51

and this beautiful waltz up the wild water.

01:58:59

Ed was really, really happy on this particular day. It was like we could go forever, and nothing would stop us.

01:59:12

Mike D

It was such tremendous fun and I confidently got out my big, expensive, and not at all waterproof camera, and started filming from the boat itself

01:59:23

Then whoh! Reality check.

01:59:32

Deep down, we knew this river was deadly. Two world-class canoeists had just drowned in it.

01:59:38

Jim

And I must say, this freaked me out completely. I thought that if experts like that coming down had drowned, who am I to stay alive?

01:59:48

We also heard that two young Indian lads were trying to raft down, and they both drowned.

01:59:56

Mike D

That tragedy had actually been witnessed by one of our own film crew, Prem.

02:00:02

Prem

Just eleven years back, the tragedy, which I had actually seen with my own eyes. Two boys dying on the same river.

02:00:29

Believe me, within a minute and a half I see the raft dashed. And then disappeared for a few seconds under the water. And then the raft came up. Again I see the raft was just floating on its own.

02:00:50

We lost two young boys and it was a most shivering memory in my mind.

02:01:00

I was praying all the time to the God Almighty that nothing like this should happen in our expedition of Sir Edmund Hillary.

02:01:14

Mike D

It was Prem, filming us from the shore, who saw his worst fears maybe about to come true.

02:01:22

Mike H

My dad’s boat plunged into a big hole in the rapid, and disappeared from sight.

02:01:29

Waka

And we just paused at the top of this wave and dropped nose first down into this hole. And the water just smashed into us.

02:01:40

Mike G

And this wall of green water poured over the front of the boat.

02:01:45

Waka

We had no choice. We were pinned into the seat.

02:01:48

Mike G

And we thought, “ Well, we’re going to sink here, I think”. I really did think we were going to be swimming down the Ganga after that. It was the closest I’ve ever been to perhaps being drowned in the Ganga.

02:02:02

Mike H

He managed to get it ashore

02:02:06

Running on only 5 cylinders

02:02:09

Water was up over the starter motor and over the spark plugs.

02:02:15

I had to drain the engine oil out of it before we could get going again.

02:02:22

Waka

They ended up pumping the whole boat out, draining oil. It was bush maintenance done on the side of the river at that point.

02:02:32

Murray

And I said to Jon Hamilton, I said, “I thought you said these boats were unsinkable.” And he said, “They are. They’re unsinkable when they’re afloat!”

02:02:42

So even the master can make mistakes.

02:02:45

Peter

The risk, of course is that if one of the boats sank, someone might also be lost in the process. And that was really unthinkable. We did not want to do that. Dad had never lost anyone on any of his expeditions. And we didn’t want to start now.

02:03:00

Ding

Ed always said that we’d drive until we lost a boat. I think he worried about people getting hurt or dying. He’d never lost anyone before on a trip.

02:03:14

And if it was his very close friend, Jim Wilson, then that would have been a total disaster.

02:03:29

Jim

So then we come to Rudraprayag and a really fearsome rapid.

02:03:36

And there in front of me was a rapid which I had seen in a picture at Rishikesh before we left. And which I’d been having nightmares about ever since.

02:03:47

And it was a long bouldery rapid. It looked very big indeed to me. And my nightmares always ended up with the boat splitting in two and me desperately trying to piece the thing together again.

02:03:59

So when I saw this rapid in reality, and saw that it was worse than the photograph, my heart sank within me.

02:04:08

Definitely, I think my memory of sinking the boat in the Arun came back to me, because this was the sort of place where I could very well sink.

02:04:19

Tensions were certainly high at the Rudraprayag rapid. We weren’t at all sure we could get all three boats or even one up.

02:04:27

Mike H

Crowds and crowds of people had come to watch. We were performing in front of them, if you like.

02:04:35

Mike G

We were told that storekeepers were leaving their shops open because even the thieves had gone down to watch the boats.

02:04:44

Jim

So steeling our nerves as best we could, we tackled this dreadful rapid.

02:04:51

Jon, in his usual masterful fashion led up this nightmare rapid, and I waited with increasing nervousness at the bottom.

02:05:14

Murray

The crowd was actually laying bets on who would get up the rapid.

02:05:20

And they all put their money on sadhu Jim, because he had a beard and he looked like a holy man so he must be able to do it. But in actual fact, Jim was not the best driver of the expedition.

02:05:34

Jim

The crowds gathering around, watching, were laying their bets on me – they thought I was a holy man and were convinced I’d already performed miracles.

02:05:44

And so they thought that if anyone would get up it would be the holy man. So I fervently hoped that they were right and that I could perform a miracle again.

02:06:03

It was difficult driving but not as bad as it appeared, and my nightmare of sinking the boat, splitting it in two, was not born out in reality.

02:06:19

Ding

I was beginning to grade the rapids by a sort of danger scale. You know, if a thousand people turned up then that was relatively easy. But if ten thousand people turned up to watch us die, then that was a difficult rapid.

02:06:56

Jim

Ed was definitely feeling the tension and as each boat got up, his elation grew and when Mike, the third boat, got up he leapt to his feet and went “Woooh!”

02:07:09

We got without undue trouble through to the Koteshwar Gorge. It had an abrupt drop at the start of the gorge, known as “The Deer’s Leap” because deer were meant to have leapt across it.

02:07:22

Although the whole river came through a single chute at that point, we actually got up with no trouble.

02:07:35

We went through the gorge, which was quite still water, but eerie because it was encased in sheer cliffs a hundred feet or more above.

02:07:50

Mike H

At the top of the gorge we came to a chute, and this rapid poured down into a wider part of the river that was surging up and down, unpredictably.

02:08:03

Jim

It was an incredible boil of water, a very steep tongue.

02:08:07

But the worst feature was that the force of the water meant that sometimes the water below rose right up and the chute was not very high a jump. At other times huge holes, boiling holes, opened below the chute.

02:08:22

And of course if you went at the wrong moment you hit almost a vertical wall of water.

02:08:26

Mike H

The bow of the boat would have plunged onto the rapid and we would likely have sunk.

02:08:32

I was thinking that it was certainly a place where we could loose a boat

02:08:41

Mike D

You only had to look at the audience. To have bothered to come here miles from anywhere.  They must have known they were going to see something spectacular.

02:08:53

Ding

So the Dingle Danger Scale had a number of factors. If the rapid was particularly remote, if they’d had to trek to get there, then that was very high on the Dingle Danger Scale.

02:09:11

None of us were really looking forward to being on the boats and so there was a great enthusiasm to carry gear up the sides, so that the boats were as light as possible, and only one person was going to die.

02:09:35

Jim

The angst was reinforced by the fact that it was very similar to a chute in the Clutha River in New Zealand where I had, in fact, come to grief.

02;09:47

I didn’t hit any rocks, but I was tossed out of the boat and the boat and I floated back down the river but fortunately I didn’t drown.

02:10:02

That tended to increase my trepidation and it would have been interesting

to measure the difference in terror between Jon and Mike and me. I imagine Jon felt tension, but no terror, Mike was probably mildly scared, and I was plain petrified.

02:10:22

Mike G

And we watched Jon go up first, and because the water is changing all the time, its not constant.  You just have to sit there and judge it, and at some point he has to put his foot on the accelerator and just try and leap forward.

02:10:44

Jim

Jon hovered for a very long time and then with incredible skill, chose his moment, and just shot through with virtually no trouble.

02:10:59

I had to muster my courage somehow, and so I comforted myself with the thought that I must surely by now, be undrownable, because of all the many occasions in the past where I’d had every chance of drowning and hadn’t. It wasn’t a complete comfort,

02:11:16

and in situations like this my thoughts did go to Anne and the children and I felt it wouldn’t be a very good idea to drown.

02:11:23

I went up, and hovered much longer than Jon, and the difficulty was, the water would come up and it wouldn’t stay there long.

02:11:33

And then it’d go down again. I was waiting to make sure it was properly up,

02:11:37

but when I gunned the boat it had already started dropping. I hit the near vertical wall of water at the wrong angle.

02:11:45

The boat swerved violently to the right.

02:11:49

I corrected violently to the left. I nearly hit the rock on the left, and swung just in time,

02:11:58

I think missing the rock only by inches

02:12:01

Mike G

He got thrown a bit to one side and then to the other side and we really thought he was actually going to hit a rock and be thrown back into that turbulent water, which really could have drowned him.

02:12:13

Jim

If I’d hit the rock with the stern of the boat it would undoubtedly have taken the whole jet unit out, and I would have lost all control of the boat.

02:12:21

The boat and I, probably broadside on, would have been swept down into the boiling water below.

02:12:27

And I might have survived, and indeed, since I was a holy man, I was undrownable.

02:12:37

Murray

And he only missed it by inches, but doused me in the process.

02:12:45

Mike G

But he just escaped from it and got out the top. And we were so pleased. There was a great sigh of relief.

02:12:52

Jim

Mike came up, much more proficiently, but still hit the tongue at the wrong angle and did a near repeat of mine, but not nearly so close to the rocks, so we were all safely through.

02:13:14

All the way up the gorges, there were huge and increasing crowds at all the bad rapids as people came from miles around.

02:13:23.

Because the national press and All India Radio, and of course word of mouth, had been spreading rumours, myths about these magic boats, driven by a holy man, which could fly and overcome any obstacles.

02:13:38

Mike G

And they believed that these boats could actually jump up in the air and when they came to an obstacle, a waterfall, they could simply jump up it.

02:13:46

So the combination of the god Vishnu in the form of Edmund Hillary and these magic boats was irresistible.

02:13:54

Waka

I blame the papers, because these jet boats could leap, they could do backward somersaults. These jet boats could do anything.

02:14:03

We were on the chariots of gods, weren’t we?

02:14:32

Ding

This man clearly with very poor eyesight, came up to me and put a garland around my neck and said,

02:14:41

‘You are very great man. What is difference between you and god?’

02:14:50

I shuffled about from one foot to the other and said, ‘Well, I don’t know, mate.’

02:15:17

Jim

We survived some very bad rapids and we’d driven some others with increasing skill, but we were, by this time, getting quite weary. And we came to a rapid that had huge waves in the middle.

02:15:34

I, by this stage, hated big pressure waves, and so I tried to a route close to the shore. And I got to a place where there was a rock on either side of a tiny trickle.

02:15:44

And I glared at the rock with my yogic powers and enlarged the gap ever so slightly, and slipped through.

02:15:58

We were now looking back on about 300 kilometers, of rather difficult, I thought, jet boat driving.

02:16:06

I guess my main feeling was one of relief that I was still alive and that I hadn’t sunk a boat.

02:16:16

Mike G

What would finally stop us?

02:16:18

Would it be a sinking or would it be something where we, it was just impossible and we wouldn’t even try.

02:16:28

Peter

And then we came to a great waterfall right across our path and, yes, we knew this was the end for the jet boats.

02:16:35

Waka

I think somebody must have yelled something out to me “What do you think?” And I just would have gone “There’s no way these boats are going to get up here, you know.”

02:16:57

It was an impenetrable barrier.

02:17:03

It was pretty obvious what would happen if we’d even, like, got the nose of the jet boat anywhere near that waterfall. The nose would have dug in and the boat would have been just pushed under.

02:17:16

Jim

To the crowd, however, who had seen the legend of these boats growing over some weeks now, we were absolute wimps, and had totally failed.

02:17:27

Someone came up to Mike Gill and said, “ Why are you not going on?” and Mike said, “Well, we can’t. The jet boats cant get up a waterfall like that.”

02:17:37

“That is not true!” he was told. “These boats can leap, twenty or thirty feet! I have seen it with my own eyes!”

02:17:49

Waka

The next day in the papers, apparently, there were these accusations of us chickening out for not being able to move on beyond this.

02:17:59

Mike G

The Indian press was disappointed in us because they said we had magic boats. Why did these boats not jump up this waterfall ahead of us?

02:18:08

And they suddenly realized that we were ordinary human beings. We weren’t gods. And our boats had limitations

02:18:16

I think it was an immense disappointment to the people of India

02:18:23

Jim

We were so ashamed of our inability to perform as expected, that we crept away with our tail between our legs. And decided that ,as penance, we would walk the hundred odd kilometers to Badrinath, scorning the easier route of a pilgrim’s bus.

02:18:45

So mere mortals again, no longer holy men, magicians or deities,

02:18:52

we walked, at first somewhat wearily, up the road towards Badrinath, one of the holy centres at one of the sources of Mother Ganga.

02:19:04

Mike G

Right from the very beginning, from Ganga Sagar, we were aware that we were doing what every Indian wants to do, which is to make a pilgrimage up the length of the Ganga.

02:19:15

So that was from the beginning, and it was just born in on us more and more. And when we took off on foot, we left the boats behind, we felt even more like pilgrims, because there were people along side us doing the same thing.

02:19:48

Jim

En route, we climbed a long series of steps up to a lake sacred to the Sikhs.

02:20:05

And as we went, we saw many very old people making the pilgrimage up there, and Ed was moved to comment that this gave them a purpose and a joy in their later life that was very moving.

02:21:16

And so we reached Badrinath

02:21:20

We were sort of on pilgrimage, but our main aim was, of course, to end the journey from the Ocean to the Sky. And so we started planning the final stage.

02:21:33

The ascent of the mountain to the sky.

02:21:37

Waka

Akash Parbat was to be the peak, the unclimbed peak, that we were heading towards, just below 20,000 feet.

02:21:47

When we got to the mountains there was this nurturing love around Ed because it was the new Ed, the non-grieving Ed. And very much at that point the Graeme Dingles, the Murray Jones, the next generation of how do we make these decisions in the mountains, that was coming to the fore.

02:21:06

Ed

Looks big, but its as light as a blooming feather.

02:21:09

Mingma

All same

02:22:10

Peter

By golly, we’re going to need those cairns I think. If this cloud keeps building up. Because its building up pretty quickly.

02:22:24

Ding

Ed’s climbing career in the Himalayas had begun in this place, and some of us kind of anticipated that, indeed, this could be the place where it ended too.

02:22:40

Waka

Which brings me to the slightly reckless decision to go to altitude without the required time of acclimatization. And that had just become one of those ‘it’s the schedule’, you know, the schedule took over.

02:22:56

The expedition had to fulfill its goal, and I think we were probably a little bit bullet proof at that point too.

02:23:05

Jim

The next stage was to establish a base camp on the mountain at about 15,000 feet. And we were in a hurry to get on to this, and get on up to the summit, because we were very worried about the advent of winter. It was now getting late in the season and we wanted to get the job over quickly.

02:23:25

Murray

I think time was precious and all of that sort of thing, and Ed felt that he had to do it in a certain amount of time.

02:23:32

Ding

And I said, ‘Ed, we’re going up too fast. And if we keep this up, someone’s going to die. And it will probably be you.”

02:23:48

Ed might have claimed it was the young climbers pushing him, but that’s completely untrue. All we wanted to do was make sure that he had a safe ascent,

02:24:04

and a safe ascent means going up about 1000 feet a day at his time in life.

02:24:17

And the plan was that we would go up 3000 feet a day and it’s just too much.

02:24:34

Jim

When the porters dumped their loads at Base Camp thankfully and headed down, they turned to warn us that we would be very foolish to go on any further,

02:24:43

because we were trespassing into the land of the gods, and in winter that was territory no mortal could enter unharmed.

02:24:54

Mike G

I personally thought from my experience that because we’d been going up quite slowly we would all be adequately acclimatized as we went

02:25:04

but as we were climbing up and we’d reached a height of lets say 14,000, 15,000 feet Ed said,

02:25:12

‘Well, I wouldn’t mind stopping here, actually.” And we didn’t take any notice. Now, we should have listened to that.

02:25:23

Ed

What height do you think it is, Mike

02:25:24

Mike

I’d say roughly 15,000

02:25:28

Ed

Do we have the altimeter?

02:25:29

Mike G

Ed was quite a bit older than us, and what Ed didn’t let on was that he’d been suffering from altitude sickness at that altitude quite a lot over the previous two years since the death of Louise and Belinda, which was the beginning of a very rapid decline in his tolerance of altitude.

02:25:47

And so, we were heading into a disaster without knowing it.

02:26:10

Peter

Altitude sickness is a ticking time bomb.

02:26:15

Up where we were climbing, there’s less than half the oxygen in the air that you’d have down at sea level. And up here you risk developing mountain sickness, where fluid flows into the lungs and the brain.

02:26:31

Mike D

And Ed insisted on carrying as much as the rest of us.

02:26:35

Jim

So the very next day, foolishly as it turned out, we headed on up, this time without porters, and carrying all the loads ourselves.

02:26:46

Ed was a prodigious load carrier in his youth, and he’d carried by far the heaviest load to the high camp on Everest.

02:26:53

But that was when he was thirty-three. And he was now fifty-seven.

02:27:24

Peter

And unfortunately, my father had begun to develop a condition with altitude.

02:27:31

Despite his extraordinary performances on Mount Everest and other peaks

in those early years, because he had gone up too quickly on some previous occasions, he had developed pulmonary and cerebral edema.

02:27:46

And once you’ve actually developed those conditions, you have a higher, and higher propensity to getting them again.

02:27:53

So our fairly rapid ascent from Badrinath up onto the glacial plateau beneath Akash Parbat proved to be one step too far for my father.

02:28:10

Waka

One foot in front of the other, and obviously the altitude was not treating him well at all.

02:28:15

I think we worked out it must be at least 18000 feet

02:28:19

He was distressed,

02:28:22

he was not in a good way. He’d lost his colour. He was fighting with his breath.

02:28:28

Jim

And he carried really far too heavy a load, and we went up too fast. And he, and I must say, I also, were totally exhausted.

02:28:58

Mike D

Ed said he was far more exhausted reaching here than he was reaching the summit of Everest. But here he was.

02:29:06

And beneath his feet lay the greatest, most loved river of them all.

02:29:11

And he’d led us all that way.

02:29:33

Murray

Well, I was woken up about 10.00 o’clock at night

02:29:36

by Ed screaming out, saying he wanted Jim. And he was obviously in some pain.

02:29:43

Mike G

Murray Jones came and shook me awake and said, ‘Look, Ed’s wants some help. He’s complaining he’s got a terrible pain in his back.’

02:29:52

And I thought, well I suppose its something to do with carrying a load up here. And I gave him a painkiller.

02:29:57

And an hour later he said, ‘Yep, that felt better.’ But the next morning we went up and Mingma came to see me. ‘Go and see Burra Sahib, he not, I’m not happy with Bara Sahib.’ (Burra Sahib is best changed to “Ed”)

02:30:09

And I went along there, and Ed was in a stuporous state. You could shake him. He’d say ‘Ahhh, Ahhh.’ And he clearly was in the early stages of cerebral edema.

02:30:17

Jim

Fluid on the brain from high altitude.

02:30:21

Mike G

This is a life threatening illness

02:30:25

It can lead to death within 24 hours

02:30:27

Peter

Dad was sort of lying there slurring his words. Really not coherent at all.

02:30:32

Ding

He looked like a corpse. He was totally grey. Unconscious. And didn’t look like he was going to live.

02:30:41

Jim

We all loved Ed dearly

02:30:43

and we were desperately worried that he was about to die.

02:30:48

Ding

As soon as we realized how serious he was and we knew that he probably didn’t have more than sixty minutes to live, we just collapsed the tent.

02:31:01

Waka

Wrapped him like a cocoon in ropes, climbing ropes.

02:31:05

Ding

Tied ropes on each end and dragged him across the plateau. And then started lowering him just bundled up in the tent fabric.

02:31:17

Jim

Without really any verbal communication between us, we acted as if we were separate limbs, but operating by a single brain.

02:31:29

We simply collapsed the tent around Ed, wrapped him up in the tent, still on his air mattress, tied ropes to the tent and started dragging him as fast as we could across the gentle slopes of the snow plateau.

02:31:45

Because the only possible cure for high altitude sickness is to get down to thick air and more oxygen.

02:31:53

Peter

And we just started dragging him across the glacier to get down to lower elevations.

02:31:59

And I just remember, as with the other members of the team, just straining on a rope out in front, knowing that if I could do anything, I would pull as hard as I could to expedite this, and get my father down.

02:32:13

And foremost in my mind was the fact that just two years before I’d lost my mother and sister in an air crash in Nepal.

02:32:22

Here I was high in the Himalayas again, in India. Was I about to lose my father as well?

02:32:34

Mike G

People loved Ed. There was this very powerful emotion that drove us on to do everything we could.

02:32:40

Jim

Peter was particularly worried, as you could well imagine.  And he was pulling like a great draught horse out in front.

02:32:48

And he was so worried that he went over the lip of the snow plateau and onto a very steep snow slope we had ascended.

02:32:57

The rest of us realized what we were doing and circled round behind, and instead of pulling, started belaying.

02:33:03

And at one stage, poor Peter was pulling not only Ed, but all the rest of the team.

02:33:08

Waka

And we just dropped down off the side of the mountain,

02:33:12

descending on the shortest line possible, which is the most direct line, down.

02:33:17

Jim

As soon as we got onto really steep stuff,

02:33:21

most of the team gathered round, guiding what you could call a sled, but it was the tent with Ed wrapped up in it, and Ding and I were at the back.

02:33:29

We were finding whatever belays we could. Sometimes hopping into crevasses, sometimes getting good shaft belays.

02:33:35

Waka

Everyone was working absolutely as this incredibly rehearsed team.

02:33:41

It was like we had rehearsed this moment for all our lives. And we were taking Ed down

02:33:49

vertical ice slopes. Down through rock gullies.

02:33:54

Mike G

I’ve never seen such determination in a group of people. To achieve, put every ounce of their strength and will into getting Ed down to a lower point where he would recover.

02:34:05

Waka

We dropped really fast.

02:34:07

Ding

I think we lowered him about 3000 feet in not much more than sixty minutes.

02:34:16

Mike D

We didn’t film at all.  Our total focus was on Ed and our chosen task. And mine was to carry all the extra gear.

02:34:25

Jim

Here’s Mike with an enormous pack on his back,

02:34:27

teetering on precarious crampons

02:34:31

right above. Had he come off, he and the camp would possibly have swept the lot of us off

02:34:35

although I’m sure Dings and my belays would have held.

02:34:38

Waka

Mike made it backwards down this incredible, icy, it was near vertical, icy slope towards us.

02:34:47

Mike D

But somehow I managed to cling on, and I guess we were just so utterly determined that absolutely none of us would die today.

02:34:56

Ding

So when we got to the end of the snow we couldn’t drag him any longer of course. So I rather foolishly said, “I think I can probably carry him”,

02:35:09

which was a bit crazy because I was ten stone and he was eighteen stone.

02:35:17

But I contrived a rope harness and got him onto my back with the help of my mates. And we were kind of tottering along.

02:35:29

Mike G

And we carried him. Took turns carrying him.

02:35:32

And he was a heavy load. It was tough going.

02:35:36

Ding

Ed apparently unconscious on my back. And his head lolling around by my shoulder.

02:35:43

Jim

Ed was no lightweight in those days

02:35:46

and as he struggled down, supported on either side, Ding said’” Jeeze , you’re a heavy bastard, Ed!”

02:35:53

And a voice came up from what we thought was a comatose corpse on his back.

02:35:58

Ding

And he suddenly said, “twelve stone five,” which was exactly his weight when he climbed Everest in 1953.

02:36:10

We all laughed, and knew he was going to survive.

02:36:16

Jim

The fact that Ed could respond like this to Ding’s barb, gave us real hope that the real Ed was still there and was recovering.

02:36:24

Waka

Murray Jones, immediately after Mike Gill’s announcement, shot off back to Badrinath and managed to get a phone contact.

02:36:34

And I think the words, “Ed is dying,” got through.

02:36:40

Murray

It was quite amazing the reaction of the Indian army, who just wanted to help, because it was Sir Edmund Hillary.

02:36:50

And when I asked for one helicopter, they sent two!

02:36:53

I was quite impressed.

02:36:55

Jim

But unfortunately the cloud cover was coming in and we could hear the helicopters. Whoomph, whoomph, whoomph overhead.

02:37:01

But we couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see us of course.

02:37:05

So eventually, Peter went on ahead to Base Camp, and brought back a tent

02:37:11

and some bedding for Ed, and the most essential thing, a tin of Watties canned peaches, which was Ed’s favorite food.

02:37:19

Mike G

It did reach a point where he was saying, “Well, I’m feeling quite a bit better now.” So we could put him down, gave him a rest, and slowly we could walk with him, supported on either side.

02:37:28

And we knew we were out of it by then. ‘Cause it’s a very short lived thing once you get down.

02:37:37

But, he could have died up there.

02:37:41

Ding

We pitched a tent and all clambered inside, and the sense of team, and warmth and thankfulness, was just overwhelming, really. It was a lovely time.

02:38:00

Jim

And the mood now was almost euphoric. Ed was talking to us, laughing with us, he was eating canned peaches. We knew that he was alive.

02:38:13

Peter

Suddenly, he’s got a smile on his face, a little bit of colour in his cheeks. And he’s enjoying a little bit of humour.

02:38:19

And I think the thing that really told me he was back, he was going to be ok, was someone produced a large can of New Zealand Watties canned peaches.

02:38:32

He really enjoyed eating those. And I thought, he’s going to be OK.

02:38:37

Waka

Peter Hillary, at one stage,

02:38:40

said to me, “God, for a horrible moment then, I thought I’d see my whole family die in the Himalayas.”

02:38:50

It must have been pretty close you know.

02:38:53

That form of edema can take out the strongest people very, very quickly.

02:39:02

Mike D

By morning, Murray was back, after climbing up through the night with oxygen for Ed. Then we heard the joyous shouts of Indian Mountain Troops who’d also come up to help.

02:39:13

And then we heard the helicopter

02:39:16

I think we were just so moved that India, who’d taken our expedition so to heart, was right here with us now.

02:39:27

Jim

We had no trouble getting Ed down to this much better helicopter-landing place.

02:39:32

Waka

The helicopter landed, still on full power. There was this horrendous noise. Then Mike Gill assisted Ed. They got into the helicopter.

02:39:43

Jim

And Mike and Ed ducked under the rotor blades, hopped into the helicopter and disappeared from our sight

02:39:51

Waka

And then, there was absolute, complete silence.

02:39:58

And we were just, everyone stood around

02:40:01

And then, one by one

02:40:03

People just collapsed in a heap

02:40:06

And wept

02:40:10

Just wept their hearts out

02:40:13

It was extraordinary

02:40:16

It had been what?

02:40:18

Two and a half days of just

02:40:21

It felt like a knife-edge, you know.

02:40:26

Extraordinary

02:40:45

Jim

The rest of us wept

02:40:48

With relief and joy because the tension had been incredible.

02:40:53

And then we slapped each other on the back, and then we regrouped. And we thought, well, what Ed would want us to do is to make sure we get back up to the sky.

02:41:05

Peter

Really, for Dad, we need to turn our attentions back up there ,and go and complete our journey from the Ocean to the Sky.

02:41:18

Jim

So that’s what we did.

02:41:33

And we were certainly doing it for Ed. We climbed a lovely snow dome above the high camp, which we named Akash Parbat,

02:41:42

Sky Mountain.

02:41:46

And Ed got his wish.

02:41:48

We did touch the sky.

02:42:10

Peter

Dad fully recovered. In fact, he lived for another thirty years.

02:42:16

Mike D

He married a family friend, June, who’d also lost her partner in an air crash.

02:42:29

Peter

He became the New Zealand High Commissioner to India.

02:42:51

And for decades more, he carried on his work with his beloved Sherpas

02:42:57

Building over thirty schools

02:43:08

And he went back to the Ganga

02:43:13

With Mike Gill and Jim Wilson and their kids,

02:43:17

To give them a taste of the beauty we’d all seen.

02:43:24

And, yes, if anyone ever asked, “What was your favorite expedition?”

02:43:28

We’d always say, “It was the time we went by jet boat up the Ganga.

02:43:37

That was the best journey of them all.”