The most amazing climbing story I've read is Touching the Void. There's a film of the same name. True story. Incredible.

gomper, have you read Krackauer's Into Thin Air? About the Everest disaster in 1996. Best book I've read for describing step by step what it's like to climb Everest.

I trekked to the Mt. Everest base camp way back in 1984, but I'll never go higher than that.

I read Krakauer shortly after Norgay's book describing events from the same season. Krakauer has a more journalistic approach, Norgay is more poetic. I can't find Bukrejev's book.

Did anyone watch the imax movie filmed in 1996? I check imax in Europe (damn, the one in Vienna was closed) from time to time, but I don't expect it will be shown sometimes in the near future.

No. And it wasn't a climb, just a hike (what they call "trekking"). Porters carried our heavy gear and cooked for us. We slept in tents most nights. It was a lot of hard walking but really pretty cushy in its own way. The Sherpas would wake us up with bowls of hot water to wash our faces in. We stayed a few nights at Lubuche and hiked to the top of Kala Patar at 18,500 feet. It was quite amazing to look up at the Khumbu Ice Fall, where the real climbing begins for those going up Everest.
I spent five weeks in all in Nepal. Quite an adventure. I had taken leave from the USS Dixon to do it. The XO didn't believe I was really taking vacation time to do that until I brought my pictures back. I don't know why, but for some people a trip like that is entirely off their radar screen.
And now I'm happy to spend a week just lying on the beach in Hawaii.

The other really big trip I took was in 1990-1991. Three months overland from Cairo to Kathmandu, which was my second visit to Nepal. I did it through this British outfit: http://www.explore.co.uk/ It was surprisingly inexpensive, but there are few frills. We traveled in a custom-built truck and slept in tents at night. But what an adventure--floating down the Nile at sunset in Faluccas, Crusaders' Castles in Syria, Alleppo, Turkey, (me and the other American had to overfly Iran and meet up with the group in Quetta, Pakistan), the Khyber Pass, India, and ending up in Nepal. The group itself was interesting because we had two Americans, two Canadians, four Brits, four Austrialians, a Swede, and a woman from Iceland.
A trip of a lifetime.

Look up that link and drool at all the possibilities.

Wow, they are pretty cheap jpn. Thanks for the link.

Cheap, and again, few frills. For that reason most of their clients are pretty young. The thing is, since it is so cheap, you're living a lot closer to the ground than if you go with an expensive tour and stay in lavish hotels. You miss a lot of the experience that way. For instance, at noon we'd stop somewhere and the guide would give four of us some money. Then we'd head out into the town we had stopped at and find bread and vegetables and meat for that night's dinner. We rotated cooking responsibilities. The meals were therefore rarely very great, but we got a real feel for the availablility of various foodstuffs as we traveled along. For lunch we'd often stop on the side of an apparently person-less stretch of road and set up our camp chairs and tables. Within minutes there would be throngs of local folks standing there, watching us. We were like a visiting show for them, I guess. Same thing in the afternoon when we'd set up volleyball nets and have some great games. As a result we had numerous opportunities for interaction.

On the other hand, for the real "authentic" experience I suppose the best way of all is not going with a guided group at all. But hey, I wanted vacation too. Traveling in the third world by yourself is a lot of work, especially if you don't know the language. I remember the sign in the Cairo central train station showing where all the trains on the various tracks were heading. Couldn't make heads or tails out of the Arabic. And since Arabic numbers are different too, it was even more mysterious.

So this low-rent adventure travel way to go is a good compromise between having someone taking care of most of the headaches, while at the same time not being entirely cut off from the common folks.