The Best views comes after the Hardest climb

“Success is a beautiful thing, but Mt. Makalu taught me how to deal with my failures.” Lachmi Deb Roy INTERVIEWS Arjun Vajpai

- Lachmi Deb Roy

Mountaineer, Arjun Vajpai (28) from Nida has been climbing 8000 plus meter mountains for the past 11 years. In 2010, he became the youngest person in the world to climb Mt. Everest at the age of 16. He has done over 13 expeditions to the mountains. Vajpai took mountaineering as a profession so that he could climb the mountains within himself. He believes mountaineering teaches one to cross all hurdles in life no matter how big it is. Every time he goes for a climb, he comes back learning a new lesson which makes him strong and look at look at things with a different perspective. Excerpts:

» Latest travel experience…

In 2021 I went back to Mt. Everest where I started my first journey but this time only to scale it without oxygen. Unfortunately, I had to return from the camp due to a back injury. But the clock has been reset and I have already started training and looking forward to completing my oxygenless climb on Mt. Everest next year. In the meanwhile, in September I will be attempting Mt. Dhaulagiri which is world’s seventh highest mountain.

One of the major difficulties I faced while climbing Mt. Everest was taking all the permissions, doing all the logistic in the time of lockdown, procuring all the equipment’s as there are many equipment’s which you cannot buy in India. It struck us the most at base camp as half of our team Sherpas tested positive. There were set protocols, but I would say COVID got the better of us. At base camp we could every day see around four to five helicopters just coming into to take away the corona positive people. There were multiple cases of corona positive climbers and even with light symptoms it was getting difficult for them at that altitude.