20th May 2013 - Katmandu

Roy and I have just returned from Katmandu where we went to meet the first Arab Woman to reach the summit of the world's highest peak of Mount Everest. Raga Anarrak, a 25 year old Saudi woman & distant cousin of Michel Anarrak of Gold Circle fame & part of a team called 'Arabs With Altitude', reached the summit on Saturday with a group of foreign climbers from Tel Aviv and an assortment of Nepalese trainee guides. The South African team headed by former Grikwas prop, Koos Vleis Van Deventer, had had been the subject of heated discussions after a brawl broke out with the young Sherpas near the ladder bridge, mainly because the ladder had gone missing. Van Deventer had fainted twice on the bridge before its mysterious disappearance, causing a blockage that took hours to clear ensuring that the more serious climbers lost valuable time and ultimately the opportunity to summit.

SA Everest contingent in training

The fitness of the SA contingent had been in question since the overweight leading linkman, Sorrie Foru, lost his footing and took half his following crew fifty metres down a ravine into a local corral of Yaks being milked by the Sherpa wives. 

Sherpa Vellie Tensing

Head Nepalese Sherpa,Vellie Tensing, who was carrying the imported Kudu biltong on his back pack, immediately discarded his baggage and reverted to local colloquialism to fire up the other Sherpas into a state of simmering rage. The free for all that ensued lasted all of three minutes until the ill-prepared skaaps ran out of energy and willingly gave up the fight and, of course, the climb.

Gyandera Shresta

An exhausted and extremelly gaunt Raga, who had impressed Gyandera Shresta, the cross dressing official with the Nepalase tourism ministry, with her tenacity, was resting up in a clinic at the time near the Human Rights offices at Everest base camp. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that effectively bars girls from taking part in sports at government schools, and Minky and Manurey, the director of global initiatives, said that it was a magnificent achievement considering that millions of girls in Saudi Arabia are denied playing any sport at all along with driving or eating in public. In a historic first for the country, two female athletes took part in the Olympic games in London. One took part in the over-dressed underwater synchronized swimming contest and the other finished last in the camel surfing contest. Both took their meals in the toilet & were ferried between their hotel & the stadium in an armoured security van.

The Saudi Arabian government spokesman, Havtu Repressall, said that they were initially unaware that Raga had left the country until thrashing her husband to within two feet of his life & stringing him up in Chop Chop Square before he finally informed them of her mission to climb the famous peak. The conservative Muslim kingdom had allowed a few girls from private schools to participate in some forms of sport so long as they wore a burka, full length clothing and kept strictly to themselves. Some liberty! Will the Arab Uprising ever think to consider their female partners, who they abuse ad nauseum, and allow them some degree of freedom to live a half decent & normal life?