There was that time when I busted my knee while training for a 14 days trek through the Himalayas to Mt Everest Base Camp four days prior to departure...and decided to go anyway! Now, I admit looking at it through the glasses of reason, this might not have been my brightest decision. But the thing was, the flight was booked and paid for and with no cancellation insurrance or possibility of going at another time.

While in Kathmandu, Nepal, I met up with Matt, an Aussie I had met on the Lonely Planet Thorntree forum. We had decided to do the trek together and make arrangements once in Kathmandu at the hope of wiggeling our way out of paying the sky high online prices for joining a group trek. We succeeded.

Before we left touristy Thamel in Kathmandu, we both picked up books that would entertain us during the cold evenings in the mountains. To spike up the feeling of drama, we both went for publications on the 1996 disaster climb on Everest. Matt went for the all-time classic “Into Thin Air”, while I settled for the less famous “The Climb” – a tragic account that would come to mess with my mind in a strangely delicious way once we reached the higher altitudes (yeah, the altitude can do that to you!).

The most dangerous airport in the world

...which you won't get to fly out to because the weather gods hate you!

Seriously though, we had really been looking forward to flying into Lukla airport, the starting point of our trek, by plane. It was known as the world's most dangerous airport and there was no way we were going to miss that experience! Except there was. While waiting for hours at the airport, watching flight after flight getting cancelled (how bad can a fresh breeze be, really?), we eventually had to come to terms with booking a helicopter to get our butts onto that mountain. On the bright side, we managed to pick up a stray dog in the airport to accompany us on our trek. His name was Paul. In reality he wasn't really a dog at all, but more of a 40-something years old contructions worker from England who travelled solo (but what a nice mental image of the two of us trekking through the snow clad mountains with a dog right behind us the entire way happily wagging its tail).

Eventually though, I did make it all the way to Base Camp and Kala Pattar on my busted knee. The pain worsened significantly along the way though, and as I had not had time to see a doctor before I left for Nepal and therefore wasn't completely sure what was wrong, I made a decision which made my way down the mountain a lot less impressive than my way up; I called my ensurance company and had them send a helicopter. In all fairness, by that time I couldn't walk 100 metres without the sudden pain in my knee spontanously sending me to the ground, whining. But I would have liked to finish the entire trek. Not this time around then.

There was that time on the trek to Everest Base Camp when I felt the Himalayan altitude - and realised how exciting that was! To be fair, not all parts of the effect of altitude were equally exciting, but all of it was foreign and that alone made it feel somewhat mysterious.

I had felt altitude before while travelling through the Andes in South America, but to my great surprise, the Himalayan altitude felt very different. In The Andes, the altitude sometimes made it difficult to breathe. Not hard, difficult. Imagine putting a rubber ban around the middle section of your lungs that makes it impossible to expand your lungs to their full capacity, regardless how deep a breath you try take. That's how the altitude in the Andes felt to me, and that's what I expected to find in the Himalayas. This was not what happened. In the mountains of Nepal, I just felt as though I was in terrible shape. Really terrible shape. But I had no real trouble breathing and felt that I could expand my lungs as much as normally.

I felt a different effect of the altitude in Nepal though, specifically once we got above 4500 metres. I started getting what I later learned was called "Cheney-Stokes" - a common phenomenon in the mountains where, while you are sleeping, your body stops breathing for up to about 20 seconds. And then it wakes you up. In quite a rought way. Imagine being asleep and suddently you are yanked up by your body trying to draw air. Then you are out of breath for a few seconds before your extremely exhausted body forces you back to sleep. Waking up from Cheney-Stokes you also have a clear sense that your body has not been breathing for several seconds, although you were asleep while it happened - somehow you can just feel it, as if you have conscious memory of it. Yeah, that's Cheney-Stokes for ya. It happened a few times during the nights over the course of a couple of days, but strangely, it stopped once I got the the highest point on our journey. That might have been because I had gotten a valium pill from Matt to help me sleep through the night though.

I am quite thankful that I had heard of this phenomenon before, although I didn't know the name of it. Back when I was travelling in South America, a Canadian guy, Jim, whom I had started travelling with in Ecuador, told me he had experienced this while climbing Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, and that it was normal and not dangerous. My guide in Nepal had not heard of it before (really?), so had Jim not warned me years earlier, I might have thought that I was dying from lack of oxygen out there in the middle of nowhere. Thanks, Jim, really appreciate it.

Another thing I experienced as a result on the low oxygen was, when waking up in the morning while in the higher regions og the mountains, my vision would play little tricks on me. I would move my hands around in front of me and watch the contures of my hands follow me around, several layers of them, each in a different colour. Very funny, actually, although I'm sure it technically wasn't a good sign.

There was that time I had to be rescued off the mountains in Nepal. Or, well, "rescued" sounds a bit dramatic, perhaps. Buttom line, my stubbornness had sent me trekking through the Himalayas for two weeks (or so was the plan) on an injured knee that remained undiagnosed at the time, but SURPRISE, trekking up and down mountains for 6-8 hours a day for two weeks is not the best thing you can do to a torn miniscus. This meant the pain as well as my anxiety over whether I might be causing permanent damage to me knee had gotten gradually worse over during the trek. Two days into the descent, with only another two days to go, I eventually had to give up. By that stage I couldn't walk 50 metres without having a sharp stabbing pain in my knee sending me to the ground crying out, so fearing I might be enforcing my chances of permanent knee problems, I gave in and phoned my insurance company. After conversing with their doctor, who diagnosed the problem (at least now I understood what was wrong!), they decided to send a helicopter to take me off the mountain. Now this was really not the ending to my adventurous Himalayan trek I had hoped for...although I suppose I could consider helicopter "evacuation" an adventure of its own.

There was that time I learned that, despite being Scandinavian and hence a viking (yes, we are!), I am in fact allergic - in the medical sense - to extreme cold! Yes, it sounds like a bad joke, but it turns out, cold allergy is a thing - and I have it. My trek through the Himalayas did not only take place at great altitude, where it is of course always somewhat chilly, but I had also had the great visdom (insert sarcastic attitude here) to choose to do the trek in winter, when the temperatures we would come to endure at higher elevation were in the -20 C degrees category. Thing is you get used to the cold when you are constantly exposed to it for many days in a row and you sleep in little sheds made basically out of tin cans - and when moving so much, your body getting warm easily because, man, trekking at altitudes of 4-5500 metres is tough, you hardly feel the cold anymore. I remember us at one point getting to a tiny village at around 5000 metres, where we were to have lunch inside this tin can shed and when we asked, our guide told us the temperature inside where we were sitting was -22 C degrees. We laughed in his face, because we didn't believe him - until he showed us the thermometer at the counter!

All this meant that often I wasn't wearing gloves because I felt wamt enough. Specifically in the morning I couldn't, because I had to pack my backpack and get all my stuff together. During those daily 30 minutes (because that's how long packing a few things takes at high altitude), I felt the cold, which meant it must have really been freezing! On the way down the mountain I started getting what looked like a rash on the back of my hands - but within less than a day, this rash was itching so badly I was going insane! My guide tried to help by giving me a bucket of ice water to put my hands into to try to numb the skin. This helped a tiny bit, but looking back, and now knowing the itching rash was caused by an allergic reaction to the constant exposure of my skin to extreme minus temperatures, it probably wasn't such a good idea! But then I met a couple of other travellers, and while we were all sitting around the oven inside our mountain tea hut (which in the cold accumulated trekkers like moths to a torch), one of them told me that she had seen similar reactions in other people, and that it was an allergic reaction to the cold, which meant I should keep my hands really warm.

Seriously? Allergic to the cold? But...I'm from Denmark! She turned out to be right though, and the crazy itch continued for days after I was back in Kathmandu, which had me racing from one drug store to another trying to find something, anything, that I could apply to numb the skin, but without luck. So yeah, now I'm kinda excited to see how it goes down the next time I encounter extreme minus temperatures. Y'know, with me having decided that high altitude mountaineering is my thing and all.

There was that time it actually paid off to bring a big reflex camera and spare lenses with me on a long high altitude mountain trek. This usually isn't recommended, since camera stuff is heavy, bulky, and the thin air at high altitude makes it kinda - well, "tough" to drag unnecessary bagage up the mountain. I do, however, love to play around with my camera, and although I am by no means a particularly brilliant photographer, or know all that much about cameras, I have found that sometimes I will be so lucky as to come across places that hold such beauty and magic that it is as if the camera and the surroundings do all the hard work for me. The South island of New Zealand in particular was one of those places, and as I would find, the Nepalese Himalays was another. Both of these places are home to dramatic landscapes and nature that is just out of the ordinary in every way, and I visited both places in Winter time. Being the coldest time of year to visit, these months are also when the weather is the clearest and the colours the brightest, making a big reflex camera and loads of spare lenses an absolute must - even if you have to drag them all the way up to 5500 metres above sea level by manuel force.