EVEREST DEATH ZONE: Satis Shroff
Pix courtesy: pixabay
EVEREST DEATH ZONE: Death of a Swiss Climber (Satis Shroff)
The father of five children conquers Everest on May 12, 2021. He is a Swiss Muslim, an ETH-graduate and software engineer, a man who finishes what he starts. Mountain climbing and trekking are his passion. A man with experience who has trained a lot. But even if you train for a long time, there is always a risk that lurks in those heights — -especially in the Death Zone of Everest. With pride he took the flag of his religious community, the Ahmadiyya, in his hands on the highest mountain in the world.
Abdul Waraich 40, reached the summit. On his descent he developed problems. ‘ He was exhausted,’ according to Chhang Dawa Sherpa, the director of the organization Seven Summits Treks (reported the Himalayan Times). He also added: ‘We sent two additional Sherpas with oxygen and foods (sic) but unfortunalety the Sherpas couldn’t save him.’
‘ Abdul was a good man, simple living, very hearty and full of compassion,’ said Imam Wafa Mohammad, the Imam of the Mahamad mosque in Zurich, Switzerland. A prayer meeting will be held as soon as the Corona situation allows it. The body will be retrieved when the weather becomes favourable in the snowy, icy Death Zone.
His picture in the media showed Abdul Waraich holding the flag of his community above his bearded face with emblems of the mosque, a full moon, two crescent moons with a star each, and on the right hand corner the Swiss emblem: a white cross on a red background.
A US national, Puwei Liu, 55, also died on the mountain. He had reached the rock band known as the Hillary Step, located between South Col at 7,906m and the summit, but had to return because of snow blindness and exhaustion. He reached camp at the South Col with the help of support team members and additional oxygen, but died on Wednesday evening, the organisers said.
May their souls rest in peace.
CORONA BLUES NEPAL (Satis Shroff)
Meanwhile, in Nepal there’s a daily rise in corona cases of the Indian variant B.1.617.2.
Similar to the cases in the Indian subcontinent. In Nepal too there’s a dearth of oxygen for covid patients as well as O2 bottles. However, there are hundreds of empty oxygen bottles left behind by expeditions on the way to Everest and Dhaulagiri. The Nepal Mountaineering Association have made frantic requests to the expeditions, Sherpa and porters involved to gather and bring back those abandoned bottles to Kathmandu’s hospitals for filling up with O2 and reusing them for covid-patients. This attitude of irresponsibility and carelessness on the part of the foreign climbers has to stop. They would be heavily fined in their own countries if they did that. What is the use of a western education and intellect when such stupid climbers make their way to Everest and other peaks and don’t thing about Umweltverschmutzung? By creating garbage pollution in the Himalayas they are behaving like human swines in the Nepalese countryside. They are not respecting the Nepalese and their country and are only using their money to take selfies of themselves in the social media. ‘The garbage and O2 cylinders are not my problem,’ they think. There is no one to control this behavior. And Kathmandu is far away and the porters and Sherpas keep quiet.
Have you heard of a Sherpa demonstration in Kathmandu against plastic and garbage pollution in the Himalayas? It is high time to treat the Himalayas the way the Swiss do with their mountains: with respect and pollution-consciousness. A lot of publicity has been done over the past about the Annapurna and other national parks but expeditions and climbers should be banned if they don’t follow the rules. It seems environmental rules are made to be broken in Nepal.
It is a shame that the Nepalese government and Nepalese Mountaineering Association have done nothing till now to bring down the oxygen cylinders. A law should be passed by the parliament in Kathmandu to force the climbing agencies and their Sherpa guides and porters to bring down the oxygen cylinders from the peaks.. We don’t want Nepal to be an O2-cylinder dumping place of egoistic, eco-careless climbers and their agencies in Kathmandu or abroad. This is very un-ecological and irresponsible on the part of the Kathmandu government as well as the climbers from abroad. Do something about it, please.
GEOPOLITICS ON EVEREST (Satis Shroff)
ONCE upon a time, a Nepalese King named Prithvi Narayan Shah described his Himalayan country as a sweet-potato (yam) between two great stones (China and India).
Now China wants to fight covid-19 on the highest mountain in the world. Chinese mountain guides will create a line (border) separating the peak from Tibet (China) and Nepal. Why? You might ask. This is to prevent the Alpinists coming from the Nepalese side from infecting those from Chinese sides, says the official Chinese new agency Xinhua.
It is not clear how the Chinese intend to implement this decision on the peak, which has place only for a few climbers. Geopolitics has indeed reached Mount Everest. The Chinese have been quarreling with the other big rock called India since 1962. Refer to the Sino-Indo War of 1962 in which the Chinese beat the Indian troops.
With a quarrelsome neighbor like China, India and Nepal would be well-advised to review their borders issues, even though they are at the moment not activated due to corona. The Chinese are experienced and quick in putting up solid buildings and claiming land, like the Israelis. Si if you wait too long and hope that nothing happens, you might be in for a surprise. We call it ‘eine böse Überraschung’ in Germany. An evil surprise.
