Tenzing's Grandson Interviewed

Tashi Tenzing - Tenzing Norgay's grandson profiled

OUTDOORSmagic profiles Tashi Tenzing,whose book honouring the Sherpa people is about to be published. We met him on the trek in to Everest BaseCamp and chatted with him at the base of the mountain . He is the third generation of his family to stand on the roof of the world.

When Tashi Tenzing moves, he glides effortlessly with the sort of lithe, compact grace that makes the rest of us feel somehow oversized and clumsy. His neat frame shifts with a measured precision reminiscent of a Sherpa Bruce Lee. And that's just on the dance floor of Namche's one and only happening night club.

Tashi with Ama Dablam in the background - a novel mix of east and west in one man

Out on the trail he's as sure-footed as a mountain goat, every foot placement neat, firm and just so - exactly where it ought to be for effortless ease of movement. He looks like a man born to the mountains. But then, of course, he bloody well ought to. He is, after all, the grandson of the great Tenzing Norgay, first Everest sumiteer with Edmund Hillary back in 1953, and in 1997 Tashi himself topped out on Everest to become the third generation of his family to stand on the roof of the world.

Head To Foot Patagonia

Dig a little deeper though and things are a little less obvious. Like Nepal itself, rapidly changing and adapting to the glacial influx of tourism, Tashi, 36, is perched on the cusp between east and west. Dapperly clad in head to foot Patagonia - the Gucci of serious outdoor gear - and sporting obligatory cool Oakley e-Wire shades, Tenzing's fluent, slightly Australasian sentences invariably end with a rising 'man!' and his easy, effortless charm is such that, if you didn't know him, you could easily take him for some sort of Himalayan playboy.

Now living in Sidney, he has an Australian wife, two kiddies and his own tour business, Tenzing's Himalayan Travel Centre, specialising in Himalayan trekking and climbing. Watching him with clients, it's clear that he's a consummate guide, attentive, considerate, informative and, above all, in love with his country with its blend of eastern culture and towering mountain scenery.

Yet he could be forgiven for being a little confused. After his grandfather's triumph on Everest - Tashi recalls now that he didn't realise he was 'the' Tenzing until he was five years old - the family decamped to Darjeeling, where Tashi went to the traditional British public school St.Pauls. 'The best thing that ever happened to me,' he says now. 'Education has been a big help in my life.'

'I still feel a Sherpa'

At the same time he's managed to keep a firm hold of where he came from. 'I still feel a Sherpa,' he stresses. 'But I love Australia, it's my second home.' He steps between cultures almost as effortlessly as he breezes through boulder fields. 'He's a chameleon,' comments one of his clients on the Everest Base Camp trek where we met him. He deals easily and naturally with his Nepali employees and, according to his sirdar, speaks passable Nepali and Tibetan as well as excellent English and Sherpa.

He's also an avowedly spiritual man, something that at first seems at variants with his smooth, occidental image. One of the more moving moments of the trek was watching him burning incense and praying at the monument to his uncle who died climbing with him on Everest in 1993, clearly lost in the moment and his memories while his tour group looked on. It was one of those moments that could have been uncomfortable, even exploitative, but the accepting nature of Nepali culture is such that the moment could be both intensely private and public at the same time. That may sound odd, but somehow it seems to work.

His first action in the morning is to recite mantras using traditional Buddhist prayer beads, though he's not above ordering bed tea in mid-prayer, and he refers often to the spiritual side of his life. It is, he says, one of the lessons his grandfather taught him: 'Be happy in the mountains, enjoy yourself in a spiritual way, keep the spiritual side.' As a guide he constantly draws his clients' attention to cultural and spiritual details, on one afternoon spending an hour stitching together traditional Sherpa prayer flags and explaining carefully what they mean.

'I do believe in fate, but also in hard work'

It must be odd, I muse, to have your fate shaped so strongly by one event, by one man climbing one mountain, being in the right place at the right time. He shrugs when I suggest he might otherwise have been herding yaks in the Khumbu. "I'd still be fine,' he says. 'I do believe in fate, but also in hard work, in having a dream and disciplining yourself to achieve it.'

He says that his grandfather gave him the inspiration to climb - neither his brother or sister do - 'He was a man with great vision and dreams, who gave me the energy to follow. It was always in my mind to climb Everest and keep his name high; I wanted to climb spiritually and place a statue of Bhudda on top, for me it was more like a journey than just a climb. It was the most beautiful day I ever had. That day we were blessed by Chomolungma itself. You could see the curvature of the earth, just amazing. You do know that you're at the highest point on earth.

'To me, Everest is part of my family tradition. It was important for me to be there.' So would he want Passang, his son aged nine to follow in his footsteps? 'Of course I'd love to see him follow in the tradition, but even if he doesn't, I'm still proud of my family. I'll be happy if they do, but still happy if they choose not to.'

He palpably climbs for pleasure as well as money

Of course, the Tenzing name is also one of Tashi's strongest commercial assets, and it doesn't take a hardened cynic to see that keeping it in the headlines is good for business, yet there's no particular contradiction here. You only have to spend an hour or so with him to realise that he has a genuine love of the mountains, 'I feel closer to the spirits,' he says. But though he is a qualified guide, a graduate of the Himalayan Mountain Institute founded by his grandfather in Darjeeling, he differs from traditional sherpas in that he also, palpably climbs for pleasure as well as money. 'I climb mountains,' he says. 'Because I love them.'

And leading treks? 'I choose programmes in places I love, it's just beautiful to be away from cities. So many people would die for a job like this.' Note 'die' not 'kill', very Nepali, very Tashi, very reasonable. Sometimes you kind of wish he wouldn't be quite so accepting of things. In the midst of a trail closely resembling a rush hour tube platform, I asked him if perhaps tourism might be in danger of damaging Nepal, that it could be overwhelmed. It would, I suspect, have been easy for him to agree, to jump on the eco-awareness bandwagon. Instead he pointed out that this, for some reason, was a particularly manic season in the busiest part of the country and that for the rest of the year it's relatively quiet.

Nepal's a very poor country...

'There's always,' he concedes. 'A good and a bad side, but Nepal's a very poor country, it really does need the money from tourism and there are now projects to help conserve the environment, for example to promote re-forestation in the Everest region.' His uncle, he guesses would be proud and happy that trekking and mountaineering was raising the profile of Sherpas. And of course he's right, in a country of blinding poverty the foreign pennies are vital.

But there must be something that gets his goat? 'Sherpas,' he concedes. 'Would appreciate it if climbers gave them more public credit for what they achieve on mountains like Everest. often climbs are only possible because of the Sherpas, and while ultimately it doesn't make a difference, it would be a nice gesture to say that the climb is possible because of them.'

In his own way, Tashi too is trying to promote awareness of Sherpa history. Once more following in his grandfather's footsteps he is working, with his wife Julie, on a book telling the story of his own family and people, which is due to be published by Harper Collins in the UK and has just been launched by Sir Edmund Hillary. But then Tashi Tenzing is a thoroughly modern Sherpa.

 

Note: Tenzing Himalayan Travel Centre can be contacted at:
tenzing@himalayantravel.com.au / www.himalayantravel.com.au

tel: 02 9221 7177