We had our first death today.
A young French climber and friend of ours went to his bed in Broad Peak Base Camp with a headache and died in his sleep of cerebral oedema. He was twenty years old.
As we climbed over the Baltoro Glacier, dodging the crevasses, on our way to Broad Peak Base Camp a helicopter raced over our heads. We assumed that it was delivering supplies to the climbers at the base camps as usual. However on it's return we saw that there was a body bag strapped to the side of it. Our friend's body was in it.
God, what I am doing here?
Four months ago I set myself the challenge to run my on-line outdoor clothing business, WildDay.com from the wildest place on earth and to send the highest e-mail ever recorded from the top of Broad Peak. With the help of my friend Mark Lewis of expedition company WorldSummits.com the plan took on a life of it's own and now I find myself typing on my laptop at 5000m in the shadow of K2.
I was aware of the dangers involved as I have climbed for years. I used to think that the proximity of one's death created an urgency, a celebration of life, but now when I think of the French climber's parent's it seems like so much reckless vanity and boyish nonsense.
I am at Broad Peak Base Camp now and as I type this I am staring at the mountain, my impassive, potential executioner. 150 porters toiled with us through the searing days and freezing nights to help us reach "The Throne Room of the Mountain Gods". The ancient peoples who lived here believed that gods dwelt in the peaks above. I now know why. As the avalanches surge around us I can here the deity's roaring "Go home. You don't belong here."
The villages we passed on the trek in were different from the idyllic arcadia that we passed through during our acclimatisation trek round Nanga Parbat. Unlike the spontaneous friendliness of the porters there, our current gang look like they were recruited from a high security prison and we have been warned to protect our equipment against petty theft.
The reason is depressingly simple. There are a lot more climbers and trekkers in this area. The corruption from the west has started! You have to laugh at the irony. While I am trying to stop porters stealing my sunglasses, on a much grander scale I am currently working on preventing international on-line credit card fraud on my site. No matter how much technology advances the basic instincts of people remain the same.
WildDay.com has experienced very little domestic credit card fraud. However on an international scale there are continuous failed attempts to defraud us. As a result there are certain areas of the globe where we will not deliver goods to, namely Eastern Europe, specifically Romania and Russia, and Indonesia. I do not mean to be disrespectful to the law-abiding citizens of these countries but the fact remains that the vast majority of attempted credit card on WildDay.com comes from these countries.
Up to now we have used simple but very effective methods for detecting fraudulent orders and my business partner Michael Green seems to have sixth sense for spotting them, but due to the vast increase in orders we are experiencing we need to make our prevention systems more automatic.
There are three simple procedures that we are in the process of implementing. The first is to use the function in our ecommerce package, Actinic Business, whereby when the customer comes to the order page they can select the "Pay by cheque before despatch" option. When we receive dubious orders we simply e-mail the customer and ask them to use this option.
The second simple option involves placing a drop down list on the order page with all the countries that we are willing to sell to. By omitting countries such as Romania, the Actinic software will block the customer from that country from continuing with their order.
The third is more drastic but would prevent our staff from going through the irritating administrative hassles that international fraud attempts create. Everybody who uses the internet has an IP address that identifies them to the world. The last few digits of this number identify the country of origin of the user. The last option then is to simply block everybody from the countries we choose from accessing WildDay.com. It's a bit like an electronic bouncer.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each solution and it is an issue that we will have to keep constantly ahead of.
Before I finish for today I call the technical team of Indigo Vision in Edinburgh. It has developed an embedded technology that allows you to send and receive streaming video to a handheld device. I am fascinated by the cutting edge technology they are pioneering and will be working with them when I return to Scotland.
My motives are simple. I miss my family desperately and wish I could see their faces. When I call my father I wish he could see that I was safe and be able to experience the lunar landscape that surrounds me. I also believe that had the technology been available years ago maybe I would not have lost so many friends who died unable to summon help in the mountains.
I switch off my laptop as the sun sets and the brutality of the heat is replaced by the debilitating cold. The porters are laying out their prayer mats and soon the mountains reverberate with their devotions. I am humbled by their faith. Belief in God seems to be an academic debate in my comfortable life in Scotland but K2's silence screams the vulnerability of my humanity. I find myself thinking of the forgotten God of my childhood and pray that he will keep me safe in his arms as I climb, not for my sake, but so that I don't break my Mother's heart.
The expedition has been sponsored by Actinic
