Arriving from all corners of the country we gather, fashionably late, at our old mountaineering club stores in London. The plane doesn’t leave for four hours, and already we have problems. SMC, the company who is supposed to deliver our down gear has still not turned up. They pulled this stunt on one of our friend’s expedition the year before, and we are not impressed.

Alan’s fish-scale indicates that our bags, bulging with climbing stuff and food, are well over the 20kg luggage limit. Sue’s birthday cake weighs nearly three kilos on its own. Tom is dispatched to buy last-minute batteries and gaffer tape (invaluable stuff) while we slowly work ourselves up in to a state of nervous excitement. Mercifully our Rab gear appears at the eleventh hour (not that they got the order right) and we leave for Heathrow.

Airports the world over have a special sort angst-ridden plasticy atmosphere that, no matter how early you arrive, makes you worry that you will miss your flight, get your bags in the wrong plane, stamp your ticket with the wrong official and make instant enemies of the customs officials. At least at Heathrow they don’t carry Kalashnikovs.

Being students, we have bought the cheapest tickets we could find, with the consequence that we will be spending twenty-four hours in Karachi airport en route to Kathmandu. After an uneventful journey (if you can call five hundred tons of hardware wrenching itself from the ground at hundreds of miles an hour with a noise like Armageddon uneventful), we are fed a nasty midnight meal and come in to land. "God willing", the attendant announces, "we shall shortly be landing at Lahore International Airport". Lahore? What are we doing here?

If any of us had actually managed to get to sleep, the landing would have woken us up with the heart racing, as the 747 swerves alarmingly from side to side laying down the rubber. The plane empties almost entirely, while we sit like lemons and wait in a stupor of sleep-deprivation.