‘It’s easy,’ he says when I ask how difficult the four-day trek I’ve booked will be. ‘So easy it’s barely a trek. The roads are paved the entire way, and you’ll be staying at teahouses, not camping, every night. You only go to 3,600 metres.’
I should have known the son of the world’s most famous sherpa might not be the best judge of what a civilian would consider ‘difficult’.
Perhaps the sherpa blood flowing through Jamling Norgay’s veins and a life spent scaling mountains and trekking the Himalayas had clouded his judgment when it came to a city-dweller whose idea of a hard walk is setting the cross-trainer to high.
‘Will it be worth my while, then?’ I ask, concerned it might get boring. He laughs and assures me: ‘Yes, you’ll enjoy it. You’ll find it pleasant.’
Those four days turn out to be some of the most arduous of my adult life.
When Jamling later asks what I thought of the trek, I tell him I did, indeed, enjoy it, but found it extremely challenging. ‘It was my Everest,’ I say, laughing.
Jamling doesn’t laugh and after a pause, says, ‘My daughters did that trek. In winter. They’re 10 years old.’
The legacy of Tenzing Norgay looms large over Darjeeling. The main road into town has been named after him, as has the local YMCA. The rest of the world might remember him as the man who, along with Edmund Hillary, made the first successful climb of Everest. Here, in the shadow of the Himalaya, Tenzing is revered as much as the mountains.
Jamling has followed in his father’s footsteps, having climbed Everest in 1996 he is now running a trekking company out of the family home, Ghang La. It is here, in a two-storey guesthouse just steps from the main home, that we have been put up. Usually Tenzing Norgay Adventures accommodates clients in local hotels, but as Jamling is home and there are just the two of us, we are lucky.
Inside the guesthouse is a small climbing wall and beyond that, a tiny museum decked out with Tenzing Norgay memorabilia, relics you won’t find in the small museum dedicated to his life in the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in town. Inside an ornately painted wooden cabinet is a 12kg oxygen tank, one of those used by Tenzing on his 1953 expedition; next to it is a 3kg tank used by Jamling in 1996.
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