Mountains for Business
Most believe that Sherpas and mountains are inseparable. This is further substantiated by the experience of Ang Tshering Sherpa, president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA), Honorary Royal Belgian Consul in Nepal and one of the few pioneer tour operators of the country.
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Ang Tshering Sherpa
Chairman & MD Asian Treaking (P) Ltd.
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But Ang Tshering would have been a doctor had his aspiration come true. He got a scholarship under the Colombo Plan to study MBBS in India . But he had to abandon his studies in the third year as he did not want to be a "sick doctor". Born and brought up in the high altitude of Khumjung (3890 metres) near Namche, he just could not adjust to the low altitude of the Indian city of Darbanga . It also turned out that if he joined another college located at a more suitable altitude, he would have had to start again from the first year. So, he decided to work in the Nepali tourism industry.
But his rise to top was slow. Though entry into the tourism business was simple, the rise to the top was as hard-earned as a climb to the top of Mt. Everest itself.
Back in Nepal in 1976 after leaving his MBBS pursuit, Ang Tshering started escorting tourists from Kathmandu to Namche. That job was made easy by the English language skills he had developed during his school days. "Sir Edmund Hillary, the legendary mountaineer, had set up a school at Khumjung and a hospital at nearby Khunde. Foreign doctors would come there as volunteers and their English-speaking wives would volunteer as teachers in our school," he recalls. In fact, while in school, Ang Tshering already had several chances to work as an interpreter helping foreign mountaineers and their Sherpa guides to communicate.
After a couple of these Kathmandu-Namche trips, Michael John Cheney, a well-known name in trekking at that time, asked Ang Tshering to be a partner to set up a trekking agency. Ang Tshering quickly accepted the offer, put in some money as a shareholder and became the manager of Sherpa Co-operative Trekking. Though he left the company after some time and went abroad for employment in a factory, he came back in 1982 and bought Asian Trekking which he still heads as the chairman and managing director. The company specialises in organising mountaineering expeditions and providing support infrastructure and logistics.
But to be successful in this business, he still had to go a harder way. As he puts it, in the trekking business, the customers prefer a company headed by a mountaineer. So he had to learn mountaineering himself. The trigger was an incident when he was in an Austrian town on a business tour. Upon knowing that a Sherpa was in town, the local mountaineers were very excited. They organised a party in his honour and the next morning they took him to an expedition to climb the highest peak of Austria and wanted Ang Tshering to be the leader.
Till then, Ang Tshering had not climbed a mountain. But he dared not reveal that and his performance in the expedition was not as expected by the Austrians. He blamed the lack of enough snow in the Austrian mountain and salvaged his dignity, but realised the importance of learning the skill. So, upon his return, he took basic mountaineering training and later went to Switzerland for an advanced course.
By now, he has already climbed many mountain peaks though he could not manage to go above 8,000 metres on Mt. Everest . The interesting thing is that Ang Tshering has climbed more mountains outside of Nepal than in the country. "My friends, who are my clients as well, wanted me to climb with them when I went to market my services…That is why I have climbed many mountains in Europe as well as the Russian Federation ," he says. The mountaineering experiences have been very fruitful for the business. "With these experiences, I know the needs of my clients very well and can serve them better," he says.
After 14 years of running his own trekking business, he started an airline company - Asian Airlines Helicopter (P) Ltd. which pioneered the use of Russian-built helicopters in Nepal's heli-tourism. But as for now, he is more engaged in managing NMA, Asian Trekking, the pioneering trekking agency (celebrating its 25th anniversary this year in 2007) and a chain of hotels along the Everest trekking route.
Talking about the current mountaineering scenario, Ang Tshering says that Nepal needs to build more roads in mountainous areas. This is because neighbouring countries like China, India and Pakistan have all built roads to the base of their mountains and consequently expeditions in these countries have increased drastically. According to him, in China, there are about 80 teams per year climbing a single mountain like Cho Oyu and Sisapangma. But the statistics for Nepal are dismal. Nepal has 326 mountains, out of which only 293 are open for climbers and they get a total of 150 expedition teams per year. This gives an average of 0.51 teams per mountain per year.
Explaining his point further, he adds: "Currently it takes seven to eight days of walking to reach the Nepali base camps. Thus, it takes about half a month to get to the mountain and back. But the clients today have time constraints. So, if roads were developed, the time needed for expeditions would be drastically reduced and more people would come here. Underdeveloped terrain also means that business operations here are very expensive compared to other countries. Also, our fee structures are prohibitively high. The government should look at these matters."
Personal Side
- Family: Wife and three sons.
- Food: Prefers Nepali over the foreign food. A teetotaller.
- Reading: About mountaineering.
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