Special offer: Sherpa Hospitality at a super low price

With COVID Christmas II hitting our high streets and much of the planet waiting eagerly to see what new restrictions will be put in place over the festive season, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and give you all something to smile about.

Yes, that’s right I’ve made the ebook version of my new book Sherpa Hospitality as a Cure for Frostbite available for less than a pound/dollar/euro on all the main online bookstores. This offer will only be available for a few days, so head on over to my book page, click on the link to your favourite store and pop the ebook on your device before it’s too late.

Reading Sherpa Hospitality as a Cure for Frostbite is totally safe. It’s something you can enjoy while socially distanced without leaving your own home, whether in or out of quarantine or awaiting test results. In fact, reading any of my books (or any travel book in fact) is good for your mental health and a great way of easing any loneliness you may experience during lockdown.

Much to my surprise, the book also turns out to be topical. Figure 1 below shows the top 12 search terms by people arriving at my blog via search engines.

As you can see, apart from Alison Hargreaves at nos. 1 and 2, and Ueli Steck at 3 and 4 – who also makes a cameo appearance in my book Thieves, Liars and Mountaineers (as a mountaineer) – the rest of the top 12 is occupied by people making searches related to Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja.

Many of these people were looking for controversy and criticism. The blog post that most of them arrived at (which is also one of the chapters in Sherpa Hospitality as a Cure for Frostbite) presents both sides of the picture, so I hope they found what they were looking for. But why were they searching in the first place?

If you’ve been connected to the internet over the last few weeks you will know that Nims has a new film out on Netflix called 14 Peaks about his successful ascents of all the 8,000ers in 2019. News and reviews of the film have been spreading as rapidly as omicron. Someone even wrote to me to ask if I could give it a plug on this blog (so here it is – I’m keeping my fingers crossed Nims will return the favour and give my book a plug).

I’m one of the few people in the world who doesn’t subscribe to Netflix so I haven’t watched the film yet (though I did read Nims’s book). I can tell you, however, that Sherpa Hospitality as a Cure for Frostbite explores the wider context of what his 14 peaks and winter ascent of K2 mean for Sherpa mountaineers, as well as Sherpa history and their role in events leading up to it.

If you watched the film and are keen to know more about the background then Sherpa Hospitality is an entertaining and accessible introduction to the subject drawn from my own experience and posts on this blog. If you do end up reading and enjoying, do please consider leaving a review, or even just a rating. I always appreciate them.

This will be my last blog post of the year. It’s been a more irregular blog this year, the first time I’ve not set out to write a post every week. If you’re still here then thank you for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed it – I’m always happy to receive feedback.

Here’s to a happy 2022 for all of you!