This is an account of my part in an expedition organised by Stephen Badger in 1987 with the principal object of climbing Mt. Ararat. Mt. Ararat is an extinct volcano at the very East end of Turkey, within 30 km of its borders with both Russia and Iran, and was for a long time closed to tourists for security reasons. In the early 1980's, the Turkish government started to allow parties to make the ascent, but required written permission to be obtained from Ankara in advance and the employment of a licensed Turkish Guide on the mountain. So people who have climbed the mountain may still have some scarcity value.

Of course, Mt. Ararat has biblical connotations, so I will start this account on a religious note. Stephen and I went on a training weekend which involved climbing Ben Nevis. As I toiled up the tourist path in thick cloud (alone, Stephen having gone on ahead), a huge figure in a yellow oilskin jacket loomed out of the mist. Standing in front of me and blocking the path, he said in a Germanic voice, "Do you believe In God?" It crossed my mind that he might tip me over the edge if I gave the wrong answer. However, he was in the event not interested in my answer, but merely wished to give me a leaflet and persuade me to join the Unification church (the `Moonies'). I later got to the top of Ben Nevis and found other parties huddled in the cloud and chuckling over their encounters with this ardent evangelist.

In order to get acclimatised before our attempt on Ararat, we were to spend our first week in the Kackar mountains in N.E. Turkey. And so it was that, after a tedious two day journey via Trabzon (no time wasted admiring the towers) and including a 42 km drive up a rough dirt track, we all assembled at Ayder. There were ten of us, Stephen Badger and Nicholas Roskill of Morgan Grenfell, Ben Martin of BZW and our natural history expert, and Ben's cousin Richard Martin; John Wiggins of the DES who had a letter bomb from the IRA, and his wife Jenny who tags along so that John will let her indulge in her horse-riding hobby for the rest of the year; Pat Quaiffe who two years ago cycled 1600 km from Ankara to (almost) Jerusalem; Jo Carey, British representative of the Court of Auditors to the EEC commission; Anna Vaudrey, mother of four from Luxemburg whose glamour somehow survived the elements; and myself. For the first week we had a Turkish mountaineering student Turke Ak, organised by Ben, who was a great help to us over language and route-finding problems. The Wiggins, Jo and Anna had several years alpine climbing experience; and I have climbed. The rest were only hikers. Our ages ranged from 38 to 55, mostly professional men with sedentary jobs who had made little or no effort to get fit for this expedition.

Next morning I was charmed to be woken at 4.00 a.m. by the Imam summoning the faithful to prayer. Our first day is worth describing. Ayder is a magical place, a hamlet 1100 m above sea level surrounded by high steep valleys covered with large trees steaming in the morning sunshine. We strolled up one of the valleys and found that many of the trees carried barrels high up, bee-hives positioned to prevent bears taking the honey. This is a major local industry. The Kackar range is covered, even in August, with flowers in a variety that I have never seen in the Alps. And the honey is delicious, the highlight of any breakfast (generally good fresh white bread, olives, goats cheese, and honey, washed down with stewed tea). But we never saw a bear.

Gradually we rose towards high alps above the tree line, where there were nomad settlements, wooden buildings not tents, but occupied during the summer months only. A Turk and his wife were walking up to the same settlement. He had a small zip-up bag, while she was bent double under a sack of potatoes weighing perhaps 30 kg which she supported on her shoulders by a rope. He was friendly and invited us to take ayran (a dilute yoghurt drink) at his hovel, which we were glad to do. We spent a happy lunch-hour surrounded by old crones and smiling children with fine features and brightly coloured clothes. The wife had been left toiling up the slopes below - we never saw her again, but I suppose she got up in the end.

Neither in this settlement nor anywhere else in Turkey did we encounter any fierce dogs. This was surprising. I had been apprehensive about dogs, and several members of the party with experience of hiking in Northern Greece, had taken anti-rabies injections.

We walked down again to find Ayder covered in its usual afternoon cloak of damp cloud. To freshen up, we bathed in the hot springs, women until 5.00 p.m., men thereafter, and finished the evening with dinner in the Ayder `Hilton'. I asked for wine to accompany the meal, but it was quickly made clear that alcohol was not available in this Moslem area. Nevertheless, a lovely day.

Next day was the start of Bay-Ram, the religious festival in which each household slaughters a sheep or goat. We performed our morning ablutions on the balcony provided, above a steaming mound of fresh entrails, and prepared to set off on a six day trek designed to climb Mt. Kackar (3932 m) and traverse the Kackar range, finally descending to Yusefele. The logistics were complex, as we all had more luggage than we could carry, so someone would have to come back to Ayder, a distance of 150 km by road from Yusefele, to pick up the surplus.

The first day of our trek was hard work, seven hours uphill with rucksacks weighing perhaps 12 kg. But we camped at 2700 m in an idyllic spot by a lake, far above the tree line and the highest nomad settlements, and more importantly far above the damp Ayder clouds which we never saw again. Conditions in the Kackar were perfect for trekking, sunny by day, pleasantly cool at night, plenty of streams, grass and flowers underfoot, no wind and no insects. I slept in the open every night (except one high on Ararat), and watched satellites and shooting stars overhead - the night sky was magnificent. I cannot understand why everybody else preferred to seal themselves up in tents.

Another advantage I enjoyed was that I wore trainers on my feet. Everyone else wore boots which were hot and heavy and in many cases uncomfortable. I attach no importance to the extra ankle support that boots are said to provide. Except for work on snow and ice, where boots are needed to carry crampons, I am satisfied that trainers are superior mountain footwear.

Ayder is North of Mt. Kackar, but the only easy route is up the South face. We therefore had to cross two passes on our second day in order to get round to the South side of the mountain. We were descending from the first of them when Nicholas, who was hurrying to catch the rest of the party up, fell forward down a boulder scree, smashing his spectacles and badly cutting his face both above and below his left eye. He seemed allright, after the flow of blood had been stopped but we had no doctor and were not sure whether he might not be suffering from concussion or shock. In any event, professional help was needed to stitch the cuts. Stephen very kindly agreed to escort Nicholas down, and subsequently to retrieve our surplus baggage from Ayder. Turke Ak went down too, to help with language problems. The eight of us left crossed our second pass and camped at 2700 m beside a rushing torrent on the South flank of Mt. Kackar.

There are no decent maps of the Kackar range. Perhaps the Turks do not publish accurate maps for security reasons. Our diligent search had produced one map that was vague and, as emerged subsequently, quite inaccurate. From our camp-site it was impossible to tell which of the peaks far above was Mt. Kackar. Our third day was to be an attempt on the summit, the only attempt the Wiggins would have time to make since they had to return to their hired car in Ayder. The way seemed to lie up a boulder-filled cwm and I led the party up that. But after two hours of scree-bashing, John called a halt and expressed the view that we were in the wrong cwm. And he was correct. We descended to camp in a depressed state.

John was very keen to get to the top, so at 11.00 a.m. he Jenny and I set off up into the correct cwm. This was not easy to get into, and John did a masterly bit of route-finding, zig-zagging this way and that to avoid major obstacles. The only problem was a steep exposed 10 m gully full of snow; you had to worm your way up (and later down) partly on the snow and partly in the gap between the snow and the vertical rock wall bounding the gully. It was a bit alarming, but in fact perfectly safe as you could wedge yourself into the gap.

After some energetic work, we got high enough to see clearly a simple way to the summit. We reached the col (3700 m) and had a fine view over the mountain's North glacier (one of four) towards the Black Sea. While Jenny and I sunbathed and talked of horses and Ecuador, John made a frenzied attempt to climb the ridge to the summit. But he ran out of time, and we descended in the evening sunshine to find Turke Ak at our camp reporting that all was well with Nicholas down in civilisation, and the rest of the party who had enjoyed a lazy afternoon.

At this stage, I ought to say something about our catering arrangements. To save weight we were relying almost exclusively on dehydrated foods such as porridge and dried soups. There are nourishing dehydrated meals (beef curry, chicken mexico etc) made for climbers, which I enjoyed but others grew to dislike. We made a mistake in not carrying enough fresh food (bread, cheese, fruit). Camping Gaz is not available in Eastern Turkey, and you cannot take fuel in by aeroplane, so we were using stoves fuelled by petrol and methylated spirits. Two of these soon ceased to work, leaving us with one temperamental petrol stove for eight people, which was just about OK until the fuel supply ran out. In the end it was shortage of edible (re-hydrated) food that really drove us off the mountain.

But that problem only arose later. On our fourth day, John and Jeremy returned with Richard to Ayder, leaving five of us with Turke Ak to climb our mountain. Unfortunately, Ben and Pat were sufficiently put off by descriptions of the snow gully to opt out. So four of us, Jo, Anna, Turke and I, set out. I was able to show them the route and we reached the summit via an airy rock ridge without any difficulty. We enjoyed a long lunch in warm sunshine and admired the fine views. There was a hanging glacier to the West and a beautiful high green lake ringed by peaks. We signed the summit book, which contained names and descriptions from 1979 on. Although I did not make an exhaustive check, I think the only other British party in the book climbed the mountain in 1983. There was a handful of continental parties, but the rest were all Turks. We admired an eagle to add to our list of birds, which included Egyptian vultures, hoopoes, snow finches and storks.

What we did not see (several km away) was Ben and Pat sitting by the beautiful lake waving and shouting at us. They had found a longer but easier route into the cwm, probably the best way up the mountain. Had food and fuel not by then run out, they could have gone up the next day. The mountain certainly deserves more British ascents; it is glorious country (like Switzerland only warmer), and the only real difficulty is the route-finding.

The five of us Britons in the camp that night had come direct from desk-bound jobs, and had carried all our requirements up into the mountains. None of us had ever camped at such a height (2700 m) before. None of us had ever combined camping with climbing on such a scale. We had crossed a remote mountain range and ascended its highest peak. Considering our inexperience, we had not made too many mistakes. We were fit and well and rather pleased with ourselves.

Next day we packed up our tents and walked by the stream, down past nomad settlements, down to the tree-line, down to the first village where a minibus (pre-arranged by Turke) took us on in a spectacular 3 hour drive, down to Yusefele. At one village, we stopped for refreshment, our first since Aydar, in an attractive cafe overlooking the stream. One table was occupied by a fat Turk asleep on a goatskin, and we sat at the other.

The Southern limit of the Kackar mountains marks an abrupt boundary in rainfall. Although in the morning we had struck camp on a green grassy site, in the afternoon we found Yusefele to be practically desert, watered only by rivers from distant mountains.

Yusefele is a typical East Turkey town. All day the main street is thronged with men strolling up and down, shaking hands, conversing, kissing friends, or sitting outside their shops or at tables on the pavement. There are no women in evidence. At age 40, all the men grow a moustache; at age 70 they grow a beard and don a woollen hat. The prestige of being seen to be acknowledged and respected is evidently vital. They dress smartly, if uniformly, in creased long trousers with a belt and an open-necked shirt, and take care of their appearance. The street is full of barbers who ply a busy trade. In one such shop I had 6 days growth of beard expertly removed by a 14 year old boy with a cut-throat razor, who finished by applying an astringent liquid, a cream, and finally a powder, and left me feeling perfectly groomed. The charge? 500 Turkish Liras (equivalent to 40 p). All prices are very low by British standards.

A moustachio'd Turk from Yusefele
Found his sack of potatoes weighed heavily.
Said he "Wife, take your rope.
Carry this up the slope".
Thus solving the problem quite cleverly.

(Walking up mountains is a good time for composing Limericks.)

In Eastern Turkey there are a few hotels that provide a reasonable standard of comfort, such as hot water and a sit-down lavatory, for European tourists. And there are doss-houses, dirty and smelly with little privacy and one cold water tap and one squat lavatory per floor. There is absolutely nothing in between. Yusefele had no decent hotel, so we made do with a doss-house, washed our clothes under the tap and visited three Georgian or Armenian churches (the region was Christian from the Vth to the XVth century).

And there are two kinds of tourists. Coachloads of middle-aged continental sightseers pass from one decent hotel to the next, here today and gone tomorrow. The young of all nationalities with rucksacks and karrimats, start singly or in pairs but meet and team up to form fluid groupings. It appeared perfectly safe even for single girls to tour in Eastern Turkey. The Turks are honest and anxious to be friendly. The main problem is their anxiety to do business with you, and at outrageous rates unless you bargain - I quickly learned to recognise and ignore the call "Hello, hello" with which children tried to engage the attentions of any foreigner. Diana Parke's new guidebook "Eastern Turkey" will surely bring many more foreign visitors to the area. And incidentally, if anyone is thinking of following in our footsteps in Kackar and/or Ararat, the Turkish organisation Trek Travel appears substantial and able to provide the required services at reasonable cost.

After two nights at Yusefele, we said goodbye to Turke Ak and moved on to Erzerum to meet up with the rest of our party for the planned attempt on Ararat.

Erzerum is the capital of eastern Turkey with a population of 500,000 and boasts one comfortable hotel, the Oval. There we met up with the Wiggins who had recovered their car, and Stephen and Nicholas with our surplus luggage including long-awaited clean clothes. Nicholas' cuts had been sewn up and were fine, but the antibiotic had produced an allergic reaction and his body was covered with painful sores, to the extent that he thought of going home directly. But he quit the antibiotic, got Anna to massage his body with cream and made a rapid recovery. So the eight of us (Ben and Richard having departed as planned) went on by bus to Dogubyazit the small military town at the foot of Mt. Ararat.

There are no other mountains round Ararat, so you can see the snow cap shining through the haze from 50 or 100 km away, and it does indeed appear to be suspended from heaven. In the morning the summit is clear, but by afternoon a cloud cap generally develops. It is difficult to photograph the mountain or to appreciate its scale - you can drive towards it for miles without its appearing to come any closer.

From the plain of Dogubyazit (600 m) it rises 4500 m in a smooth symmetrical sweep, a rise surpassed by few mountains anywhere in the world. Getting to the summit required skills we had not needed in the Kackar range, as will emerge.

In addition to getting government permission from Ankara, we had used an Oxford travel group to organise a guide, food, tents and horses for us on the mountain. "The place is full of charlatans," we had been told, "but Yavuz is much the best guide available and will get you to the top if anyone can." Our first setback came when Yavuz announced that he had to go to Ankara and had arranged for Alattin, a thick-set Turk with a raucous sense of humour and no English to guide us instead.

Our next setback was when Alattin reported (through his interpreter Hussein) that we could not start without a two-way radio with which to keep in contact with the police. All the police radios were out on the mountain, and the date for their return kept on being put back. Since the arrangements with the Oxford travel group had been quite breathtakingly expensive, and the radio requirement was evidently standard, we could not see why our party should not have come equipped with a radio.

With an increasingly tight schedule ahead, we passed an intensely frustrating two days. We visited Ishak Pasha Serai, a pleasure palace (now ruined) built 200 years ago for a sultan and his harem by an architect who was rewarded by having both hands cut off so that he would never build a rival palace. We visited the Iranian border, officially closed, but in fact with about ten Iranian lorries per hour passing through. We played bridge and Stephen and I bid and made a vulnerable small slam. My greatest single regret about the whole expedition was my failure to bid the grand slam which was quite straightforward. "Grand slam in Dogubyazit" would have made a good headline. And then at last, a radio was returned to the police station, our credentials were re-checked by 3 separate sets of armed guards, and we were permitted to start.

We walked for an hour that first afternoon before pitching our tents in the dusk at 1700 m near a group of tents where the Turkish army were carrying out exercises - indeed, the whole area was dotted with soldiers and military equipment. Dinner by our Turkish cook was some time coming but worth waiting for - soup, stuffed peppers in sauce, fresh peach, washed down with red and white wine. We sat round our lantern in the still night air, warmed by food and drink, with the tensions of our frustrating delay at last removed, and chatted contentedly. Some soldiers strolled over to fraternise. I proposed a health to my Mont Blanc climbing partner Tim Unmack (on his 50th birthday, 14th August), and performed Camilla's and my "Mastermind" dialogue for the entertainment of Britons and Turks (but the art of story telling is a lost one, and we lacked a raconteur on such occasions). That night there was a particularly fine display of shooting stars (the Perseids), and I lay in my bag and watched them till I drifted off to sleep.

Next day we walked on up, in a school crocodile because of the military presence, the eight of us, guide, interpreter, cook, and about ten horses and their drivers carrying our equipment. There is a rough path, first over dry grass studded with boulders, then over ridges of lava, and finally up endless scree, a mixture of lava and basalt, and dust ground by horses' hooves. Ararat is a dry mountain, with no water until the summit ice cap, so we had to carry our water supplies with us. The dry landscape is dull; what is beautiful is the contrast between oasis and desert, the range of colours - emerald, olive, yellow, beige, brown.

There are established camp sites on the mountain, Camp I at 3200 m and Camp II at 4000 m. To save time, as we were a day behind schedule, we missed out Camp I and walked in one day straight up to Camp II. This was not unreasonable, but it involved a rise of 2300 m, more than any of us had ever achieved before in a single day. And Camp II was at a height that none of us had ever slept at before, not in a building let alone in a tent. It was inevitable that these stresses would produce some side effects. Alattin kept on rushing off to be sick and had to be dosed with our medical supplies. On arrival at the camp, Hussein and our cook crashed out with altitude sickness and took no further part. And our party who had previously been drinking tap water and eating un-peeled fruit with complete immunity, started to succumb to a tummy bug that in the end affected nearly all of us. That night at Camp II was a cold cheerless affair.

We were woken at 1.00 a.m. for the summit assault. The site was in cloud when it should have been clear, and breakfast was dank and huddled. I can catch the atmosphere by saying that I spread butter on my bread, but the butter blew off and I could not find it among the boulders in the darkness.

Anna and Pat had been the first to be bit by the bug and were too ill to come. The rest of us, the Wiggins, Stephen, Nicholas, Jo and myself, set off after Alattin at 2.00 a.m. For the next five hours we toiled up steep unstable scree, mostly by torch light. Alattin adopted a terribly slow pace, whether in response to Nicholas who was going much slower than the rest of us or because be was himself sick, we never found out, but the result was that we could not adopt a work rate fast enough to get warm. The dank cloud deposited a picturesque but slippery ice rime on the stones and on us. We had hit the only day of bad weather on Ararat that occurred while we were in the district.

I was struck down by the tummy bug at 4.00 a.m. Imagine me (or not, if you prefer) squatting - alas, a moment too late - in darkness among a pile of icy boulders, with the summit four hours above, the nearest change of clothes two days away, and no water to spare for washing soiled garments. The bug made me feel generally rotten and spoiled any pleasure I would otherwise have had in the ascent.

At 8.00 a.m. we reached the summit ice cap, only 150 m vertical height still to go, but a strong wind chilled us. There was a long pause while numb and inexperienced fingers strapped on crampons; and then another while Alattin tied us all on his rope. Nicholas was in a poor state and suggested going back, indeed several people were muttering about turning round, but Alattin urged us on. And indeed it would hardly have been safe for some to retreat while others went on. We plodded up the snow at the same funereal pace, with long pauses while Alattin seemed to be trying to re-tie his crampon straps.

When at last we reached the summit, we found a model ark containing a book for signatures, and a complex signpost pointing out distant landmarks. We ignored both. We could not have signed the summit book in the gale and spindrift, the signpost was all iced up, and in any event we could see no further than 50 m. Alattin afterwards suggested that, taking into account the wind chill factor, it was -60 degrees C; and while this is nonsense, it was certainly cold, cold enough to freeze the water in the bottle inside my rucksack. We took no summit photograph. We turned straight round and started down again.

By this time, Nicholas was only semi-conscious, frequently fainting and staggering. But here Alattin showed his strength; he tied a coil of rope over his shoulder and walked steadily and slowly down, while Nicholas clung to the rope and stumbled after him. Considering his age and lack of preparation, Nicholas did exceptionally well to get to the top at all. For Stephen, the other non-mountaineer in the party, it was also a fine achievement. For me with my tummy bug, the ascent was harder than Mont Blanc last year, and less fun. (For the record, Ararat at 5169 m is 360 m higher than Mont Blanc, and the barometric pressure is just about half that at sea level.) But I did not have any problems with the altitude. The scree had seemed interminable and I made a mental resolve not to climb a volcano again.

Back at Camp II at midday, we found Anna and Pat just about on their feet and the horses waiting to take tents and equipment down to Camp I. There was an alarming moment when one horse attacked another and pushed it over the edge. Over and over the horse went, somersaulting among the boulders, and we gave it up for dead. But no, an hour later it was carrying my rucksack sedately down the path. And as we got lower, the sun came out and it got warm, and we spent that night at Camp I on grass under a calm starlit sky.

Our descent the next day was a gentle stroll for all except Pat who was troubled by stomach cramps and made slow progress. As we passed the soldiers' tents, the Officer invited us in for refreshment, and we squatted among their hand grenades eating water melon and drinking ayran. For the last stages he provided a military vehicle for Pat, in which I also went as chaperon. And so I finally left the mountain in a fitting way in the front seat of a Turkish jeep, with five soldiers each armed with a sub-machine gun sitting behind.

And what of Noah's Ark? Well, in 1956 a landslip some 25 km south of Ararat revealed a wall of hard earth 3 to 6 m high in the shape of a boat some 133 m long and 22 m wide. From some angles it does look remarkably realistic. When we visited the site (which is by no means a tourist attraction), we found a professor from Erzerum University doing survey work. He told us that excavations within the wall had revealed a far higher concentration of bones than in a comparable area outside it. Who knows, perhaps there is something in the story after all?

"Noah," says the Lord, "for the next flood, I want no animals on board, just fish. And not just any old fish, but carp only, in glass tanks. And this time," says the Lord, "think big Noah, think big. Eight decks at least."

"I get you," says Noah, "what you want is a multi-storey carp ark".

Post-script. A few weeks later I took part in a seminar on patents in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where, despite detailed preparation and extensive advertising, we had an audience of three! One of these identified himself and asked a question. After the seminar, I approached him and said:

"You will not know me. But four years ago you climbed Mt Kackar in North-East Turkey and left your name in the summit book. I was the next Briton to get to the top, this summer." And it was him, and we reminisced together. So the work preparing for the seminar was worthwhile.

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