This is Jamie. He is awesome.

One of my oldest friends, Jamie is now a semi-professional explorer with a ground-breaking business bringing expeditions to the classroom and vice versa. If you ever have a bad day at work and want to daydream about yomping off round the world, the page on his website showing current, past and future expeditions is guaranteed to put some tingling hairs on your chest. Or something. He also has a real beard. Did I mention the awesome?

Jamie is exactly the person you want on the end of the telephone when you have a Proper Travel Dilemma. Need to know what kind of satellite phone to take with you when you are off on a truly remote holiday tomorrow and an investment banking transaction is cratering around you? Call Jamie. Need to know somebody trustworthy in Antarctica with access to a ski-equipped plane? Call Jamie. Need to know how to tell your real Buddhist Thankas from your standard mass-produced rubbish? Call Jamie.

OK, so his advice is sometimes a little hardcore (regarding the Thankas, the answer is apparently to befriend an artist with careful inquisition about the monastery he was apprenticed to, and then commission him to paint one of that specific monastery’s patron deities, because that way you will get something both high quality and individual. Oh, and be sure to get the Thangka blessed by a high-ranking lama to make sure it attains proper religious object status). Regarding Antarctica, his advice was that the Argentine air force will fly you out in the back of a cargo plane if you hang around Ushuaia for long enough, and most expedition bases will be glad for the company if you kinda turn up on their doorstep. All, may I be the first to say, top quality and utterly correct advice, but enough to scare the pants off a wimpish ex-investment banker with a predilection for good coffee and high speed internet access

Anyway, I digress. As usual.

We are in Tibet, and we have just had THE quintessential Tibetan trekking experience. Namely, we have loaded up a Toyota Landcruiser to the gunwhales with food, tents, sleeping mats, propane, a cook, a driver and a guide; we have arranged for yak transport; we have painstakingly acclimatized ourselves to the altitude; we have bought copious amounts of warm clothing to cope with the oncoming winter at 5,000 metres; we have procured about half a dozen official permits, all stamped and signed; we have driven from Lhasa to the start of our carefully planned (and, although we don’t normally mention it, extremely expensive) trek, and … the f***ing Chinese have decided that because they are choosing their new leader in some stage-managed rubber stamp of a farrago five thousand miles away in Beijing it is too dangerous to allow any Westerners to contact village Tibetans (who don’t speak any English) and they have cancelled our permission to go. Boy we were mad.

So, we were offered another trek in a less arbitrarily politically sensitive area, but this one went higher, faster and colder than the one we had chosen. Winter is setting in, the high passes are getting hairy, and having climbed Kilimanjaro a few years ago I know that altitude sickness at 5,300 meters is seriously not something to play with. We have a very difficult decision to make, very quickly. So what to do? Call Jamie, of course!

As we are time zone constrained we text him, very briefly setting out the situation, the altitude and the trek our guides are now suggesting and asking him to call us when he wakes up. And what comes back is one of the finest text messages ever sent. I will repeat it here in its entirety so as not to dilute the epic Jamieness of it all:

“Did a similar ascent profile crossing into Zanskar. Had to organize casevac of member of another party back to Manali with AMS [Acute Mountain Sickness]. Also one pack horse slipped on snow and had to be killed. Um… Doable but may not be enjoyable”.

Wow.

We are grown ups and we know when discretion is the better part of valour. We cancelled the trek, we got some of our money back, and we set a course for Nepal. Jamie, we love you.