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Posted on 30 Nov 2007 at 16:45

 

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What would you take if you were planning to climb Mount Everest? David Robinson treks to the top of the world with just a PDA, a camera, a phone and an MP3 player.

Well, I'm back from the Everest trip, which I survived without any major mishaps (more by good luck than good management, I should add). I was asked to go by my friend Lee, who left his job as MD of one of our major customers in the USA last year to set up his own company. Trekking up Everest to the Base Camp site had been a major ambition of his for years and, having now established his new enterprise, he asked a number of friends to go with him. I was the only one dim enough to say yes.

Breaks from work such as this are obviously disruptive, but they also have the wonderful effect of forcing you to get organised and delegate absolutely everything you don't have to do yourself. It also means sorting out your communications so that, if needs be, you can make decisions and implement solutions from afar. On most of my previous trips abroad, however, I've had a reasonable prospect of getting the internet, a mobile phone connection and a continuous supply of one essential element for computing: electricity.

Kit for the top

This time I had to make some critical decisions about which equipment to take and how it might be used. It didn't help that these choices were made against a background of considerable ignorance - so nothing new there, then. The big factors affecting my choices were size, weight, battery life, power consumption and the possibility of getting a recharge en route. That ruled out the new Toshiba.

On previous trips abroad my computing tool of choice had been the JVC sub-notebook. It's small and has swappable batteries and WiFi through a CardBus card, but once the batteries go flat they need a decent supply of power (and time) to recharge. As I had no idea what power would be available, I decided against it.

A better option might be the Palm Tungsten PDA. It's small, very light and has built-in WiFi and a reasonable battery life. Another plus is the short recharge time, and the charger requires only 5.2 volts, which I could reproduce from one of those emergency mobile phone rechargers that run on AA batteries.

Snap decision

When it came to cameras, I basically had three choices: a small compact, a full-on SLR or something in between. Compacts are OK for snapshots, but I wanted some decent landscape shots. The best tool for that would be something like Alan's Canon EOS 30D, which has interchangeable lenses and lots of megapixels - what more could I want? Well, something that runs off Duracells would be nice, as would a little less weight, as every item I took would need to be lugged uphill either by me or a poor Sherpa.

Eventually I opted for my trusty old Fujifilm FinePix 602. It's five years old and, although it cost an arm and a leg when new, it's now worth about four pence. It still takes damn good pictures, though - up to six megapixels - and accepts an add-on wide-angle lens. If it was damaged, lost or stolen, I could replace it with the modern equivalent: a FinePix S9600, which costs a shade over £200. Keef's just bought one and it looks like a lot of camera for the money, especially if you don't really need interchangeable lenses.

For entertainment I chose my very simple no-name MP3 player, again on the basis that it's powered by a single replaceable AAA battery rather than a rechargeable one. With that and two SD cards - one with music and the other with recordings of Gardeners' Question Time and The News Quiz from Radio 4 - I'd have some chance of avoiding being bored to death on the flights to and from Kathmandu.