'Jack, you decided to do it. You are in a good shape, you are morally prepared. The expedition is organized, thought-out and paid-up. Thereby you've conquered your Everest already. Will you be on the top - it now only depends on God and weather'. These good parting words were said yesterday by Dmitriy Arsenievich. Dmitry and I together took part in the most interesting expeditions, rafted the taiga rivers, fished and hunted in places where no one has gone before. Dima is a great psychologist, and after his words I've felt better, as though really the main things are already left behind.

If to consider it from the spirit point of view - and I think that it should be considered exactly that way - the main physical testings will be on the mountain. Regarding moral readiness... we'll see, how it will transform during the ascent. I consider moral readiness, strength of mind as the factors of exceptional importance in achievement of success. As Napoleon said: 'The moral is to the physical as three to one.' For me personally the qoute of Yogi Berra is closer: 'Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical.' This easily can be applied to alpinism.

Our contemporaries, being raised in traditions of the Occidental cultures, are inclined to undervalue the role of 'the delicate' in life, the classical 'delicate' - it is the mental power. I'm lucky in life - I communicate with different people, who belong to different cultures and social strata, and I think I can see the things from the different points of view - it is very useful. Also I like to try everything myself - when you ascend a mountain or when you just watch a movie about someone else doing that - these are the two different things. The desire to try everything myself as well as the striving to get acquainted with 'the places of power' once already led me to Tibet in 2004. Besides that,  the complexity and the inaccessibility of that trip were the important factors as well - I wanted to hang out in Tibet and to live a few weeks in one of the monasteries. And to stay away from the civilization as far as possible...

We travelled together with one distinctive and interesting person - Anatoly Kovgan (in the photo we are crossing the Tsangpo river in search of the requisite monastery). Tolik is a sinologist, wushu master, Shaolin monastery noviciate. That time the greater part of the year he spent in Shaolin, where he had a small hotel. He even visited his wife and children in Krasnoyarsk only twice or thrice a year, and it was a difficult task to persuade him to go to Tibet. We met with Tolya two years earlier; the story of how we met  have something in common with the Sufi parables about Khizr (the green), which can come in any guise and, on hearsay, we owe the Eastern hospitality to him.

Here is how it happened. I went to China with a big group of Russian speaking fans of Vladimit Tarasov to the seminar on management art. At those years I was young, impudent and quite cheeky. The group was big, there was no room for us all in one bus, and there were some hitches during the parking at the time of the excursion to the Great Wall of China. At that moment some guy with freckles and prominent ears came into the bus and began to command. I pulled him down quite roughly, in fact it was a barefaced rudeness. He listened to me very politely, and started to give instructions to the driver in Chinese. The fact that this fellow knows Chinese angered me even more and I came into an open conflict. But Tolik didn't. And I calmed down.

When after a couple of days in Shaolin monastery I woke up early in the morning and went for a walk, I was really impressed by what I had seen: Tolik was practicng alone between the bushes in the forest. It was a tiger, it was a dragon, it was an overman... He could have killed me with one blow easily, with one move - and nevertheless he calmed me down, didn't let the conflict grow, without letting anybody know about his capabilities and skills with neither word nor gesture.

Let's return to Tibet. After a time of research I found a place, in which I decided to live for a while. It was a quite solitary monastery Yumbulagang, but I wasn't allowed to stay in, so I rented a room in the village below in the house of a local resident named Patskhak. He spoke Chinese very bad, so in general we communicated using gestures. In the first night we woke up because of the rats - they had scratched the door, at first from the inside, then from the outside. In the morning Patskhak said: 'Big mice a lot. Bad to close the door. Need to open and mice will go. Then it is quiet'. So we did as he had said. It was a granary instead of our room before, so the rats got used to go there.

Since the first day of our stay at Patskhak's the village kids started to follow us. When we went to the shop to buy foodstuff, I bought candies with a cow on the package and treated the kids to it. Shortly after that, they discontinued to follow me, and I naively decided that they just got used to see us - but that wasn't the case. The answer came unexpectedly. While walking in the surrounding mountains I got tired and stepped up to a herdsman and his son. They were making tea and eating tsampa. They cordially treated me to it. Tsampa is the worst thing I've ever eaten in my life. It is a grinded unsalted maize, brewed with boiling water. The tea, on the contrary, was bitter and salty. In the photo on the left from the teapot you can see a fabric bag, in which they comminute tsampa before eating.

So after eating tsampa and drinking the Tibetan tea I decided to smoke. I took my cigar and found a candy in my pocket, which I then gave to this pretty little boy. The boy took it, but after chewing it for a few minutes something happened to him: he began to fidget and to show signs of anxiety. Since he wasn't able to stand up and go away - we were sitting in front of each other - and the candy worried him a lot, the guy spat it out imperceptibly, as he thought, and sat on it. I was curious, and when I went home I decided to taste it myself. Imagine my surprise, when after chewing this absolutely tasteless delicatessen for some time, I understood that this candy was a dried beef, moreover it was with red pepper. The pepper had been felt after chewing the candy for a couple of minutes, and the whole mouth was burning... Poor Tibetan kids.

The story of staying at Patskhak's ends very unusually. Tolik and I was prisoned, because we had travelled around the country without a local security officers, so-called 'liaison officers', and had not got a coordinated and approved itinerary sheet for our staying. Actually it was a serious violation of a regime, with the possible deportation from the country with the paying of a heavy fine. After long negotiations the problem had been solved by giving a bribe of 200 $.

The trip to Tibet has confirmed the old truth - one cannot run away from oneself, a peace of mind is not in foreign meditative practices and not in rotation of a prayer drum, it is at peace with oneself. One doesn't need to go somewhere - neither to faraway Tibet nor to high Everest... The whole world - is you yourself. From the other hand it's good that the understanding of such simple truth is reinforced in such a serious way - it makes this understanding veritable, truthful. Ceasing to search for a harmony - you lose it; the whole way, the whole search - is an aim. What a wonderful thing - life!