It all started with the Sugar Loaf

If someone was to compose a pictorial record of British icons of the last century, a photograph of Chris Bonington's bare feet would surely have to feature in there somewhere. Bonington's feet have probably spent more time at altitude than any of his fellow countrymen's.

The first mountain that ever enthralled London-born Chris Bonington was the Sugar Loaf in Wicklow. "My grandfather retired to Mount Merrion in the 1950s, and I came over to visit him when I was 16. I thought the Sugar Loaf was such a lovely shape. I didn't have a map - I didn't know how to read one then, anyway. I got a bus out there and walked up and walked down again."

This is the sort of language one associates with giants with seven-league boots in fairy tales. After that, young Bonington was hooked. On the boat back to Holyhead, he looked up at the Snowdonian mountains, and promised himself he'd climb them too. He did. He hasn't climbed the Sugar Loaf since but he has climbed plenty of the world's other mountains.

Among his many expeditions are ones to the extremely demanding south face of Nepal's Annapurna in 1968; an ascent of Mount Kongar in Western Xinjiang in 1981; and what has become de rigeur for every contemporary mountaineer, Mount Everest in 1985.

Mountaineering can be a cruelly unpredictable sport: Bonington has lost several friends over the years. These include Mick Estcourt who was killed by an avalanche on K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, in 1978, and Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman on a 1982 Everest expedition.

How does he define the thrill of attempting new routes and ascents in such potentially dangerous terrain? "It's a conflict between the pure fascination of exploration and that thing of wanting to be first there, which is ego. In most climbers and explorers, there are these two sides. And there is that sense of finding the unknown, even in the known territory: standing somewhere where no man has ever stood before."

Given the wear and tear that mountaineering clothes and equipment endure on every expedition, the entire kit is replaced by sponsors each time. What does Bonington consider has been his most useful piece of equipment over the years?

"Every bit of equipment has its own job to do, but aesthetically, I love my ice-axe. There's something very pleasing about an iceaxe. The old-fashioned wooden one especially. The ice-axe is a symbol of everything that's most important about climbing to me."

Bonington's most recent expedition was a series of three to Sepu Kangri, a peak in north-west Tibet. However, none of the party managed an ascent of the peak. Bonington is now 64. "As you get older, you have to drop the harness," he admits with uneasy resignation. "That trip was probably my last big mountain of that size - the last high-profile, heavily sponsored climb."

Together with the expedition doctor, Charles Clarke, Bonington has co-written a book, Tibet's Secret Mountain, about the Sepu Kangri story. It's only fair to acknowledge that Clarke's chapters are by far the better-written ones; funny, observant, and sharp.

The book is supplemented by a series of fascinating appendices, which the armchair traveller and mountaineer will pursue eagerly: a gazetteer of rivers, valleys, glaciers, summits, and villages; a Tibetan and Chinese glossary; weather charts; lists of medical supplies; lists of maps; lists of communications equipments (they made regular broadcasts to ITN.)

There was one reconnaissance and two expeditions to the Tibetan peak, over a period of two years. Women are absent from the lists of all three of these. "When you have women along, the whole dynamics change. Man is competitive. Woman is slightly less competitive than man," Bonington says.

"The climbing world is a very small one. It's a tiny little intense world, the world of an expedition. If you have women along, sex usually raises its lovely head at some point. It complicates things. It's easier to go as a single-sex expedition."

He drinks some more Darjeeling in the lobby of his Dublin hotel, and muses a bit further. "I think on the whole, the wives left behind are more relaxed with that arrangement." This is sterling Victorian stuff - but after all, the Victorians were the first to popularise mountaineering.

Does he carry any talismans on his expeditions? He pulls out a necklace made of coloured sacred threads, which were blessed by a Rinpoche (high-ranking Tibetan holy man), and a Tibetan hermit. He suddenly looks a bit embarrassed. "I feel a sense of security when I'm wearing this," he admits. What happens when the threads fall off? "That's natural. But I would never cut it off; that would be terrible. It'll fall off and when I go on another trip, I'll get another one."

Much of the interest in the new book has focused on Bonington's own realisation during that expedition that the effort of high and difficult ascents has gradually become too much. In the final, epilogue-like chapter, he writes movingly of how he felt he was holding back some of the younger members of the team.

`I have found climbing at altitude, carrying my share of the loads, increasingly demanding in the last few years. I was aware that I was no longer able to pull my weight fully within a team where I was always the oldest member. I had decided, and talked to others about the decision, that this would be the last peak of such a height that I would tackle . . .

"And yet, I was not depressed as we made our way back from Sepu Kangri. The quality of the experience as a whole made that ephemeral moment of standing on a mountaintop seem less important.

"I think I'm changing from the tunnel vision I had for years, which was just looking at the mountain," Bonnington says. "Now I see things from a wider angle." He says the explorer part of him is getting stronger; that he is looking at things on the fringes now rather than the top of the mountain.

Next year, he is planning to tackle an unclimbed 6,350 metre peak in Asia with Gerard, his half-brother, and his son Daniel (32). "I'd like to share with them that thing of standing on something that no one else has ever climbed."

There has to be one last question. Does he still drink Bovril? Although it was as long ago as 1977, Chris Bonington admits he has still not lived down his television appearance in the Bovril ad, where he tried to look enthusiastic about consuming a big mug of Beefy Bovril atop some snowy mountain. He grits his teeth good-naturedly and says a very definite no. "But they paid me very well for it!" he declares.

Tibet's Secret Mountain, by Chris Bonington and Charles Clarke, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £20 in UK.