Mountain adventure on the Net

Q: What next for an explorer who has viewed with amazement the world laid out before him from the summit of Everest? A: Show the rest of the world what it looks like.

The veteran mountaineer, Sir Chris Bonington, will embark on another high altitude odyssey next week when he leaves for the foothills of an unexplored Tibetan mountain.

However, this time the public will not have to rely merely on newspaper reports and photographs to follow the adventurer's climb for he is carrying with him a digital camera and satellite phone to transmit photographs around the world via the Internet in minutes.

The 62-year-old climber has been waiting for 12 years to gain permission from the Chinese authorities to enter the Nyain-Quen-Tanglha mountain range. His seven-man team leaves next week and aims to reach the summit of a 6,950 metre peak named Sepu Kangri, as yet unclimbed by Europeans, by the middle of May.

"I am very excited about this project. We can send back both text and actual images and we can update the website daily, so that anyone in the world can join our climb," Bonington said yesterday. "But it does have a slightly evangelical level to it, because people tend to get more excited about the fastest journeys and the biggest mountains, which is going away from what I think is the romantic tradition of mountaineering and exploration of going into unknown places.

"Using this technology I hope we can show the ordinary person in the street what a wonderful unknown world we still have, and how good it is to go into it."

From 18 April images and text from the expedition will be available on website http://www.bonington.com.