Sergi Unanue: living with fear and beauty in the heart of the Himalayas

BarcelonaSergi Unanue (Banyoles, 1993) couldn't complain about the life he had. He worked as a journalist at Betevé, had friends, lived in an apartment in Barcelona... but something wasn't quite right. "I had always wanted to tell stories and that's why I had studied journalism. When I was young, I wanted to do radio and I ended up on television. I had a good time. In the news section, every day is different. I was one step away from having job and financial stability, but I dreamed of taking a big trip. I had to decide whether to leave the stable life I was building and take the big leap. And I did it without a return ticket." It was the year 2018 and an adventure was beginning that would lead him to walk across all of Nepal.

When he was little, Sergi was a boy who read Tintin. “And I had children’s encyclopedias where I learned about volcanoes, dinosaurs, history... My parents were already great travelers and they influenced me positively. They are partly to blame for the life I lead and also the victims, as I make them suffer a bit when I spend months traveling in remote places,” explains this young man who took a leap of faith without looking back. “Was I brave? It depends. I understand bravery as being able to make a decision or take action when there is something that scares you. And when I took the step, I didn't feel scared,” he explains. “But during the trip I was scared, you know?”, he clarifies, remembering when he climbed peaks and glaciers at six thousand meters. When he left home in 2018, he didn't know he would do those things. “The idea was to travel only by land, without taking planes and trying to spend 10 euros a day. I wanted to go to Moscow and from there take the Trans-Siberian train, which was a dream I had always had. And so it was. I left Banyoles, some friends took me to the border and there I started hitchhiking. It was the beginning of a journey where I would travel 30,000 kilometers, most of it hitchhiking. I saw that this way of traveling allowed me to get to know the places I passed through better. I learned more from a crazy Siberian who invited me to his dacha, the houses that Russians have in the woods, where he produced a somewhat illegal kind of homemade vodka, than from watching a documentary,” he recalls.

The Horses of Mongolia

The trip took him to Mongolia. And there, he met Dani Benedicto, another young man who had been traveling for many months. “Together we decided to embark on a first great adventure which consisted of buying horses in Mongolia and spending a few weeks traveling to get to know the life of nomadic shepherds. It was beautiful, as in Mongolia the horse culture is incredible. I knew nothing about horses, beyond the typical day at school when they take you for a ride on a small horse. But I learned. Doing so gave us energy for new challenges,” he explains.

After crossing Mongolia on horseback, the two parted ways. Sergi would go through Vietnam and China, and Dani would contact him from Nepal. “He had told him about the Great Himalaya Trail, a network of trails that allows you to connect one end of Nepal with the other,” he says. A route that is over 1,700 kilometers with different variants. “I signed up and, as unaware as we were, we took the variant known as the extreme route, the one that allows you to cross the highest mountains in the world. There are 8 mountains over 8,000 meters in this section,” he explains. “I joke that we were unaware, but in reality we were aware of what we wanted to do. And what it entailed. We knew the risk. What was a surprise was that we reached the end. Because what usually happens is that people normally end up giving up halfway. Because many things can happen. You can twist an ankle, you can get caught in storms... and that's it. But we finished in 99 days and became the youngest to achieve it,” he recalls. He has told the story of the trip in the book El Sendero de las Nubes (Península), where he narrates that trek “which was a probe sent to see exactly where my physical or mental limits were. It was a very important turning point in my life,” he reasons.

During those 99 days they saw it all. “We suffered frostbite and climbed peaks without knowing if there was a path behind us. He saw how mass tourism destroys everything in the Everest area. But also how the effects of tourism are now reaching isolated areas, creating social differences. We saw how everything changes when the internet arrives in villages. As soon as the internet arrives, young people stop feeling proud of their parents' culture and want what they see on screens. It was difficult for us to build ties with the local population, but we succeeded. The Himalayas are an area with a lot of cultural variety. There are different ethnic groups, the most famous being the Sherpas, but there are others, like the Tibetans,” he recalls.

The magic of the Himalayas is its people and, of course, nature. “There is a maxim that says the more suffering there is, the more beautiful the reward. And when we were able to see the sun rise at five thousand meters, with the ice melting, it was unforgettable. The image people have of the Himalayas is a large snow-capped mountain, but by doing the Great Himalayan Trail we went from 100 meters above sea level to 6,000. Imagine the entire chromatic scale and variety of landscapes. Jungles, cultivated fields, pastures, different types of forest, rivers, lakes, everything,” recalls excitedly a young man who has now opened a travel agency where he accompanies people who want to see the world as a guide. A guide who is already waiting for the moment to return to the Himalayas, while continuing to discover new corners of the planet.