Vitidnan Rojanapanich – The first Thai climber to summit Mt Everest

Thais have a very special affinity for the lives of hi-so actors and actresses whose every moves are followed by paparazzi and documented in the many gossip magazines that litter the newsstands. At the same time, Thai people are very proud of their history and use every opportunity they can to remind foreigners that Thailand / Siam has never been colonized.

Unfortunately, the general public is very much unaware of the hundreds of other Thai nationals who deserve a place in the annals of Thai contemporary history. One of them is Vitidnan Rojanapanich, or “Nung” to his friends, who is the first and only Thai climber to summit Mt Everest. There are very few articles in English on the Internet about the exploits of Mr. Vitidnan and I hope this article will make Thai people become more interested in the things that really matter.

On May 22, 2008, Vitidnan Rojanapanich reached the top of the world and not only did he set a new national record, as the first Thai climber to reach such heights but, on that day, he was also one of the 74 climbers to summit Mt Everest. It was the greatest number of climbers to successfully reach to top of Everest in a single day, the former record being just 64. Apart from the Thai national, among the 29 foreigners to fulfill their climbing dreams that day were four other nationalities: Ecuadorian, Vietnamese, American, and Romanian. 46 of the remaining climbers were from Nepal, more exactly Sherpa and Tamang high altitude workers, who helped the foreigners carry their equipment up the Himalayan Range.

It is such a wonderful coincidence that on the day a Thai man reached the summit of Mt Everest, a Romanian climber, Ciprian P. Popoviciu, also joined him in celebration. (The first Romanian to summit Mt Everest was Constantin Lacatusu, who reached the highest point on earth on May 17, 1995.) Thus, it was a great honour to have met Vitidnan Rojanapanich, on September 7, 2012, at a talk he held for students at KPIS, an international school in Bangkok.

The moment he reached Mt Everest, Vitidnan took from his backpack a framed photograph of the King of Thailand, which he had been carrying all along and, with tears of joy, he sang the Thai Royal Anthem while a Sherpa was holding his video camera to record this historic event in the life of Vitidnan and the other 60 million Thais.

He then started shouting the traditional “Long Live the King” chant which is used by Thais in order to show their love for their king. Before he left on his journey to the top of the world, Vitidnan was granted an audience with Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn who presented him with a flag of Thailand. At 40 years old, Vitidnan basked in his achievement and once-in-a-lifetime experience by flying the Thai flag on Mt Everest, while his fellow climbers joined in his celebrations and congratulated him.

And when he reached his dream, Vitidnan confessed in an interview for Bangkok Post that, “I wanted to accomplish this task so that I could hold the picture of His Majesty at the top of the world. It was the greatest gift I could ever give.”

Before climbing Mt Everest, located on the border between Nepal and Tibet and with a height that soars up in the sky at 8.848 m, it is customary for climbers to summit six other peaks in preparation for the big climb. Unfortunately, Vitidnan, a freelance TV producer, didn’t have the budget to afford this, so he started looking for sponsors.

In his presentation, Vitidnan talked about the brick wall he had encountered with prospective Thai sponsors. Most of them rejected his dreams of climbing Mt Everest as unrealistic, especially when Vitidnan was not a professional mountaineer. He had talked to 50 sponsors in five years but not one of them believed in him. To prove them wrong, in 2004, he climbed Mount Kinabalu (4.095 m) in Malaysia and returned to the sponsors with hopes that now they would start believing that his dream of climbing Mt Everest was actually accomplishable. He was greeted with the same mistrust and was even reminded that Everest was twice the height of Mt Kinabalu.

But, he didn’t give up. He spent the next years training and continued looking for sponsor. His dream was to climb Everest in the year of 2006, when the King of Thailand was celebrating his 60th anniversary on the throne. Still, no Thai companies answered his call. Luckily, after a total of six years spent searching for sponsors, he finally was given an opportunity to see his dream come true.

In 2008, Vitidnan was offered a lucrative contract by a Vietnamese event organizer who was sending a team of Vietnamese climbers on Mt Everest. The producers of the reality TV show “Everest 2008 – Vietnam the Spirit of the World” agreed to support him financially and logistically. So, here you had a Thai person who tried to put the Thai national flag on the highest place on earth and no Thai company offered him assistance. Instead, Thailand’s Vietnamese neighbours did! The few that believed in Vitidnan deserve our mention. So, big kudos go to K-Trade International Bangkok who equipped the Thai adventurer with climbing paraphernalia from five of its distributed brands.

It was because of the Vietnamese TV show that Vitidnan had a chance to prepare for Everest by climbing Mount Kinabalu (his second time), Mount Kilimanjaro (5.895 m) in Kenya (the highest mountain in Africa) and Island Peak (6.189 m) in Nepal (situated only ten kilometers to the south of Mt Everest). In recent years, he has even scaled Vinson Massif (4.892 m), the highest mountain in Antarctica, where he had a near-death experience due to the extreme cold he was exposed to.

But, regardless of how much money you have or how much support you have behind your back, climbing Mt Everest is a journey that cannot be completed without rigorous physical and mental training and self-motivation. “Every day I underwent weight training, ran 12 kilometres and carried a gallon of water on my back while running for two hours up and down a 40-storey building,” he explained in article published in The Nation.

His 2008 climb on Mt Everest took two months. Due to its high altitude, extremely cold weather, strong winds, and the rarefied air which requires oxygen masks, climbers need to get acclimatized to these harsh conditions over a long period of time. Once in Kathmandu, the Vietnamese team, led by the Thai cameraman Vitidnan Rojanapanich, flew to Lukla, a town at the base of Mt Everest located at an altitude of 2.860 m. From here, they trekked for nine days (each day for about 4 to 6 hours starting at 8am) to Everest Base Camp (5.364 m) where they spent the next seven days adapting to their new environment.

Then they climbed to Camp I (6.065 m) where they spent the night and returned to Based Camp the next day. After another week of rest, they climbed to Camp II (6.400 m) where, again, they stayed only a night after which they retuned to Base Camp for another week. Once again, the Vietnamese team and Vitidnan climbed to Camp II where they stayed overnight and, the next day, they started a very difficult climb to Camp III (7.200 m), which was a very treacherous journey on a mountain slope with a 60-degree incline. Here they rested for one night, returned to Camp II for another night and then climbed back all the way down to Base Camp.

After a wait of about ten days, they were ready for the longest climb of their lives. But before they could start the ascent, they had to up every day early in the morning to check the weather forecast in the hope of a window in the weather. When such an opportunity arose, they geared up and climbed straight to Camp IV (8.400 m) – also known the “Death Zone” – where they had a 4-hour break.

Then, at 8pm, surrounded by darkness, they started the final push to the summit, following the worm of lights coming from the head torches of the climbers ahead of them. To make it to the top, Vitidnan used all his remaining energy, anxiously waiting for the break of dawn. When morning finally come and the Thai climber reached a peak called the South Summit, he thought he had finally made it to the top. Before he even had a chance to say anything, one of his Sherpa guides just pointed up towards another peak and moved on. A couple of hours later, on May 22, 2008, Vitidnan Rojanapanich, was the first Thai climber to reached the top of the world at 8.848 m. He had fulfilled his dream and proved all the people who did not believe in him that he had the power of will to climb Mt Everest. No other Thai has succeeded in matching this feat ever since.

A similar reality TV show to that on which Vitidnan worked on in 2008 was put together by the now defunct iTV station. The series “TITV Everest: The Unlimited Spirit of Thailand 2007” followed the journey of nine Thais who planned to summit Mt Everest to mark the King of Thailand’s 80^th birthday. The team reached 8,500 m in altitude but failed in their attempt due to bad weather and fatigue and retuned to Base Camp on November 8, 2008.

Also, in 2011, Natapol Supmanu, then 35 years old, a Thai businessman, lead the “Thai Everest 2011 Live Your Dream” campaign, in an attempt to be the second Thai national to summit Mt Everest. Unfortunately, he failed, but at least he raised the public’s awareness and more sponsors were willing to support him.

On May 29, 2008, Vitidnan Rojanapanich stood proud and tall at the Kathmandu City Hall where the Nepalese government presented him with a gold medal as recognition to becoming an Everest Summiteer.

“I believe life is a big journey,” said Vitidnan in his talk at KPIS. I believe that no matter what obstacles separate us from our dreams, there’s nothing that can stop us in fulfilling them.

Below you can listen to Vitidnan talk to Thai students about his Everest adventure:

Photography by Regin Reyno

A  shorter version of this article was  also published in 
“Bangkok Trader” (May 2013, Vol. 7, No. 6)