Friends in high places

David Lang first heard about the Himalayas when he was a little boy. As his father read aloud from the works of the great botanical explorers — Reginald Farrer, Frank Kingdon-Ward, and ‘Chinese’ Wilson — he imagined the high mountains and the flower-filled valleys. Above all, he longed to see the yaks: ‘there was something about yaks which appealed to a small child’.

When he grew up, David Lang became a vet with a busy practice in Sussex. He is also an accomplished field naturalist, equally knowledgeable about plants and birds, and author of several books about British wild flowers.

Not until 1983 did he realise his dream of visiting the Himalayas. A first trek to Kashmir and Ladakh, led by the great botanist Oleg Polunin, whetted his appetite for more. Next he visited Bhutan, where his party was caught in a blizzard and had to be rescued by helicopter. Undaunted, he then planned a trip to Sikkim, the little country — or, more accurately, region of India — which is wedged between Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan.