KATMANDU, Nepal -- A Belgian climber given up for dead on Mount Everest two weeks ago turned up safe Friday to tell of his desperate struggle to survive without food after sliding down an icy ridge into Tibet.
'I am lucky to be alive,' said Jean Bourgeois, 44, an engineer from Dinant, Belgium.
Bourgeois disappeared Dec. 30 while climbing the world's highest peak with an 11-man French climbing expedition.
After searching for three days, his companions abandoned their effort, presuming Bourgeois had frozen to death on the west ridge of the 28,028-foot peak on the Nepal-Tibet border.
Bourgeoisslipped on the west ridge of the mountain and although he was not injured, he said he was in shock and had only a vague recollection of the accident.
He said he eventually encountered some Chinese who brought him to the Nepal-Tibet border Thursday and gave him $35 for bus fare to Katmandu.
Bourgeois told a news conference Friday that he left the expedition group after getting the permission of leader Michel Metzger, 32.
He said that soon after he set out he developed a severe headache.
'I could not even stand on the ridge. I had extreme nausea and finally I fell.' He said he did not recall how far he fell.
'I was not injured but was in extreme shock,' he said.
'If I had fallen to the Nepalese side of the mountain I would have died. I am lucky to be alive.'
After recovering from the fall, Bourgeois said, he followed a glacier in which he dug holes at night to sleep in. He said he encountered nobody until he came upon a Tibetan village on New Year's day.
'They thought I was a snowman. I could not explain anything to them. I tried to tell them I came from Quomolongma,' the Tibetian word for Mount Everest.
On Jan. 4, Bourgeois met some Chinese who along with some policemen of the public security bureau of Tibet, which is part of China, drove him in a jeep for two days to a border settlement just across the border in Nepal. He said the Chinese Thursday gave bus fare to the Nepalese capital.
Bourgeois had been similarly lost and abandoned for dead in 1966 while climbing in the Hindu Kush mountains.
When asked if he thought Yasuo Kato, 33, lost last month after he became the first man to climb Mount Everest in winter, was alive, Bourgeouis said, 'He was higher. The weather was very bad that day in the afternoon.'
Kato, a bachelor from Omiyashi, Japan, is believed to have frozen to death, with another Japanese climber.
