Meet Hong Kong’s intrepid, upwardly mobile ‘Everesters’

Thanks to one man’s adventurous imagination and love of cycling, there is now another way to climb Everest: by bike.

“Everesting” is as the title implies: cycling up and down a mountain until you have accumulated 8,848 metres of elevation, the height of the world’s tallest mountain.

The rules are fiendishly simple: one mountain, one ride up and down – fully, no half attempts allowed – on the same patch of road. And the old Confucius saying rings true: “It doesn’t matter how slow you go, so long as you do not stop.”

It is the brainchild of Andy van Bergen, a self-proclaimed “sucker for adventure stories”, who wanted to triumph like the mountaineers of his childhood dreams – and preferably via his favourite mode of transport, cycling. “I loved the idea of a challenge which sounded impossible, something you couldn’t just turn up and do, but you had to work towards,” says the 36-year-old Australian.

Van Bergen was inspired by George Mallory’s pioneering “Everesting” endeavour in 1994 – eight “laps” of a 1,069-metre hill in Victoria in honour of his grandfather, the famous mountaineer of the same name. In early 2014, he set off with a group of diehard mates to replicate the same feat. Out of the 65 who set off, only 40 made it.

The idea has since evolved into a globally recognised symbol of “badassery” among the cycling community. There have been 1,200 successful attempts in 45 countries, with 35 successes in 11 Asian countries.