Give me Africa anytime - if you have one too many and fall out of your chair you'll be able to have a few more the following evening.

That's funny Anton.

They both have their own magic. Having said that, on the side of cliff would not be my choice for a sundowner unless you have a harness and safety strap secured. LOL

Huh, let me think.............

A friend of mine is a mountaineering guide who has guided on Everest. He told me a story once about a guy was trying to summit with a sherpa. The guide was watching via a spotting scope from one of the camps (I think IV) above the Khumbu ice fall. The weather started to turn and the sherpa told the client they had to turn around. The client refused, so the sherpa got my pal on the radio. He told the client he had to turn around, that he was ordering the sherpa off the mountain. The client said he was going to summit alone. The guide watched him go up and indeed he did summit. But on the way down he became disoriented and descended down the side and ended up on a cliff. He was too tired to climb back up and radioed for help.

My friend knew if he sent someone up to help, they would all die, so he never answered the call. The next morning the guy was still alive, but later on the clouds swirled around him and they never saw him again.

I climbed in the Himalayas with this guide in August of 2010. Originally we were going to climb in the Nubra valley, but on our third day a tremendous mud slide destroyed a significant part of the city of Leh, where we were staying. Hundreds died and the Khardungla pass was closed. We hung out for two weeks and then learned we could try finally get across the pass. We went into the Nubra valley but our guide said the rock and avalanche danger was too great, so we aborted that.

After we got back to Leh, we learned we could try and summit Stok Kangri, a mountain just over 20,000 feet.

We got up to about to base camp at 16,600 feet or so and this guide said the avalanche danger was too great. I thought he was being ultra conservative, but the next day a bunch of guys came into base camp all smashed up; one had a broken femur. We had a doctor in our group and he spent the day treating that group. They brought us over some beer and we did indeed have a few sundowners that night, even though drinking alchohol at 16,600 feet is a bad idea.

The next day we hung out went to bed early, and woke up at midnight to climb Stok Kangri minor. When we hit the glacier just shy of the summit we had too many inexperienced climbers who couldn't navigate on crampons, so that was the end of that. Two weeks later I traveled to the Yukon and shot a huge moose. The two trips could not have been more different, but each was special.

Mountaineering is not for the faint of heart or the old.