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The Himalayan trip was the first to Base Camp by a group of young UAE nationals.

In April, students from the Rashid School for Boys trekked to the foot of Mount Everest for charity. It's a journey they will never forget, they tell Damian Reilly.

Young Sheikh Rashid Butti Al Maktoum's eyes light up as he remembers the trip. "On the plane on the way there, I took the word impossible out of my vocabulary. I was going to do it. My aim was to get to Base Camp and nothing was going to stop me. So I took the word away, I had no use for it, and after that I never looked back."

Sheikh Rashid, who speaks with the engaging, clear-eyed enthusiasm of youth, is describing the trip he made with five of his friends to Mount Everest in April. The trip, organised by the Sheikh Rashid School for Boys, constituted the first to Base Camp by a group of young UAE nationals (16-17 years old), and was no small undertaking.

To talk about it, we're sitting in the plush surrounds of the school campus in Nad Al Sheba, but Sheikh Rashid seems easily to be able to transport himself back up the Himalayas through recollection: "I was the first one to summit at Kala Patthar (the highest point of the trip, just beneath Everest). I sat there for thirty minutes, waiting for my friends. Those thirty minutes were something amazing. I could see everything around me and beneath me. It was very beautiful. Above me, I could see the summit of Mount Everest."

That summit, by the way, is always clear of snow - it's so high, the jet streams into which it juts blast the snow away. From Sheikh Rashid's vantage point, itself 5,545m high, Everest's peak looms two vertical miles straight up.

The air at Kala Patthar, and indeed everywhere above 4,500m high, is astonishingly thin. Trekkers to Kala Patthar often talk of the difficulty of movement at that altitude. Fit they may be, but still they find themselves walking for thirty seconds before having to sit down for two minutes, in order to get their breath back.

And that is not to forget what has gone before: that to reach this point, trekkers have had to walk for seven hours a day, for about ten days, up and downhill over the torturously steep slopes of the Himalayan foothills. They will have wrestled with fatigue, sometimes food poisoning, altitude sickness and sleep deprivation. In the process, not only will they have learned a great deal about themselves, but also about the people with whom they are trekking.

On the trip with Sheikh Rashid were his friends Sheikh Maktoum Mohammed Al Maktoum, Eisa Al Hashimi, Hilal Al Hameeri, Mohammed Abdulla Al Mana and Rashid Al Mansoori, as well as six members of staff from the school.

It's hard to prepare for walking at altitude - in fact, nothing can really prepare you for it. All you can do is make yourself as fit as you can, and hope that your body doesn't react too adversely to being up high. Even guides from Katmandu, who do the trek to Base Camp often, can succumb to severe fatigue and altitude sickness.

Eisa Al Hashemi talks about the training the boys did before setting out: "We had two or three training sessions a week before we left. We walked around Nad Al Sheba with weighted back packs - weighted down with school books. Or we did circuit training. We were pretty fit by the time we left Dubai."

The only way to try to combat altitude sickness - a very debilitating condition the harbinger for which is an extremely nasty headache - is to stop at various points of altitude on the trip and remain there for 24 hours in the hope that your body acclimatises. However, this was not an option available to the students after poor weather meant they had to change the Himalayan airport into which they flew from Katmandu. Instead of Lukla, which is closer to Base Camp. They had to fly to Phaphlu.

Sheikh Rashid explains: "When we got to Nepal, we stayed for one night in Katmandu. Then we had to get up at 4am to get to the airport to get the first plane to Lukla. But we couldn't fly because the weather wasn't right. So we had to fly to Phaphlu, which added three more days walking. We should have got two days rest during the trip, but because of the change of airports, we had to walk them. It wasn't a problem though. We enjoyed the walking. But thank God I am fit!"

The boys were lucky, no one succumbed to altitude sickness on the trip except for one of the members of staff, who had consequently to retreat down the mountain and recover. Sheikh Mohammed also became quite ill, although fortunately he found a way to carry on.

"There came a point towards the top when I couldn't eat anything without vomiting, and so I became very tired and sleepy. I really felt like I couldn't walk anymore, but I didn't want to give up. I was holding up the people with me and we were a long way from the leaders of the group. I was sitting down and resting and I just didn't think I was going to get there. But I am so glad I did. Being at Base Camp of the world's highest mountain was the most incredible experience ever."

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