At Everest Base Camp at age 4: Zara’s story

From the voice of her father David, here is the full story of the little girl who along with her little brother Saša (7) reached the legendary base camp at the record age of 4.

In the pages of this magazine you often read about extreme feats, more or less spectacular, more or less dangerous.
Reaching Everest base camp certainly isn’t a feat, unless you’re four years old, like Zara, the protagonist of this bizarre story that has caught the media’s attention because of the “record” linked to the little girl’s tiny age, but which actually has more than one implication.

Parenting is certainly a difficult job, and in these times it is probably even more so.With this interview, we simply wanted to try to understand what the path was that led such a small child to walk for days in temperatures well below freezing and at an altitude where oxygen is scarce.
Meeting Zara, her brother Saša (which is short for Alexander) and their father via Zoom: They returned from Nepal to Malaysia, where they have been living for the past few years because of a choice David calls “political. “We are originally from the Czech Republic, but we didn’t like living in Europe anymore because we don’t see ourselves in the way politics organizes life.
Maybe it’s good for business, but not for people like us, who are not profit-oriented, but are content to carry on small businesses.
That’s why we decided to move to Asia: we don’t want to live the life of an employee, and here there is no socialism that matters, you can carry on your business without being crushed by taxes like in Europe, here we feel free.
We consider ourselves to all intents and purposes refugees against socialism.”

What passport do you have?

European, like Saša.
Zara, on the other hand, was born in Canada, but again for a political reason: we no longer trust Europe and wanted to give her the passport of a country in whose policies we believe more.
It is not our intention to go and live in Canada, but we want to reserve for our daughter, and for ourselves, the possibility of doing so in case we have problems here.
Europe is no longer an option.

The idea then is to raise Saša and Zara in Malaysia….

We are raising our children as evolutionary logic would have it, not as civilized society would have us do.
Another of the things that we no longer share with Europe is the way of raising children.
In our opinion, the best way to educate a human being for life is the way that indigenous tribes use, even today, especially in terms of respecting nature and relating to it, which includes knowing how to survive in any situation.
Western society today does not teach its children any of this.
We, for example, make them walk for two hours in the jungle every day, otherwise how do they develop the muscles they need?
What we do basically is simple: we follow the teachings of indigenous tribes, even if we don’t understand everything perfectly, we try to follow what they do as much as possible.

What was the path that led you to choose this educational method?

My partner is a teacher, and when we started planning a family I was already 44 years old.
She wanted children, but I could not see a way to raise them in today’s society according to my beliefs.
I had to overcome her resistance.
Initially she would have wanted to set up our parenting in a much more protective way, but then I was able to convince her and succeeded in shifting her Western mindset to a more natural and ancestral one.

All right, let us now come to the path that led you to reach Everest base camp together with Zara….

Contrary to what people may think, we did not have it in our minds to conquer who knows what record.
It all happened very naturally and is somehow a result of how we are raising our kids.
We are not training them for the Olympics or for anything specific, we simply want them to be prepared for life.
However, this causes their “level” to be higher than that of boys their age growing up in Western societies.
We do what we do to get their bodies developed, but also to train their mental condition.
Then when it comes to choosing vacations we try to take them to places that can be at their level, in September for example we went cycling in Jordan for 2000km.

And how did Everest come out?

It was Saša’s wish; he was very attracted to the idea of going to the Himalayan range.
To accommodate him, we joined friends in Kathmandu: we knew that he would be able to climb up to Everest Base Camp, after he had reached Annapurna Base Camp last year, but we did not know that Zara was already so powerful as well.
The thing we didn’t expect was her resistance to cold, after all, she grew up in a tropical area, it’s never cold here.
Anyway, when we arrived we decided to start with a little trekking, after which we reached Lukla, where most people land to get to Everest base camp if they don’t have time, and the funny thing is that we, although we started from farther away, at one point mingled with these people and Zara overtook them all.
This made us realize that we could reach base camp without any problems.
From Lukla we then arrived at Namche Bazar and from there we went further, slowly, giving us a chance to acclimatize as much to the cold as to the altitude.
We constantly measured Zara’s blood oxygen level and it was always over 90, the same for Saša.
In total it took us 18 days: many people arrive from Europe with very little time to spare and do not give themselves enough time, but once this is handled the route to base camp does not present much difficulty.

Why is a 7-year-old boy obsessed with the Himalayas?

In his short life he has already been to more than 50 countries.
We have also done a lot of trekking in the Dolomites, he really likes hiking and has reached more than one peak over 2000 meters, but he loves mountains in general.
We have also taken him to Alaska and Iceland.
Our children are stronger but, by virtue of the way we have raised them, they are also further along mentally.
I can understand that it sounds strange, but when you think about it in Europe, and I can imagine that it happens in Italy as well, many parents push quite a bit on their children’s sports activities, pushing them to be competitive and to train a lot.
We don’t want any of this for them, but just prepare them for life without a specific goal to achieve, our goal is to give them a strong body and an equally strong mind.

Are you planning any more extreme vacations?

I wouldn’t call them extreme, but in any case Zara has asked us on the next trip to reach Annapurna base camp, which is lower than Everest, so I don’t think he will have any problems.

She is quite acculturated about what concerns mountains….

A lot, and she is also good at handling applications.
She has the level that a child in Italy reaches around six, seven years old.
She speaks three languages.