Think about really remote places.
This is what the Andes looks like.
And this is where I like to be
Huh, what we're doing here is exploring mountaineering.
People think that that doesn’t even exist anymore.
My main goal is to climb all the 6000m peaks in the Andes,
huh, 104 of them.
And huh, right now I'll climb the next 12 peaks I have left in Argentina and Chile in one single push.
It might look crazy but the truth is you need the right equipment to speed up your journey and the right people.
And sure you need bad memory, that’s what makes a good mountaineer, so you’re not going to remember how much you suffered before so you just keep going ahead.
Well, let’s see what is waiting for me.
Ho Ho Ho ho
My name is Max Kausch, I was born in Argentina and raised in Brazil and I spent most of my adulthood in UK, actually.
Well, I climb since I'm fifteen years old, I started rock climbing and moved towards high mouintaineering when I was seventeen.
I climb for living. I started guiding when I was 23-24 years old,
I started climbing many mountains back in the Andes when I was around 27-28.
I'm now 35 and climbed 73 peaks out of about 6000. I'm on probably 200 mountains - high altitude mountains - about 5.500 so far.
Back in 2013, when I was climbing some of these peaks, someone told me I was the world-record holder on number of six-thousand peaks in the Andes.
Now I hope to climb the remaining 12 peaks in the Chilean, Argentinean Andes for the next two months.
Some of them are unknown and in completely remote places… It takes like 5 days just to get there.
It looks like I'm gonna be the first one to do it. It's not my motivation. All I wanna do is climb, really. And, um, well, it turns out I might be the first!
I didn't really know it was possible to climb so many mountains in one single push. It's extremely demanding, I mean, especially, like, psychologically.
When I climb in these mountains I feel very free.
I don't have to worry about the people.I don't have to worry about laws and rules and stuff that people have in cities. I feel really free up there.
My dream would be that more people follow this project in the future, that would be really nice to know.
So… we're gonna do in the old way, you know. Bringing all this cash. It's gonna last about 2 months, so…
Yeah, it's gonna be pretty epic. There are no banks, I mean, in the place where we're going there's one bank and it's probably 100k away from were we're staying, so...
It's very important.
The first time I thought about bringing the motorbike to the Andes was in 2012, when I didn't really know how to drive motorbikes.
It's the best way of approaching these peaks,
but I had to adapt quite a few things in the motorbike, I even put an oxygen cylinder on the side, and it goes straight into the air intake of the motorbike and it speeds up the engine.
So the idea is to approach them as high as I can with the motorbike, climb it, go back down and save time for the next one.
We’re departing from Brazil and then we're gonna start climbing in about a week from now
and the aclimatization process might take five days or six, probably.
Well, in the beginning it was just myself and the motorbike and now we have a team of people actually coming with me, we have Pedro,
which is a geographer that has been climbing with me for seventeen years. He's a very good driver and understands the terrain really well, a lot more than I do.
We have Suzie, she was my client and now she's coming as part of the team, she's a scientist, she also works for NASA
and has access to amazing resources that we need for this trip.
We have Jovani, he's a mechanic and a very good driver as well.
I'm gonna take my motorbike to at least five ou six mountains in this trip because I can go so high.
The other mountains, specially the southern ones… the approach is very hard to get, there are many rocks, too many narrow paths
which I have done, actually, with my motorbike, but I wanted to take it at least to six mountains in this next stretch.
So, um… We… spread the area. These next twelve peaks are in three different smaller areas. The northern Dry Andes, the Atacama Andes.
We got the San Juan Andes, this guy right here, we got the southern, Central Andes. These guys, they will require us to cross the Andes, have mules and everything.
And then, that is the hardest one, that is Mesa…
Mesa is pretty long.
Yeah, right now the Andes as well as the Himalayas are the last frontier in mountaineering.
There are many unknown peaks and many unknown, completely unknown areas in these regions.
Mainly because of access.
Some of these peaks are forbidden for many reasons. It could be because of landmines or political reasons.
But, mostly, in all of the areas we're going, people don't go there because it is so far and so remote to reach.
Man, I hate cities.
There's nothing here for me. All we need here is...
internet, and then to leave.
- No, no, no, no! And even that is difficult.
We just got robbed!
What?
He's joking.
Come on, man. This cannot be happening. Tell me...
It just happened. There's broken glass everywhere.
I didn’t realize what was happening, I just heard the noise of the glass being shattered.
Oh, man… The trip is over, you can't joke like that. You're not joking, right?
No, Maximo. A motorbike came… and two guys broke the car window and drove off. I didn't even see their faces.
They just took your backpack.
They robbed the whole ruck sack and all the money.
Call the police immediately! I can't think right now. I lost everything I have.
The guy just broke the glass and took the bag.
We never expect something like this to happen to us, until it does.
And it was everything! Simply all the money we had.
It was about 25 thousand dollars. Worth of stuff, it was quite a lot, eh?
When shit goes wrong, we have to focus on what we can see, so let's focus now on finding a hotel and fixing the car, eating, drinking…
Drinking a lot, hopefully. And figure out how we gonna get some cash back.
We need to leave as soon as possible and go to the mountains.
Let's go climbing. We can’t stay in the city, man. We have to leave.
We come to the city for bureaucracy only. It's always the same, cities slow us down.
We need to go to the mountains right now. Once we’re there, we'll be OK.
Well… after everything, Max just received a message from his father's neighbour and she said that maybe he will die tonight.
Like… he's suffering a cancer and he lives in the countryside of Argentina, and... very far away from him.
Besides everything, now he had this news, I cannot imagine what's passing in his head, what he's thinking.
This should be, maybe, the worst day in Maximo's life.
In a way, he knew it would happen someday. But not after a day like this... where someone steals you 25,000 US dollars.
The dream of an expedition. A work of many years. We're talking about 18 years. Almost 2 decades of work, dedication, love and passion. But it's your dad, man...
Let's go, man
Let's go for it.
Yeah, I don't even know what to think now...
I mean, there's no chance I'm gonna quit this trip.
It's my life's project and I wanna, I wanna have at least a chance of standing on the bottom of these mountains and try them.
So, yeah, that was the day, today. You know, things can be rough outside the mountains, you know.
But, when the chips are down you gotta focus on what's around you and just keep doing it, it's just like climbing.
- OK, so you’re going to do this at the bank... At the border. Can you do it at this bank?
- Yes, I can.
Yeah, but the thing is how to bring this money here.
This is a feudal country, right? It would be a lot easier to take money to Afghanistan