Bangladesh mountaineer Wasfia Nazreen returns home

Guess what Wasfia Nazreen wanted after she conquered seven of the world's daunting mountain peaks!

A proper Bengali meal.

On Monday, she returned home after climbing Carstensz Pyramid—the highest mountain peak in Oceania.

Family and friends received her at Dhaka’s Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport.

She is the only Bangladeshi mountaineer to have climbed seven of the tallest peaks in the world.

On the morning of Nov 18, Nazreen scaled the 4,884-metre Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia’s Papua Province, locally known as Puncak Jaya.

This marked the end of her seven summits that had started in 2011 on the 40th anniversary of Bangladesh’s independence.

She climbed the Mount Everest on May 26, 2012, the second woman from Bangladesh to do so. Before that, she had already conquered Africa’s Kilimanjaro and South America’s Aconcagua.

In other expeditions Wasfia made it to the top of Antarctica’s Vinson Massif, Europe’s Mount Elbrus and North America’s Denali.

Her seven-summit achievement ended with the climbing of the Carstensz Pyramid.

“I started the climbs after paying homage to the Liberation War martyrs.

"I have raised on all seven peaks our red-and-green flag given to me by the freedom fighters. This is an achievement for my dear country Bangladesh, it is not my achievement alone,” she told the media on Monday.

Nazreen, who was selected as one of the adventurers of 2014 by the National Geographic, said that her Papuan adventure was ‘way tougher’ than the previous six.

“This was the toughest of all the seven summits. I have been trying for the last three years to go there despite many hurdles,” she said.

Now she plans to start a girls’ school set in the outdoors where young women in Bangladesh can be encouraged to dream big and climb mountains on their own initiative.

"Apart from being very steep and treacherous, the trail in Carstensz Pyramid had other pitfalls too.

“The communities which live around the base camp patrol the area round the clock with bows, arrows, guns as well as machetes. We had to obtain permission from several places to make the journey. There’s no security for women there. The risks were very high.”

After a two-week trek of 220 kilometres, criss-crossing scores of villages, Nazreen and her team reached the base camp of Carstensz.

She also shared the experience of being held at a village while returning.

“An old man in a local village had died, for which the villagers held the mountaineering team responsible. The villagers believed that the old man had died because of the advent of foreigners.”

They managed to secure release by paying $4,000.

Nazreen said the journey made her feel sometimes like ‘Tarzan’ or ‘Indiana Jones’.

The adventure was great but she was glad to be home.