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Benedict Cumberbatch got lost in the Himalayas, and survived, Bear Grylls-style
Before he became Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch was just like any other lost kid, trying to find himself. So he decided to take a trip to the Himalaya and had an unbelievable, Bear Grylls-like adventure involving fever dreams, dysentery and yak droppings.
Before he became Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch was just like any other lost kid, trying to find himself. So he decided to take a trip to the Himalayas and had an unbelievable, Bear Grylls-like adventure involving fever dreams, dysentery and yak droppings.
In a new profile in Vanity Fair ahead of Cumberbatch’s big new superhero film Doctor Strange, he recounts the story of how, as a 19-year-old, he took a year off from his studies and got lost in the Himalayan mountains, literally.
After teaching monks English in Darjeeling and travelling across the Rajasthani desert, Cumberbatch and three of his friends took a bus to Kathmandu, a city where he would shoot Doctor Strange years later.
Immediately, altitude sickness struck. By the third day, Cumberbatch started having “really weird, f****d-up dreams, and felt things were happening in my sleep. I wasn’t sure if I was conscious or awake.”
What followed was days of drinking water squeezed out of moss, sleeping in abandoned barns and even more nightmares.They spent the night scared out of their wits that they were surrounded by wild animals.
The next day, they formed a plan: They would follow the river in the hope that it would lead them to civilisation. With leeches stuck to their ankles, they almost broke their necks slipping down boulders until they arrived at a village, miming the universal signal for hunger: Pointing to their mouths with their hands.
They then ate the ‘best-tasting meal they’d ever had—unwashed greens and a bowl of eggs’, after which Cumberbatch got dysentery.
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