Mountaineering legend rebuilding villages in Pakistan

He has scaled Mt Everest without bottled oxygen, crossed Antarctica and travelled solo across the Gobi desert. Now controversial Italian climber Reinhold Messner, called the most famous mountaineer alive, wants to rebuild two villages of Pakistan devastated by an earthquake.

The 60-year-old, who has climbed all the 14 mountain peaks in the world towering above 8,000 metres but now finds mountaineering too crowded, commercial and simplified for his liking, feels it is time to undertake something other than adventures.

“Man was not made to adventures all his life,” he says forcefully. “As we grow older, there are different possibilities and different responsibilities.” Messner’s own life is probably the best example of that.

Once known as a driven adventurer who pushed himself into crossing the limits of human endurance, in an unusual move five years ago he chose to become a member of the European Union Parliament as a representative of Italy’s green party, the Verdi.

Though it did not make the maverick mountaineer a conformist, his term was remarkably free from controversies, unlike his mountaineering career, during which he has been accused of stealing the wife of a fellow climber, “climbing over the bodies of his companions”, and leaving his younger brother to die on the slope of Nanga Parbat in Pakistan…