when flour from a burnt chapati got up his nose, making him sneeze so violently that he prolapsed a disc. He had to wait 10 days in agony before being rescued and brought to Islamabad for treatment. He has been referred to as the "chapati man" (even by himself) from this incident. Hinkes has climbed eight-thousanders in many styles: expeditions (Cho Oyu, Manaslu, Nanga Parbat), two-man alpine (Makalu, Dhaulagiri) and alone (Gasherbrum I, Gasherbrum II), and permutations in between. He has climbed new lines (Shishapangma, Kangchenjunga, Annapurna), he has climbed as guide (Broad Peak), as camera man (Everest), and set speed records (Annapurna). He has climbed several on first attempt, others on third (Nanga Parbat) and fourth attempt (Makalu). He has climbed with well-known mountaineers, including several expeditions with Doug Scott and Chris Bonington. He describes himself as risk-averse ("I climb to live, not to die", "The summit is optional, getting down is mandatory"), who places value on understanding, and being in the right position, to capitalise on breaks in weather. His later climbs were mostly two-man climbs with experienced sherpas (Pasang Gelu), where Hinkes could stay in control of events and react quickly. He was not averse to leveraging the resources of bigger expeditions alongside. Unusually for a 20–year high-altitude Himalayan eight-thousander, he has never lost any fingers or toes (or "other bits" as he describes it), to frostbite. Over the years, Hinkes has had public fall-outs with other chasers of the 14 eight-thousanders. Australian climber Andrew Lock (who completed all 14 in 2009), was critical of Hinkes on their successful 1998 ascent of Nanga Parbat. Spanish climber Iñaki Ochoa de Olza, (who died on Annapurna of pulmonary edema, after completing 12 eight thousanders without oxygen), alleges that Hinkes had left him to bleed to death in order to summit K2, which Hinkes countered was factually untrue (Hinkes abandoned his first K2 climb, despite nearing the summit, to successfully rescue a stricken Swedish climber). Cho Oyu dispute His 30 April 1990 ascent of Cho Oyu, which he completed alone in low visibility, is disputed by some observers. Cho Oyu has a broadly flat summit plateau with no cairn (the traditional prayer flags on Cho Oyu's summit plateau do not mark the "technical" summit). The summit is a small unmarked "hump" (or "bump") (which many Cho Oyu YouTube summit videos miss). While the height differential of this hump is small,