Shika Raju
Shika Raju sits in a quiet café on a bright winter’s morning in Sydney, her presence calm and gentle, the only sign of her recent superlative achievement and adventure a long piece of medical tape on her left cheek.
“I suffered frostbite while descending from the summit of Everest,” Shika casually explains.
Every word of that, as unbelievable as it sounds, is true. Not just that. Raju has been recorded as the first woman of Fijian origin to climb the world’s highest peak. She is still waiting on her ‘official’ certificate of climb from the Nepal government but her expeditions organiser, Adventure Consultants, has certified her achievement.
A quick check of the Himalayan Database (updated to December 2025), along with other reliable online records, confirms that Shika Raju, 46, made history on 21 May 2026 by becoming the first woman with Fijian roots to summit Mount Everest. Born in Fiji to parents of Indian descent, she lived there until migrating to Australia in the late 1980s.
As she effortlessly recounts, from memory, the timeline of her early April climbs between the mountain’s camps, you sense the quiet determination behind a goal years in the making.
It was tough. She experienced temporary loss of vision caused by the high altitude while climbing down the summit. At one point, she says, her sherpa Pasang Bhote and expedition leader and guide Rob Smith had to guide her in to Camp 4. Her vision returned the next day, and after minimal treatment at the local hospital after her descent, she was back in Australia in early June.
“Growing up as a Fijian child of parents with Indian heritage in Australia, I come from a combination of cultural influences,” says Shika. “At school, I was a non-sporty child who often hid in the school bathroom to avoid PE lessons.”
After university she took a job with the NSW government. She currently works for NSW Education Standards Authority, and is also in the process of getting her PhD in Applied Positive Psychology.
In 2013, Shika decided to run a marathon after a colleague inspired her. “I discovered I was good at endurance activity,” she says. “I have run over 25 marathons all over the world since then, but one of my most memorable ones was the Everest marathon I ran in 2019, a gruelling 42-km run that starts at the Everest Base Camp. That was my first taste of the Himalayas and there was no turning back from there. All I wanted to do from that point on was climb a mountain.”
She concentrated all her energies, her savings, her time and her focus on climbing Mt Everest one day, signing up with Rowan Smith from Summit Strength for a specialist training program, and backpacking every weekend in the Blue Mountains.
Of course, if you’re a climber, Everest isn’t the first mountain you climb. Some of Shika’s early summits included Mount Baker in the US and Mount Kinabalu in Borneo. She started climbing higher peaks 2022 onwards. She went up Mera Peak in Nepal, Aconcagua in Argentina, and Mt Chimborazo in Ecuador, among others.
During these expeditions, she faced injuries and even tragedies. Some of her team fell short and couldn’t summit, and she lost a bit of her finger to frostbite, but these setbacks didn’t deter her. She revisited the Himalayas to climb Ama Dablam (6812m) and Manaslu (8,163m), which are both technically difficult peaks to climb, but also have similar conditions as Mt Everest.
These climbs led up to her six-week expedition in April and May this year. Trekking to Base Camp a day after landing in Kathmandu on April 6, it wasn’t always smooth climbing. Inclement weather and whiteout greeted her team, there were local disputes that caused unnecessary delays to the climb itself, and there were moments where it got so difficult she wasn’t sure she could take another step.
But she did.
At 10am Nepal time on May 21 Shika Raju was standing on the summit of Mt Everest.
She took it all in for as long as she could stay up there, and then started the tough, strenuous descent to Camp 4.
“I had no emotions at the time,” she recalls, attributing some of it to the lack of oxygen and the altitude.
However, she acknowledges she felt an undeniable connection between her and the mountain, being a practising Hindu and thinking of the Himalayas as Lord Shiva’s abode.
Shika says she’s grateful that she could do what she set out to. “I always thought of the climb as incremental steps. I trusted the process.”
She is set climb Mt McKinley (Denali) in Alaska in 2027, and will train for the Ironman competition next.
If her journey so far is any indication, there’s little Shika Raju can’t achieve once she sets her mind to it.
Read Also: Diaries from Everest
