Basic Preoccupations
The Rwenzori Mountains are Uganda's answer to Tanzania's Kilimanjaro - mountains so high that they support a (albeit shrinking) glacier on the Equator. To early explorers the Rwenzori Mountains appeared so unearthly, that they called them "The Mountains of the Moon".
Despite the Western decadence of porters, cooks, and guides, life on the climb, was soon reduced to basic preoccupations: toilets, snoring and germs.
Toilets
It should be stressed at the outset that our hosts at Rwenzori Trekking Services literally left no stone unturned in their efforts to provide us with a safe and enjoyable adventure. Anything that could be done to improve our trip - they did it.
A typical latrine configuration involved a malodorous pit topped by a plank platform. Set into the platform was a hole about the size of a pocket paperback book (which incidentally was always worth bringing to such occasions, due to the sporadic toilet paper supply situation). People blessed with experience and strong core muscles, could squat, and simultaneously aim both streams through the narrow target zone. Normal people, i.e me, had to just collapse onto the rather slimy wood and aim their various streams as best they could.
However basic these arrangements may sound, they were positively luxurious compared to being caught short in the middle of a day's hiking. The Rwenzori Mountains are truly a pristine wilderness. In the circumstances, common ecological courtesy required that you use a little cigarette lighter to set fire to any toilet paper you may have used. Logically, you would only put yourself through this ordeal if you had dysentery, in which case it was not obvious to me, how the paper would ever catch fire. Put it this way, it was an experiment that I was not really ready to try. Hence Mainlining Imodium on the Mountains of the Moon. By the time I was finished, the Imodium had sucked any last drop of fluid out of my gut. Any food being consumed was headed for a one way cul de sac as tight and dry as any security vault. You won't find this survival strategy mentioned in any self respecting adventure handbook, but it worked for me.
The next problem was keeping your hands clean - we got through a lot of hand sanitizer. On a good day, you were provided with soap or water. This picture shows a red letter day...both soap and water.....
Snoring
Compared to camping, the huts we slept in were positively luxurious - although "luxury" in this context is very much a relative concept.
That shiny insulating material that you can see in the hut wall crackled and magnified the sound of any wind. When gales blew down from the glacier, it sounded like the hut was about to go airborne.
Space was at a premium. Unfortunately for J, a very fit 50 year old yoga instructress, she often seemed to end up in the bunk below mine. This was a double whammy, as she had to watch in dumbfounded amazement as I scattered my kit all over the floor around her bunk. Even worse, on my frequent nocturnal toilet journeys, I climbed in and out of the bunk with all the grace of a drunken walrus. Luckily she already had four kids of her own, so an extra one on the mountain, did not seem to faze her.
By some sort of karmic justice, the two speed demons on our trip (C, 34 years old, and P, 43 years old) also happened to be the worst snorers. It being very cold at night, we were in our sleeping bags for nearly twelve hours at a time. By the end, we were all quite the connoisseurs of our friends' every titanic grunt and whistle. It was not the volume that killed you, it was the irregularity. Trains rumbling over tracks, "clickety clack" can be quite soporific because of the predictable pattern of the clicks and clacks. Here it was the suspense that got to you. You knew the ground was about to shake, you just could not predict exactly when. C was so impressed with his peer's snoring, that he actually taped P, so that he could prove to his own girlfriend that he had serious competition in that department.
To be fair to P and C, they did once exile themselves to their own tent. This would have worked great, except that the tent was on a slope. Every so often they had to drag their sleeping bags back up to the top of the tent, before inevitably starting to roll down just as they started to fall asleep.
Germs
Ever since the SARS scare I have been right up there, when it comes to germs and shaking hands. In my last job, we often met with people from Toronto. Not wanting to contract some dread Ontario flu, I would - once the formal handshake round had been completed - slide off to the bathroom to wash my hands.
Given my mortal fear of mountain toilet arrangements, this caution nearly became an obsession on the trip. Between bogs and rocks, the terrain was "challenging". The guides soon figured out that I was the designated "weakest link" and needed a helping hand over many an obstacle. I felt like an eighty nine year old woman being helped into her seat on the Number 7 bus, except that it happened thousands of times a day. If I had received a dollar for every time I needed to say "thank you", I would be a rich man by now. Needless to say the porters' hygiene was impeccable and the turmoil was all in my own head.
Margherita Peak: if you cannot climb it, drink it
This rather weak pun, owes its provenance to a popular t-shirt in these parts:
At 5,100 metres Margherita (named by a pizza loving explorer, the Duke of Abruzzo) is the highest peak in the Rwenzoris and the third highest peak, after Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, in Africa.
As a climb it was never going to be easy, given the altitude and the ground to be covered on Summit Day. Unfortunately, the retreat of the glacier, has made a real challenge of Summit Day. Only two of our party (the aforementioned snorers) completed the ascent and descent in the 9 hours, that it was supposed to take. Others took up to 16 hours - in some cases having to be supported down the glacier by the ever professional guides.
None of this was a problem for me because the expedition's doctor (Dr Y, 43) diagnosed altitude sickness and sent me back down the mountain with a couple of porters on the day before Summit Day. In addition to feeling nauseous, I was panting like a steam engine at every step. Any pause in the walking, and I was leaning on my poles just to stay upright. I am eternally grateful to Dr Y, who put me out of my misery, while saving me from feeling like a wimp.
The guides told us that they often find themselves in a no-win situation: trying to keep their Type A clients happy, while hoping that their clients do not die from altitude sickness. On Kilimanjaro, where the stakes are higher, the results can be fatal. In 2012, the Toronto Sun published a travel article on Kilimanjaro, that does not sugar coat the dangers involved.
Latter Day and True Saints
I ran into two Latter-Day Saints (aka Mormons), Sean and Clark, on the flight from Nairobi to Zanzibar. I would have anticipated a couple of caricatures straight out of the Poisonwood Bible. In fact they were very urbane - well dressed, and looking like a couple of prosperous mining engineers. Whatever the religious differences between us, I had to admire their willingness to travel way, way, beyond my own comfort zone. They told me that, in a bid never to turn down hospitality, they consumed tainted food and drink, which led to parasites having to be removed back in Salt Lake City. I got lots of practical travel advice from them, such as the fact that it is great to travel with La Vache qui rit in your luggage, when visiting less developed parts of the world.
Just as I was having to ditch all my Mormon preconceptions, I asked them were there any grounds for optimism, when looking at the poverty on display on all sides in Africa. Sean replied with confidence that there were three grounds for optimism: first, the advances being made by the Mormon church; second, new technologies such as cell phone money transfers, which were obviating the need for traditional infrastructures, and third...well he couldn't quite remember the third thing....
So what were the top three things, I learned from my time on the trek?
1. Savour Home Comforts
If you are lucky to live in a place where the toilets work and you can wash your teeth with water from the tap - do not take these things for granted.
2. Cut the Clutter
Life is short - do not waste it worrying about physical or mental Clutter.
3. Copy the Saints of Rwenzori
The saints I am referring to are the guides, porters and cooks of Rwenzori Trekking Services. They found themselves in the paradoxical position of simultaneously being both powerful and powerless.
They were powerful because people like me could not begin to function without their help. Here is a picture of my porter Nelson. Nelson is 18, and as you can see, not particularly large.
As a junior porter, it fell to Nelson to carry jerry cans of water a fair distance from the stream to the camp. It also fell to him to carry my load. Organizing my pack was a challenge for me. Nelson was saddled with carrying my snorkelling gear up and down the mountain. More weighty, were the gallons of saline solution that were part of the group's first-aid kit. I rented a sleeping bag that did not compress and hence would not fit in my bag. He had to clutch it to his chest protecting it from the rain so that I did not have to sleep in a wet bag. My enormous pack was suspended from strapping slung around his forehead. Nelson's neck muscles must have been prodigious.
The guides were constantly confronted with the affluence of people who could afford to indulge a quixotic whim such as hiking in the Rwenzoris. By contrast, their own lives were extremely circumscribed economically. In the best case scenario, they got promoted to guide by the time they were 30, so that they could then afford to get married. Once married they could expect to continue guiding (assuming no accidents) until their early 40s, when either the glacier disappears, or their fitness gives out, whichever comes sooner.
People like me could not function without their help. They showed infinite patience helping me up and down every boulder, and across every stream. They had the skill to figure out in advance where I would need help and where I would not.
The famous British sense of humour could be clumsy at best, insensitive at worst - like when a client joked about having a lot of money, and remembering the guides, if they played their cards right, in his will.
As mentioned, they were in a no-win situation, balancing their clients' appetite for mountain glory, against their own desire to keep the clients alive. They risked falling down crevasses, to ensure their clients' survival. One of our guides suffered scald burns bringing up hot tea to a client, who was staggering down the glacier.
Notwithstanding all these totally legitimate grounds for grievance, I have never met people with less ego, or greater serenity - an example to us all.
P.S. At work in my Zanzibar office
