The Kili Instinct

“Kilimanjaro is a pretty tricky climb you know; most of it's up until you reach
the very, very top, and then it tends to slope away rather sharply.”

- Graham Chapman (1941-1989)

What is it with people and mountains? According to Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘he who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, whether real or imagined’. Fair enough. But is this really a rationale, or just a sign of high-altitude deliria? When asked why he wanted to climb Everest, George Mallory famously replied: ‘Because it’s there.’ Unfortunately for Mallory, so too would his corpse soon be. (Nietzsche, a keen mountaineer himself, would have probably found this hilarious.) ‘Apparently, more people have died climbing Kilimanjaro than Everest’, I tell my mother as she bids us (her husband and three children) farewell at the airport. This trip should be a laugh-fest.

In truth, the death rate on Kilimanjaro pales in comparison to the sheer number of climbers who set out to scale the mountain each year (some 25,000 in 2010). As big mountains go, ‘Kili’ is pretty user-friendly; there are several well-trodden routes, a host of trekking companies and comfortable campsites with hot running water and tea- and coffee-making facilities. And yet, at the best part of 6,000m, Africa’s highest peak is not to be laughed at (though Nietzsche probably would…). Though the climbing is non-technical - unless of course you’re one of porters (standard issue: two per person) balancing a week’s worth of food and fuel on your head – the success rate on the main routes is low, as little as 30% on the most popular approach. The cause is rarely physical exertion – the porters shoulder that burden - but rather the Russian roulette of altitude sickness, the symptoms of which are often described as being akin to the worst hangover imaginable. A sobering thought.

I’m fairly apprehensive, then, about my family’s chances of reaching Uhuru Peak. Though all of our party are in fairly good shape, that 30% success rate means that, statistically speaking, only one of us (or one and a bit – queue chortles from Nietzsche) will make it to the summit. “It’s the journey that’s important, not the destination”, we remind ourselves (30% in jest, 70% in justification).

And quite some journey it is. All the pre-trek chat about altitude sickness, sub-zero temperatures and blisters the size of sheep’s bladders had obscured the fact that this was, after all, a five-day hike through a spectacular national park. The mountain itself is a sky island, its various ecosystems having been severed from the mainland and cast adrift in a sea of cloud. Indeed, as one of the world’s tallest ‘true’ mountains, Kilimanjaro comprises five distinct ecological zones, each home to countless endemic and relict species of flora and fauna. So immense is this upturned ark that the migratory birds inhabiting its lower levels need only move a few kilometres up the mountain come change of season. Conversely, a creature at home on one part of the mountain may struggle to survive just a short distance up (as many a climber has discovered).

Our trek up Kilimanjaro follows the Marangu (a.k.a. Coca-Cola) route. (Why Coca-Cola? Because it is cheap and popular but should probably carry a health warning.) The five- or six-day climb traverses the eastern flank of the mountain, with each leg covering approximately 1,000 vertical metres and coinciding with a different ecological zone. Thus, we ascend first through the mountain’s forested skirt, its dark folds hemmed by silver streams and gleaming with floral sequins. At around 3,000 metres the trail unfurls across open moorland and the twin peaks, Uhuru and Mwenzi, make themselves known in the distance. On occasion, there appears on the horizon a great maelstrom of dust and clamour, which, as it rolls nearer, reveals itself to be the mountain rescue team: four men wheeling an improvised stretcher that looks like a door glued to unicycle. The first time we encounter this onrushing omen we’re understandably fretful, but we’re soon reassured by the good cheer of the stretcher-bearers, who sing and joke as they hurtle down the mountain with their unconscious quarry. (Clearly fans of a certain German philosopher…) Other returnees are slightly more vertical though often no less broken; ‘are they the ones that made it’, we wonder aloud, ‘or the ones that ruined themselves trying?’

Day three is an alpine desert, literally and mentally. Features on the trail, targeted as milestones, appear, like the charging knights in that Monty Python scene, perennially out of reach, while further still the mile-proud peak taunts us with its indifference. By the time one reaches Kibo Hut (4,730m), the prospect of tomorrow’s climb seems about as appetising as the cucumber soup we’re served at dinner, not least because tomorrow’s climb starts in just six hours, at 12 a.m. sharp. Between then and now, one is required to negotiate a string of ultra-banal tasks – eating, resting, visiting the little boy’s hut – which, on account of a lack of oxygen and an overabundance of underwear, are rendered epic undertakings in themselves. Thus, it is with a curious mix of abject fatigue and raw adrenalin that we set off through the midnight dark to begin our summit attempt.

Now this may hard to believe, but the six-and-a-half hours it took to reach Uhuru seemed to fly by. Needless to say, it was not in any way fun, but nor was it wholly unpleasant. My main sensation, in fact, was tedium, a pure, crystalline boredom that in time became so acute it induced a warm and fudgey hypnosis. For the entirety of the ascent, your sensory stimulation is limited to a) the feeling of listless plodding, b) the sound of heavy breathing and c) the sight (lit by head-torch) of the back of your guide’s boots. If you’re lucky, you might have d) the taste of impending vomit and e) the smell of dinner revisited (altitude plays havoc with one’s gas levels) to add to the equation, though these are but momentary distractions. The only real respite is the summit itself…

As the sun prizes open the firmament, we are greeted with a sight of untold majesty: ok, it’s still the back of our guide’s boots, but now the boots in question are rounding the crater rim, with ice fields to one side and the parched mouth of the volcano to the other. Shadows shorten, and in no time at all (well, another mind-numbing hour) we’re standing on the rooftop of Africa, surveying the continent, laughing at tragedies, queuing for a photo with the sign. And no sooner has the shutter clicked than we’re off again – this is no place for loitering – surfing down the mountain on a tide of scree. This is pretty much the story for the next two days. Our route down is the same as the one we took up, which means no new scenery but lots of fun to be had with those en route to the top. (The words ‘good luck’, we discover, uttered with a knowing smile, can fill people with both bonhomie and utter foreboding.) Gradually, life returns to the mountain, and with it civilisation. At this point, our interest in the latter extends no further than showers, beer and Internet, which we seek out (in this order) once back on flat land.

A week later, the clouds clear momentarily and the mountain graces us with a view from the plateau. A curious feeling consumes us, one probably common to all ‘real’ mountaineers; it’s nothing more profound than ‘I was there’, and strangely, there’s nothing more exhilarating.

Epilogue

In the spirit of broadcasting standards, I should point out that other Kili trekking routes are available. While Marangu is doubtless your best option if time and money are limited, most trekking companies would recommend one of the longer routes (Machame, say, or Lemosho), all of which promise a greater chance of reaching the summit. Moreover, unlike the Marangu, these other treks don’t jag back on themselves, which means a greater variety of scenery and far fewer mid-mountain traffic jams. While the latter do tend to dispel any sense of tranquillity that might be accrued on the climb, the Marangu route still offers some awesome scenery, great views and a decent range of trekking. If you’re after something much more than this, you’d be better off looking elsewhere.

Travel as Epic Adventure

In the last article, I set out the idea that travel can serve a quasi-religious function akin to a ritual or pilgrimage. This week, I want to look at our motivation in a different light. Rather than viewing travel as a kind of religious experience, it is, I contend, an epic adventure, a journey of discovery whose destination, as Henry Miller once suggested, ‘is never a place but a new way of looking at things’. Above all else, it affords us a new way of looking at each other, and at ourselves. More tellingly perhaps, it offers the chance to change what we see, to ‘find’ oneself and fashion it anew.

“We’d just made it to Camp 3, halfway up the Lhotse Face, when the storm set in. 24,000 ft., -20°C, and the snow’s coming in literally at right angles… I remember thinking: there’s a very real chance I’ll die here tonight! We just had to bunk down and hope for the best… The next morning the sky had cleared completely, and to see that sunrise – I’ve never felt anything like it…”

“The rooms were filthy, I mean really dirty: the sheets hadn’t been washed, the bathroom was a state, I was like ‘honestly!’ So we got the maid up but of course she doesn’t speak English. Anyway, the manager was ever so nice about it – we got upgraded to the Queen suite, proper VIP treatment! And the food was fantastic…”

Whatever one says about travel, whatever truths one tries to mine from its representative depths, it is most certainly, literally, an adventure. Be it two weeks in Malta or two years in Tibet (visa permitting), the act of travel presupposes the same encounter with the unknown that is at the heart of every adventurous undertaking. The term itself is suggestive: ‘adventure’ is derived from the Latin advenire, ‘to arrive, come about or befall’. As such, we might view the adventure as a series of unforeseen episodes that befall one, much as the gorgon befell Perseus or Gene Hackman befell the Poseidon. And as travel is more or less a matter of letting things befall one, of submitting to the new and unfamiliar in the pursuit of pleasure, it is, by definition, an adventure.

So what are these things we allow to befall us? Which novel events comprise the adventure? To name but a few of this endless assortment, there are different climates, different foods, different modes of dress. Often, the language too is unfamiliar, while elsewhere we may encounter disparate laws, singular customs, foreign fauna and strange currencies. More generally, travel rests on a series of oppositions or inversions in the fabric of everyday life. Thus, we swap cold weather for warmth, city living for country, fast living for slow, stress for calm and so on, perhaps vice versa. While the extent of these inversions may vary – not everyone swaps the rat race for an ashram or the Arctic for Arabia – they have in common the essence of adventure, namely, the substitution of novelty for normality.

Why, then, do we take pleasure in reversing our daily routines? For creatures of habit, as humans are, what is to be gained from abandoning the comfort of familiarity? Well, the first and most obvious explanation is that the highs justify the lows, which is to say that the unforeseeable pleasures equal or exceed the unforeseeable pains. So it is, then, that the sunrise trumps the blizzard, the food trumps the filth and so on. By extension, travel offers the possibility of discovering paradise, a place where pleasures don’t merely trump pain, they trivialise it. But travel isn’t simply the upshot of a cost-benefit analysis, its aim being to increase our net measure of pleasure. In fact, the epic adventure is less a quest for paradise than a quest for ourselves. Now this might sound like a clumsy cliché, and granted, it can be unwieldy. But there is truth to this truism, for in the course of the adventure, in the process of displacing our persons from their usual surrounds, we cannot help but arrive at a fuller conception of our characters. This is equally true of those who travel with us, be they friends, partners or family: change someone’s context, induce the unfamiliar, and you see what stuff they are made of. For the vast majority of people, this is arguably the ultimate appeal of travel: it is a means and a medium to know one another, an adventure to be shared. But what of those who prefer to go solo? Why the desire to ‘find’ oneself? And what does this actually mean?

At this point, things get a little messy. Traditionally, people have thought of the ‘self’ as something absolute, unchanging; we are born with a certain nature – good, bad, brave, dumb, etc. - and that’s the way we remain. Existentialism changed all this by arguing that the self had to be discovered in the course of existence (hence the name), only for postmodernism to shift the goalposts once again by asserting that the self was in fact an illusion. Now this might all seem pretty abstract, but these various ideas have had some very concrete effects. Existentialist concepts of freedom and choice, for example, were readily apparent in the counter-cultural movements of the ‘50s and ‘60s, which spawned the first era of self-seeking travellers. A generation and a half later, and we’re starting to see evidence of the postmodernist claim that the self exists only as a self-penned, self-conscious caricature; we do x, y and z not because we need or even want to, but because we want ourselves to appear like we do. Viewed this way, the desire to travel is inseparable from the desire to appear (i.e. look and feel) like a traveller, just as the need for adventure is synonymous with the need to appear adventurous. Travel, then, is a brand that helps to define one’s identity. Like the food we eat, the car we drive and the clothes we wear, it works to confer on us sense of our own individuality. Nevertheless, like any other product, it is subject to the market and the whims of consumerism, a theme that I’ll return to in the following article.