notes and images
I stand on top of the mountain, arms thrust high, holding my ice axe. All around me, far below, the world spreads out. Valleys, ridges, some of them obscured by cloud. I breathe the thin air as deep as I can.
And then I stop daydreaming, snap the laptop shut, and get ready for the office. All this visualising success, all this planning; I just want it to end so I can get to India and try to climb Stok Kangri.
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Summer 2014: Momentarily lost in the tiny village of Hemis Shupachan, I turned down a stone alley and bumped into an old local. He greeted me warmly and asked where I was from.
“Australia? Which city? Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra?”
“Wow, you know your cities. Have you been to Australia?”
“No! But Ricky Ponting is my friend!”
Tall green trees wave in the wind, blue sky behind them. The call to prayer rises, wafts in through the open window, alluring and mysterious. We lie on the bed, staring out that window, listening to the singing float on that cool wind. Later, as the sun sets over a huge white Buddhist stupa, we sip a fresh lime soda and stare at the Kangri Range. Stok Kangri’s summit, a grey wedge of rock streaked with snow, reaches up 6,137 meters above the range. It catches the last of the yellow evening light. We are in Leh, a mountain town in northern India, and after just one day we already love it. A happy, peaceful mix of local Ladakhis, Tibetan Buddhists, Kashmiri Muslims and a sprinkling Indians from down south, this place seems to us to show that people can just get along. It’s stark but beautiful, its people practical, hardy, but above all peaceful, friendly and refreshingly warm.
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If you like hiking and you have a child, well, the good news is you can keep hiking. I did a lot of research online before our kid arrived about the best heavy duty child carrier. I wanted something that could conceivably support an overnight camping hike. The Osprey Poco gets a lot of love online, and deservedly so.
This thing transformed my life, because it showed me you can take your kid anywhere.
Once, a mighty tiger roamed the mountains of ancient China. He ruled the steep cliffs with impunity. But along came a hunter, as mighty in the world as the tiger was in the wild. Slowly and carefully, quietly and expertly, the hunter stalked the tiger. Through forest and clearing, up mountains and down, until late one night, above the river, the tiger was cornered. A huge cliff behind him, and the powerful, deep, ice cold waters of the river below. The hunter drew his arrow, the bowstring stretched back ready for the killer shot. All was quiet. Savouring the moment, taking quiet satisfaction in his expertise, the hunter loosed the arrow.
Our directions were less helpful than a pirate’s treasure map – we didn’t even have an “X” to mark the spot. Just the name of a village deep in the Qinghai plateau: Xiadawu. Near there, so these clues suggested, we could find our way to one of the holy mountains, sacred to Tibetan Buddhists: A’nye Maqen. In all, I’d found two sentences on the internet, and they were a few years old. Not much to go on. But in one of my favourite novels, Professor Lidenbrock had made a Journey to the Center of the Earth with nothing more than a centuries old scrap of paper reading:
Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jokul of Snæffels, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the earth; which I have done: Arne Saknussemm.
If a fictional Professor could do that, surely we could reach A’nye Maqen?
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The wind only howls when you’re inside. Something about the pipes and cavities in a building seems to cause the eerie wail that changes pitch like a theremin in a fifties sci-fi classic. Outside, at nearly 4,000 meters, above a glacier and far from the nearest building, the wind just roars. It’s less like a vintage cinema score and more like standing behind a jet airliner at the end of a runway; a relentless loud roar that varies only in how hard it buffets you as you balance – or try to – on a path made of loose boulders on a twenty degree slope. That’s all I was aware of, that and the fiercely bright blue sky, as I made my way up the shoulder of Malchin Peak, a 4,050 meter high pile of grey boulders above the Potani Glacier in the far west of Mongolia. The altitude didn’t bother me; the boulders didn’t bother me. But that roar was so loud it seemed to consume the very oxygen around. The summit seemed so close, the visual definition crystal clear in the frighteningly bright and blinding sun. But I knew I wasn’t going to reach it. That roaring wind literally blew it from my grasp.
↑ Glacier Yoga, 5,600 m above sea level
Edmund Hillary once said “Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it”. That very much sums up our approach to Huayna Potosi, a popular peak just north of La Paz.
Sir Ed, a remarkably likeable guy, it seems, also said: “You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things – to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated.” This is certainly true of Huayna Potosi, known by some as the “easiest six-thousander in the world”. We’d even heard one woman, blissful in her ignorance, tell us Potosi was easy because “there are no clouds above 4,000”.
But as we battled a fairly convincing snowstorm before dawn at 5,750 meters – just a shade above the mythical “zone of no clouds” – we thought that perhaps Potosi wasn’t as easy as the “been-there-done-that” guys on the backpacker trail liked to make out.
Turns out you can do pretty much anything with a toddler. Sure, it can be tiring. Yes, it’s sometimes daunting. And true, the idea of brunch every Sunday can often seem more appealing in the short term than planning and doing an eight day camping trip in a remote place far from any services. But, really, all you need to do is get out your door. That’s always the hardest part. And like many things that are hard, this trip was correspondingly memorable, and so rewarding. To see our child in the wilderness, playing happily with new friends just met, with only the unspoken language of childhood in common; to lay a foundation in her subconscious for a lifelong love of the outdoors; this alone made it worthwhile. The incredible trip we had while doing that was just a bonus.
Lonely, windswept, and stunningly beautiful western Mongolia. To think such a place even exists on today’s Earth…
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