Enlightenment at - 4°C

by Dominic Chadbon, 21 July 2009

I opened the door of my tent. My boots sat on snow and a thin mountain wind breathed icily down onto our camp. We'd had to abort our last 2 peaks the afternoon before: the weather was fine - sunny and windless - but time had caught up with us and we needed to set up camp before dark.

So here we were, crawling and yawning out of our tents at dawn after a frigid, bundled-up night, blinking in the dazzle of sun on snow and ice. Sipping steaming tea - with views over mountain ranges and empty deserts - we watched in silence as distant grey peaks blushed pink and then flamed orange.

Hard to believe we were less than 150km from Cape Town, the 2nd biggest city in South Africa.

I was on a mountain guide course in the bewitching Hex River Mountains near Ceres and learning the ropes - literally and metaphorically. It's been years since my heart pumped as much as it did on that clear blue Sunday morning belaying someone up a punched-in rock face, feeding out rope as they climbed.

Anthony - our affable and knowledgeable guide - adopted a deliberate low profile from the word go as we navigated our way from point to point through thick scratchy fynbos and, as we reached 1500 metres, metre-deep snow. He would however suddenly advance on us with a smile and throw a curve ball: the weather's turned foul, someone's lost, where exactly are you on the map - and we'd have to snap into Plan B.

It seems an empty wilderness up there - we saw little else but eagles and ravens - but it's the sort of place where it's not just the altitude that takes your breath away.

'Beautiful' always seems such a feeble overused word today but here you hear it murmured over and over again. It's so unspoilt up there that you drink water from source: delicious, ice-clear stuff that gets squeezed out of the rock and into clattering streams (you'll crinkle your nose at a glass of the municipal brew back home).

Not much time to admire the scenery though. We had to focus on our objectives and that means planning, briefing and doing. Mortgage and school fee worries quickly took a back seat; the clatter of a rescue helicopter alerted us to trouble nearby and sure enough we later found out that someone had had an accident in the skiing area and died.

You need to concentrate out here.

Then it struck me: so this is what us travel writers all go on about. 'Experiential' - it's the sensation that occurs when you've been cut off from the familiar and flung into another world.

There was no 'this is good, this is not so good, oh I like this' - it was a time of complete focus and attention on the environment and the tasks in hand - not in a negative sense (it's too exciting for that) - but in the sense that you're living an entirely different experience to that which you normally encounter.

All through the 3 days - whether it was compass work at night, plotting cliff-free descents or pitching a tent on snow with numb fingers and toes so cold I wanted to shriek (OK, I did) - nothing else ran through my mind other than the immediate situation and the, uhm, experience.

We dealt with slings and snakebites as we headed down to our cars, chattering all the way and reflecting on what Rob had said earlier: ' the 4 Rules of Mountaineering are: one, come back safe; two, come back friends; and 3, bag that peak. In that order.'

Well, we all swopped handshakes and email addresses as we packed up and we'd stood on 2 big peaks (though not all of our targeted ones - see Rule 1) so I guess we'd followed the first 3 rules well enough.

And the 4th Rule?

Find out for yourself on the mountains - it's quite an experience.

All images courtesy of irideafrica

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