I was cycling back home from our caravan in Seasalter the other day – part of my Kili training regime – and thinking as I went how lucky Jae was to have had such a great time taking these wonderful photographs in Kenya, which also had the advantage of giving her a bit of an introduction to living at altitude. All experienced people I have talked to say there is nothing so good as spending a few days at a higher altitude to prepare you for the big climb. Jae was on the Maasai Mara Reserve in Kenya, which is higher than the highest mountain in Britain – Ben Nevis.
I then thought, well, Stew and I visited Yosemite in California in 1994 – and that was pretty high surely? I was alright then, wasn’t I? And then, as I cycled along, I remembered that I hadn’t been! Before we got to Yosemite, we had stayed for some days with friends who were temporarily resident at Berkeley. During that time we had done as they did, and that included drinking quite large quantities of strong coffee. By the time we were leaving them, I was starting to feel quite odd with the unaccustomed amount of coffee and decided not to drink any for a while. The result of stopping drinking coffee so suddenly, after having overdosed on it, was that I had a mother and father of a headache for the three days at Yosemite, where we stayed in a hotel in the Valley. I decided then not to start drinking coffee again: if the withdrawal symptoms were so severe, surely my body was telling me something? I have not drunk coffee therefore, for the last twenty years.
As I cycled through Whitstable, it suddenly occurred to me that a splitting headache can also be one of the symptoms of altitude sickness! Could it be that the headache had been because I was at a high altitude, and nothing to do with coffee at all? That was really a scary thought! So as soon as I got home I dashed to my computer to work out some relevant altitudes.
Altitudes
Maasai Mara Reserve, Kenya – 1500 to 2180 metres
Ben Nevis – 1344 metres
Yosemite Valley – 1200 metres
Dove Lake Walk – Cradle Mountain, Tasmania – 934 metres
Denver – 1610 metres
Loveland Pass, Colorado – Continental Divide – 3655 metres
Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad Train – Silverton 2836 metres Kilimanjaro – 5895 metres
Jae has been to the Maasai Mara recently; neither of us have been up Ben Nevis, but I was interested to know about it – and I have been to the other places on the list, save for Kili. I thought that if I looked at the high places I had been to, it might be possible to establish whether or not I am a total wuss and could have had altitude sickness in the Yosemite Valley.
Oscar and I visited our dear friends Jo and Phil in Tasmania, when Oscar was nine, and I thought we had been quite high when we did the most beautiful walk round Dove Lake, just below Cradle Mountain. Not so – we were not even 1000 metres high, it seems.
Two years ago, Stew and I did his dream trip: we went east to west across the United States by train, so I looked at a few of the places we had been to then and how high they had been. Geronimo! The places we had visited in Colorado had been higher than the Yosemite Valley and I had been absolutely fine and enjoyed every minute of the trip. We stayed in Denver for a couple of nights – the mile high city – much higher than Yosemite and went from there up to the Continental Divide, with no ill effects.
Our train was delayed somewhere between Silverton and Durango and we all spilled out on the track for several hours, while they rebuilt the train track after a rock fall, and I was in heaven. What I beautiful place for a breakdown, I thought, compared to the poor souls sitting in the London Tube.
So the results of my research are that probably I did the right thing in stopping drinking coffee, and that I am not overly prone to altitude sickness. And I am reassured by the trip notes I have been provided with by Exodus Travels. They include a nice chart which clearly shows that we will have lots of time to get acclimatised to the higher altitudes – the first five days are taken relatively gently. What is really frightening are days six and seven when we are expected to climb up almost twice as high as any of us have ever been before: who knows how that will pan out? But we only have a couple of weeks now before we’ll find out!
