Month: August 2015

GWEN’S LIVE UPDATE: I’ve heard from the team. ‘We are at the Moivaro Coffee Lodge. It’s fabulous – individual huts in amongst coffee and banana plants. Currently in the bar before dinner. Everything is packed for a 7.30am start tomorrow.’

JAE’S PRE-WRITTEN POST: So the big day is actually here. It’s today that we start climbing the biggest free-standing mountain in the world – Mount Kilimanjaro – after six months of wittering on about it!

The plan is that each day there will be a post which tells you, very briefly, what we’ve done the day before (courtesy of Exodus Travel’s trip notes). Where there is any signal at all I will try to text Litlun in Australia to tell her how we’re doing. If she recieves a text she will share its content with you in the next day’s post.

Litlun (Gwen Blake) has access to the blog and the Facebook page too – so send her a message on Facebook – www.facebook.com/3GKiliClimb if you have any useful info, or any questions.

I hope it all works while we’re away and you get daily updates.

Wish us luck, Jae (and Sheila and Oscar too) xxx

This is our 200th blog post – hoorah!

To celebrate we thought we’d share some little stats about the blog:

1/5 of Great Grandma’s ashes packed (and 1/5 scattered since this blog began)

1 mountain to climb

3 generations

3 (and a half) male bloggers

4 naked bloggers

7 days climbing to the summit

8 days on the mountain

9 drinking vessels packed

13 – Oscar’s age

14 cornrows in Jae’s hair

15 kg max each in our kit bags

16 countries we know the blog has been read in

22 total bloggers

43 – Jae’s age

68 – Sheila’s age

136 donations – thank you so, so much!

200 blog posts (who’d have thought it?!)

260 baby wipes packed

5,895 metres from sea level to the summit

11,681 pounds raised to date (that’s £14,371 once Gift Aid is added)

15,612 views of the blog pages and posts

76,534 total reach on Facebook since we began

And countless, “Oh wow, good luck”s along the way. We could never have got this far without all of you. Thank you so much Sheila, Jae & Oscar xxx

As Sheila, Jae and Oscar get ready to fly off later today for their adventure on the slopes of Kilmanjaro, I find I have been thinking of toilets a lot. As well as reading about them in Sheila’s blog posts, I seem to be seeing little articles in papers and magazines. Apparently almost forty per cent of people travelling on holiday worry about finding toilets en route and there – and even more then worry about the possible absence of loo paper. At least Sheila, Jae and Oscar know that there will be toilet tents on their holiday.

All this got me thinking about my various holidays; recently I saw some indoor toilets, with running water, amidst the ruins of Ancient Greece.   Some years earlier I had to chuckle at the chumminess of the communal, running water latrines in ancient Rome. I wonder how many deals were settled over a communal evacuation?

So I began to think that the availability of decent toilet facilities had to be an indicator of civilisation. In that case, Japan must be the most civilised country in the world with their amazing Toto toilets. They have little jets that can wash you back or front; some even have a jet of hot air to dry you. Think of it, going to the loo for a wash and blow dry! Beside each Toto there is a control panel with which you can set the temperature of the heated seat, chose the temperature and pressure of the various jets – some even play music to cover the rude noises one might make. My mind ran riot over the choice of music – ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’ or the ‘Trout Quintet’.

 

Then memories of China killed that theory. For centuries before their Revolution, China was a heavily structured and civilised society (if you can forget the conditions under which ordinary people lived). However their toilet arrangements were far from advanced. Rich and poor alike used chamber pots and the poor paid the rich for the privilege of collecting the contents each day to spread on their fields. Read Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize winning ‘The Good Earth’ in which Mrs Buck describes the indignity of a child walking round with a gradually filling up container of slops on their backs, with a piece of sacking tucked round the neck to try to stop things sloshing down their neck. Yes, I know, too much information! With that within human memory, maybe that explains why the Chinese are not squeamish about smelly toilets. I wonder what excuse the French, another very civilised country, has? And then the Chinese take sharing to extremes – like public ladies toilets with no doors – and squat toilets.

 

In Southern Africa, where so many poor people live in shanty towns without sanitation, the authorities have put in blocks of porta-loos such as we have at big outdoor events. I saw several blocks carefully painted, a letter on each cubicle, reading ‘dehumanising’. Our guide said that many of the residents were used to living in wide, open spaces where heat and insects rapidly recycled waste. It’s the same in India where, despite the authorities putting communal toilet blocks in the poorer areas of towns, people still prefer to keep up their old practice of ‘fertilising the soil’ – even if it is no more than going behind the bushes by the roadside.

But it doesn’t do to be smug about primitive toilet arrangements. Even closer to my home near Edinburgh, we weren’t that civilised. A couple of hundred years ago, Edinburgh was fondly called Auld Reekie. Reek means smelly, but chimneys also reek smoke. The twee people of Edinburgh (and there are plenty of those) still insist that Reekie was a reference to the smoke, while other know full well that it was the smell of waste in the streets. In the Old Town of Edinburgh, with its insanitary ancient buildings people were allowed to throw their waste into the streets for one hour each evening, after which a sweeper would clear the detritus for sale to farmers in the surrounding land. The residents were obliged to shout a warning to any person who may have chosen to walk the fragrant streets. This warning was “Gardyloo”, a corruption of the French ‘beware of water’ – and whatever else. These days are over, thank goodness. But the call lived on until the end of the twentieth century, if somewhat ironically. After Edinburgh modernised, they had sewage pipes with a fairly inadequate sewage treatment facility. The ‘treatment plant’ was on the edge of the Firth of Forth, into which the liquid waste was released. The sludge was another easily solved problem; a specially constructed ship, grandly named MV Gardyloo left each day with its cargo of sludge to deposit it in the North Sea.

A trip on the Gardyloo actually became a fairly popular tourist attraction – maybe not for the type of people who are flowing into Edinburgh for the International, Fringe and Book festivals at present. And the Chinese practice continued in rural parts of Scotland well into the twentieth century. An elderly friend remembers when he was about ten, his Grandmother was given, by her brother, a bag full of giant, prizewinning vegetables that had won all the prizes at the local show. Back home from the show Charlie was sent to put the vegetables in the dustbin – his grandmother’s explanation was that she knew where her brother emptied his chamber pot. Charlie chuckled as he said they would now be sold as ‘Organic’.

So what is ahead of the happy trio on the toilet front? One thing I was worried about was that, in keeping with the Kili principle of what goes up must come down, porters would carry the toilet contents uphill and down with the gang having to walk behind the ‘toilet’ porters; I remember how embarrassed our dogs used to be walking behind us as we gently (always gently) swung the little bag of poo. Sheila has reassured me that the ‘contents’ get buried.

And with that, what more can I do but to wish Sheila, Jae and Oscar a remarkable, memorable and enjoyable experience. Best wishes and love.

 

Sorry – just getting posts ready for Gwen to send while we’re away and published that one by mistake!

If you haven’t seen it yet check out this video of me getting cornrows today instead:

Jae’s boys – and indeed husband David – have pressured Jae for years to allow them to have a dog, and to date she has managed to resist the pressure. All the boys love dogs, but Jae is not convinced that they would show the commitment necessary to look after a dog properly, particularly in light of their involvement with their various football teams and the amount of time devoted to that sport.

However, it seems that Oscar may have a chance of meeting up with a four footed friend on Kilimanjaro. It seems that a rust-coloured dog has been seen on the mountain a few times in recent years.

A couple of years ago four climbers had a surprise waiting for them when they approached the top of the mountain, known as Uhuru Peak. Antoine Galloudec said that he needed to heed the call of nature and stepped off to the side of the trail. He was shocked to find the dog lying on a rock no more than a meter away. The group was careful not to disturb the adventurous pooch, choosing to instead snap a couple of photos using a mobile phone. When they later showed those photos to one of their guides, he told them that the same dog had been spotted at one of Kili’s lower camps ten years ago. Why the dog is still on the mountain, and how it has survived so long, remains a mystery.

High winds and cold temperatures are a common occurrence on Kilimanjaro, although it is the thin air that is usually the most difficult condition for people and animals, to adapt to. If this really is the same dog that was spotted on the mountain a decade ago, he has probably become quite acclimatised to life at altitude. Finding food is most likely a bigger challenge; there are plenty of small rodents, even high up, and perhaps the dog could find scraps left behind at some of the camps as well.

The sighting has baffled animal scientists who have questioned what motivated the dog to scale such heights and how he could have survived without a proper food source on the desert-like, stony plains of the volcanic mountain. One veterinary expert suggested that the dog might be rabid – one explanation for his mountaineering inclination – and warned other climbers to keep a safe distance.

The part of the mountain where the dog was found is so high that the temperatures usually remain below freezing and climbers are warned about the severe effects of altitude sickness.

It would be really exciting for Oscar and the other youngsters on the trip to meet up with a (hopefully, non-rabid) mountain dog. Jae and I had the pleasure of following a dog up Vesuvius earlier this year (see blog post 2^nd May) and my sister-in-law Mary (5^th July) describes being led on a walk by two beautiful dogs. It would be a real excitement for us all to meet up with such a hardy animal on the mountain – especially one who would take responsibility for consuming any rodents which might be in the vicinity! I really do not want to encounter any rats or mice in my tent.

 

Note from Jae: You’ll remember Ben & Alex’s lovely blog post last week. They are Sheila’s great nephews, and Louise is their mum. Today we have a contribution by their dad, Nigel – which now means their entire family has written for the blog. Thanks for the support Lou, Nigel, Ben and Alex!

A few months ago now there was a piece from Sheila about possible books (or E-readers!) to take with you up Kilimanjaro – which included a succinct plot summary of the Hollywood version of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and an allusion to Gregory Peck’s blue eyes and rugged jaw-line. The conclusion was there was no sense in taking heavy volumes to this remote and inhospitable place where what you carry needs to be reduced to the bare necessities of life (cue ‘Jungle Book’, also set in Africa?) And as for E-readers, well there would be no possibility of charging them so they can be discounted. In any case it could rightly be assumed that everyone would be far too knackered at the end of each day’s walk to consider doing anything other than having dinner, brushing one’s teeth and turning in for the night. Clearly a very sensible decision.

But stop a minute. Try taking a giant nano-technology leap forward. Imagine that each of you were taking with you up the mountain a featherlite 14th generation Kindle Extrema (Severe Sports model) with wire-less micro solar panel attached to your climbing hat. Imagine also that much of the rest of your gear is similarly scaled down in weight and dimensions by the now-taken-for-granted new materials from which they are made (knocked up by the portable 3D printer you left back at base camp). So you can look forward to skimming an hour off the old daily walking time as you skip up the mountain pursued by your porters ( I suspect life would still be hard graft for them….) Yes, you have time for a little after-dinner recreation, and for some an opportunity to catch up on your reading.

Let us therefore extrapolate a Desert Island Discs moment. Instead of having to choose eight records to listen to as a solitary castaway, what you have to do for this exercise is decide on just one book to download on to your micro e-reader – and maybe even share with the rest of the party? What’s it to be then? Radio 4 regulars will of course know that this is one of the final questions asked of the interviewee, but there’s nothing wrong with lifting someone else’s good idea.

The Bible (should you want it) and the complete works of Shakespeare are already on your wondrously tiny device. So what are you going to take? Me? Well, actually I’m a bit of a short story fan. I’ve been in a U3A Short Story reading group for the past 4 years, and I did write a few myself for an evening class in Leeds about 30 years ago. I also lead a Creative Writing group at the mental health recovery project in Crawley where I work four days a week. The astonishing facility of some of the group members to knock off some really accomplished stories or pieces of poetry in about 25 minutes never ceases to amaze me.

So what is it about anthologies of short stories by writers with something to say which butters my parsnips? Well, I guess it’s partly because the format by definition has a short structure so even someone like me who is a slow reader can finish it in one sitting, and maybe go back and read some of it again in order to work out what the author was trying to achieve. Or instead you could go out for a run and mull over some of the ideas thrown up by the writer. Actually I know someone in Horsham who runs with heavy metal on his iPod which he seems to find relaxing, but that’s another story….

So I’m going to suggest the book that my U3A group is currently working its way through (as some of you will know U3A groups are very systematic in these things) partly because I think it’s an excellent anthology of work in that format by some great writers, but mainly because I think it touches on many of the issues that Sheila and Leslie and some of the other contributors to this blog have identified over the last few months.

The book (should you wish to order it from your local library, or even get it from Amazon) is ‘A World of Difference’: an anthology of short stories from five continents edited by someone called Lynda Prescott. There are 15 stories so that future Kilimanjaro trekker would be hard put to finish them all by the time he or she gets back to base. However most of the stories are about 15 pages or less, and don’t forget your E-reader’s back-lit screen should allow you to read on into the small hours of the African night without disturbing your daughter/ grandson/ mum or any other member of the family who’s come along for the ride. Yes, I know it’s a walk but let’s not be pedantic about it…..

Each writer seems to have something that is interesting or profound (perhaps even funny /touching/ tragic) to say about the experiences of migration or uprooting or dislocation from a person’s homeland or cultural traditions, missing one’s home and then finding that what you thought was home has changed when you return after a long time away. One or two of the stories are I think more about how we as observers see differences in others, while failing to recognise the similarities that can draw us together if only we identify them, and water and nurture them.

And is there a story about Africa? Well actually there is just one. It’s called ‘The Ultimate Safari’ and it’s by Nadine Gordimer a white South African writer, brought up in the apartheid era, whose books and stories tried to deal with some of the complex issues thrown up by that hideous regime. She died in 2014 having won the Booker Prize in 1974 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

The Ultimate Safari is told in the voice of a nine year old girl who is orphaned by the violence that swept Mozambique in the 70s and 80s. She finds herself taken care of by her grandmother with whom she joins a small group of starving refugees who try to escape the conflict and likelihood of their own death by crossing over into South Africa. What they encounter in the nine pages of the story is the seemingly bountiful wild life (reference Jean Wilson’s recent contribution) to be found in the Kruger National Park as they seek some kind of safety. They see “elephants too big to need to run from anyone”. The girl says “I lay on my back and saw those ugly birds with hooked beaks and plucked necks flying round and round above us….. I saw our grandmother, who sat up all the time with my little brother on her lap, was seeing them too”.

Eventually they arrive at a refugee camp and are allowed to stay. The girl describes “ a very big tent, bigger than a church or a school, tied down to the ground….Inside, even when the sun is bright, it’s dark and there’s a kind of whole village in there. Instead of houses, each family has a little place closed off with sacks or cardboard from boxes … to show the other families it’s yours….”

According to her Wikipedia entry Nadine Gordimer believed that “ the short story is the form for our age, …. where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash …..”

So that’s it. If you haven’t already, you might want to give short stories like that one a go. Or if you want to load your gleaming little device with something a little lighter you couldn’t go far wrong with the Just William stories. He would have found himself quite at home on a trek for the duration of which he wasn’t expected to wash very much, or to be well behaved when his Aunt Agatha came round for afternoon tea.

Happy trekking (if not reading) to all involved in the expedition. This family greatly admires your spirit of adventure, the fantastic level of preparation (at least on Sheila’s part but no doubt by the other two as well!), and your determination to go through with it – and no doubt have many laughs on the way.

Jae, Oscar and I will be absolutely thrilled if we make it to the top of Kilimanjaro in the early hours of Thursday 27th August.  Just making it to the top would be a huge achievement for us.  However, it seems that for many people, that isn’t quite enough – they have to play a ball game on the mountain as well, despite the fact that just breathing can be a struggle for normal mortals. For example:

Golf

In March 2008, a golf addict from Northampton, lawyer Andrew Winfield teed off from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in an attempt to set a world record nearly six kilometers above sea level. The 50-year-old father trekked for seven days with his specially-adapted collapsible six iron, just for the chance to take the shot at the peak of the highest freestanding mountain on Earth.  Mr Winfield hit upon the idea after friends encouraged him to combine their planned mountain trek with his passion for golf.

After an arduous night-time ascent to the summit of the dormant volcano in sub-zero temperatures, he assembled his club, stripped off his heavy climbing gear and began warming up as the sun rose on the horizon.  “It was nerve-racking because I didn’t want to make a complete fool of myself by missing after carrying a golf club up Kilimanjaro for seven days,” said the Wellingborough Golf Club regular, who plays off a handicap of 5.5.  “But the shot was fantastic. I couldn’t believe how well it was struck. “It flew for about 160 or 170 yards into a beautiful azure sky and then plummeted a good quarter of a mile into a volcanic crater covered in snow and ice. “I could have hit 50 more balls and none of them would have been as good.” Even if Mr Winfield can lay claim to the highest ever golf shot on Earth, he has a long way to go to beat one golfing record which is completely out of this world.   In 1971, astronaut Alan Shepard smuggled his own six iron aboard Apollo 14 and struck two shots from the surface of the moon.

Cricket

In September 2014 a group of international cricketers set a new world record for the highest-ever match by playing at the top of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, in Tanzania.  The teams included former South Africa fast bowler Makhaya Ntini and ex-England spinner Ashley Giles.

The game was played at a height of 5,730m (18,799 ft) in a flat crater just below the summit. They played 10 overs each of a Twenty20 game before clouds stopped play. The air was freezing as the teams batted 10 overs each in the crater of the extinct volcano.  The previous record for the world’s highest game was 5,165m, played in the Himalayas at Everest base camp in Nepal in 2009.

Hockey

A Canadian group of business leaders climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in August 2013 and raised more than $350,000 in personal donations for the campaign “For All Canadians”, which is dedicated to building Canada’s new national public cord blood bank.

The group comprised 25 hockey enthusiasts who planned the world’s highest hockey game at Crater Camp, which is 18,810 feet above sea level. Six of the team members – those who had exhibited no signs of altitude sickness on the entire climb – spent the night in the crater. They were the only people in the world on that day sleeping at 18,700-ft (5,600-m). They played hockey to try and establish a world record for the highest hockey game played on earth.

Rugby

A team of 36 climbers will be tackling Kilimanjaro in October 2015 to raise funds for the Steve Prescott Foundation (SPF).  The climb is sponsored by Spectrum Group. They are challenging themselves to climb the mountain in just five days instead of the more usual nine – a plan which normally only has a 27% success rate. Each climber aims to raise at least £4000 for the three charities of the SPF, the Christie Hospital, Try Assist and the Oxford Transplant Foundation.

The climbing party includes rugby league legend Adrian Morley of Salford Red Devils, and retired legends Lee Briers, Barrie McDermott, Mike Wainwright, Neil Harmon, Gaz Carvell, Chico Jackson, Alan Hunte and Angela Powers from Sky Sports. Also climbing is Harry Potter actor Matt Lewis.

The climbers will make an attempt at the Guinness Book of Records World Record for the Highest Altitude Rugby League Match. This will take place at Kosovo Camp at 5760 metres. The 36 climbers will divide into two teams and play a full 80 minute game under Rugby League International Federation rules. This requires a fully affiliated RLIF referee so former International referee Steve Ganson has agreed to join the climb and will referee the game.

3GKiliClimb

Thank goodness that we just have to get up there to make a world record!  We would be so proud to be the first family ever, comprised of a Granny with a child and a grandchild to reach the top.  Given that two Granddads have already been up there with their 3G families, I feel I have a responsibility to women everywhere to do the same if we possibly can make it.

I have made up a bag marked “Games” to carry up the mountain – but it contains a couple of packs of cards and the instructions for proper Black Jack (not pontoon) which one of the clients at Catching Lives has been teaching me, as well as a Rubik’s cube, a Pointless travel game and a couple of other activities for a quiet moment.  There is no way I will be joining in any games involving a ball on that mountain; it will be interesting to see whether any of the teenagers on the trip are tempted, though.  Oscar is a very keen footie player: there is no mention on the internet of anyone ever playing a game of football on Kili …… yet!

Jae and I seem to be getting increasingly neurotic! With such a short time to go before the climb – we fly out on 19th August and start walking upwards on the following day – we are terrified of injuring ourselves and not being able to attempt the three generation challenge after all! Jae took up jogging late last year, and has run regularly at weekends since then, including the occasional fun run with her friends.

However, now she is frightened to run for fear of damaging herself, although she is still working every day on the 7-minute work out. She has felt the odd twinge in her Achilles tendon, and doesn’t want to make it worse. I note that the commonest Achilles’ injuries result from running, but the second highest cause on the list is wearing high heels – so she had better get her flatties out, if she wants to stay safe!

I have become afraid to get on my blue bicycle, for fear of falling off. I know so many people who have done serious damage to themselves in this way, that I don’t want to take the risk at this late date – so my bike is languishing in the shed now, until September, after the climb.

I got a wasp sting on my arm recently, and was alarmed to see it swell up over the following days, so took myself off to a local Minor Injuries Unit. I wouldn’t normally have bothered – that sort of thing usually sorts itself out – but I started to envisage a serious case of septicaemia developing part way up the mountain. The guy at the Unit said that it was borderline whether he prescribed antibiotics or not, so I whipped out one of the 3GKiliClimb cards Jae had printed for us to hand out, and straight away, he reached for the prescription pad. Problem sorted – the swelling reduced almost immediately I started to take them.

Oscar seems to be the only one of us pressing ahead with his serious physical preparation for Kili now. He is very determined to improve his six pack and is doing serious numbers of push ups every day, and has his brothers doing the same. He allowed me to feel his stomach the other day, and it feels like a board!

And of course, Oscar and his brothers are never seen anywhere without a ball. Games of football happen several times a day on the pitch behind their house, and when they are away from home too, as is evidenced by the photo of Oscar and Milo heading off to the park with their little cousin in Sydney at Christmas. Fingers crossed for accident-free football in the next few days!

As well as the reduction in risky exercise, there is another change in Jae’s and my behaviour recently. After having been very careful eaters in recent months – I have lost about two stone and Jae has lost one – we are starting to eat more now. The logic for this is that the more one eats and drinks (no – not alcohol!) during the actual climb of Kilimanjaro, the less likely one is to get altitude sickness. But we reckon that it is not possible to suddenly start eating more after months of self denial, so we are gradually increasing our food intake now in readiness. My friends in Canterbury don’t even pass the biscuits to me now, as they know I haven’t eaten anything like that for months – but suddenly it’s all change, and I am reaching for them!

I have got a few sweets to take with us, and some Dutch Stroopwafels for Oscar, which he loves, but was quite taken aback when I heard from Jae that she had weighed her supply of sweets, nuts, flapjacks etc to take up Kili as snacks – and that she had 5kg of them! Given that the total weight of clothes and equipment we are each allowed to take up the mountain is 15kg, this seems quite a lot. Clearly none of us will be without a snack between (the reputedly substantial) meals. One thing is quite certain, though: Jae’s bag will be a lot lighter coming down. I am quite sure the other climbers, as well as the guides and porters will be very happy to help Jae out with her sugar mountain, and will appreciate her generosity in bringing it!

Hope you enjoy this video interview. (PS Poor old Osc was falling asleep as the room was so warm!)

Do you remember the ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower? It is the “something extra” designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, to be a stunning feature of the Olympic Park and a lasting legacy of London’s hosting of the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. It is an amazing red tower, the UK’s tallest public sculpture, 114.5 metres high, swooping and swirling, and providing – on a good day – views of the London skyline up to 20 miles away. Despite extensive advertising it has not attracted as many visitors as expected, which reminds me a little of the Dome saga, of which more later.

Back in 2012, during the Paralympic Games, the Hopkins family zoomed up in the lift of the Orbit Tower and saw the whole bustling Olympic Park below. Maybe they even saw Sheila at the wheel of one of the posh new BMWs in which the official Olympic drivers chauffeured sportspeople to and fro.

Three years on, the plan is to rejuvenate the Orbit Tower. Tourists are to be tempted back to a tower transformed into the world’s longest helter skelter. The ride will loop around the steel tower seven times, making 13 twists before it ends in a 50 metre straight run. The ride is expected to last 40 seconds and users will reach speeds of up to 13 miles per hour. Will it attract the 3G Kili Climbers? After descending Mount Kilimanjaro it should be a piece of cake.

12 years before the Olympics, something even stranger than the Orbit Tower appeared in London; a structure that looked like a giant space ship parked next to the River Thames. This was the Millennium Dome, designed, as was the Orbit Tower, to be a focal point in the regeneration of a blighted area. The architect, Richard Rogers, deliberately gave it twelve yellow support towers, one for each month of the year, and a diameter of 365 metres, one metre for each day in a year (well, most years). The centre of the dome is 52 metres tall to represent the 52 weeks in each year. In a strange foreshadowing of what was to happen with the Orbit Tower, it was both criticised and praised, and it did not attract as many visitors as had been projected, leading to recurring financial problems.

There were public relations problems from the start. When a private opening party was held at the Dome on New Year’s Eve 1999 for the great and the good, there were problems with transport and weather. Worse still, when Auld Lang Syne was sung at the end of the evening, (which we saw on TV) the majority of the distinguished visitors crossed hands at the wrong time. Only the Queen got it right. For future reference, you start off holding hands with the person next to you, and only cross hands at the last verse when the lyrics say: “And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere / And gie’s a hand o’ thine!”. Fiere means friend, by the way.

After this underwhelming start, the Millennium Experience at the Dome, with probably far too many attractions and exhibits, was open to the public for the whole of 2000. I still have an original programme for it which came in very handy on the day of our visit. We planned our day carefully and had a simply wonderful time. I shall never forget the amazing circus, the mental flotation tank, (“escape the flurry of the Dome….filled with gentle sound, light, shapes and scents”) and the jewels. Ah the jewels! Priceless blue diamonds and the Millennium Star worth £200 million pounds, the object of an unsuccessful jewel heist later that year. The robbers had planned to escape with the jewels via the Thames in a speed boat but they were foiled by the Flying Squad, who had replaced the priceless jewels with fakes.

After that, almost everything was demolished, but today the dome still exists. It was rejuvenated and is now a key exterior feature of The O2, a state of the art arena, which Jae, Sheila and Katie climbed over a few years ago. So in the end the Dome was a success and let’s hope the Orbit Tower will be too.

The 3GKiliClimb team have recently tried out the altitude at the top of the London Eye. It is funny that we all thought it was going to be there just for a year, when it was erected in 2000, but 15 years later, it is still there, as it has proved to be such a success. I hope the three climbers look as happy at the top of Kilimanjaro as they do at the top of the Eye!

 

I found myself recently putting together four separate lots of packing on one day – but I am lucky that, unlike Jae, I don’t have much else to think about. Jae and family are moving house from Aylesbury to Folkestone this month, she has a full time job (with a three hour plus daily commute) to do and she is attending a family wedding in France, the weekend before leaving for Kilimanjaro – not to mention getting the daily blog out! Everything they possess has to be packed up, while keeping track of the necessary kit for both the wedding and the KiliClimb. Just as well husband David is there to ensure that the three boys are, as always, fed and well cared for, as well as to supervise the house move – which now looks like happening while we are actually on the mountain!

I have the luxury of being able to pack my clobber for the different trips in different rooms. Up in the top room, appropriately enough, is everything coming to Kilimanjaro. I have tried to label everything in the hope of being able to lay my hand on anything necessary quickly. If you are eagle eyed, you may be able to see a dark blue bag in the corner labelled “…gloves, gaiters, Grandma……”   “Grandma” is Stew’s mother, or at least some of her ashes. She was first mentioned in an early post called “Four Generations?”, and you may recall from Jae’s post “Ashes to Ashes” that we scattered some of her ashes off the top of Vesuvius in March this year. We had decided that as she loved a good view, that would be appropriate. So we are taking another pretty bag of Grandma’s ashes to sprinkle on top of Kilimanjaro – though Stew has very magnanimously said that if we forget in our exhaustion and excitement (as I nearly did at Vesuvius), that he is sure his Mum would be equally happy with the view, if we remember halfway down the mountain!

In the back bedroom is my packing for the wedding of my cousin’s son in France. Stew and I are going for six days, returning only the day before we leave for Kilimanjaro. A couple of people have asked if I am going straight from France to Africa. Well, the answer is NO! I might not always dress conventionally, but I cannot see how I could possibly wear the same kit to a posh wedding near the French Riviera, where the daytime temperature will be hovering around 30 degrees, as to climb the highest mountain in Africa, where the temperature is likely to be 20 degrees below freezing point at the top!

The reason why we are staying so long in France is because daughter Gwen from Australia is coming to France for the wedding too, and Stew and I want to spend as much time with her as we can. Gwen’s husband Ste came to the UK for a wedding on his own a few years ago, so this is Gwen’s turn to catch up with lots of family members in one fell swoop, as well as spend a few days with her friend Becky – friends since school and both 40 this summer.

So I am also packing a separate bag of things to take to France for Gwen. Last year Gwen ordered two massive picnic blankets in the UK to be delivered to me for sending on. However, when I weighed them, I realised that they would cost an arm and a leg to post, so they have loitered here since, apart from one outing for one picnic blanket to the park with friends. So one of the blankets is in the bag, as well as toys, clothes and some of Gwen’s old books for the children, and a couple of bottles of Ste’s much beloved Benenden Sauce.

My fourth lot of packing – in our bedroom – is for a quick trip up to London to meet up with old friends Anne and Len McGuire. Stew and Len became friends when they were about four years old and both their families were rehoused in brand new council houses outside Glasgow. Stew had a Co-op lorry and Len had an engine (or was it the other way round?) when they met up behind their houses for the first time. They have been firm friends ever since and were best men at each other’s weddings.

Len married Anne, who was at Glasgow University with us all – and she went on to become the Member of Parliament for Stirling from 1997 until she retired at the recent election. She was the Shadow Minister for Disabled People from 2011 till 2015, and was made a Dame of the British Empire earlier this year, partly because of the work she has done over the years in that connection. So our trip up to London is to say “Congratulations” to The Right Honourable Dame Anne McGuire DBE and to say “Hi” to Len!

So right now, all my possessions are tidily packed up in the correct places, I hope. In my Kili bag, I have tried to put in duplicates, if not triplicates of almost everything, because I know that if I was Jae, I would not have a chance of locating the right kit at the right time. But there is a bit of Wonder Woman in Jae – we all know that! I will not be at all surprised to find she has all her eggs in the right baskets, together with a wide smile on her face as usual, when we get on that plane for Africa!

Before I moved from Canterbury to Wiltshire, Sheila and I had job shared as secretarial assistants at a local firm of solicitors, Harman & Harman, in rather cramped little offices above the post office in St Dunstan’s. We were not to know then that this initiative would lead to our future careers, albeit in different branches of the law. Unbeknown to each other, we both enrolled on four year courses to qualify as Legal Executives. Sheila went on to become a family law solicitor. I took a different route, into corporate law and the world of software contracts, mergers and acquisitions, and intellectual property. This was a challenge of a different sort, as by then we both had full time jobs and young families. One year, we decided we needed an in-depth revision course, and we met in Oxford for a few days intensive study. For me, the highlight was bumping into Peter Cook, my comedy hero, in the Randolph Hotel, where we had sought solace from our studies one evening. (Any readers who need to refresh their knowledge of this comedy genius can do no better than watch this You Tube sketch).

Thankfully, over the years, we have never encountered Frog à la Pêche, or even Pêche à la Frog, but our various walks and expeditions up and down the land have frequently included memorable meals, the locations often researched beforehand by Stewart with suitably impressive results. Meals at the Michelin starred Sportsman, conveniently reached by walking along the sea wall from the caravan at Seasalter, live in my memory. Equally unforgettable was a trip to Margate on the bus (upstairs seats, of course, and hoorah for the bus pass) to visit the newly opened Turner Gallery – we had fish and chips on the sea wall so our day out cost the princely sum of £2.80 as I remember! And the best lobster I have even eaten, in a pub we came across while cycling in Sark. Food has figured large in our annual spring time walking holiday too – indeed the group’s mantra became “never knowingly underfed”. Packing the picnic lunch every morning after breakfast and deliberating over the home made cakes is always a highlight.

Food for free has remained an attraction – this colourful salad of leaves and wild flowers was part of our lunch when we did a foraging course a few years ago.

Sheila and I have never climbed any mountains together, but we have had many aquatic adventures … we have jumped off sailing boats into the clear blue waters of the Canary Islands, snorkelled on the coral reef at Eilat, floated in the Dead Sea with the obligatory copy of the Jerusalem Post, and covered ourselves in black mud at Ein Gedi.

Together with Jae and Gwen, we achieved our PADI open water diving certificates (much school girl hilarity in the class room sessions over the prohibition on touching any sandy bottoms was soon eclipsed for me by the utter terror of descending to the bottom of a flooded gravel pit near Maidstone, where the early swallows and house martins dipping over the water were no preparation for the old pallets and the supermarket trolley vaguely discernable through the murk at the bottom).

So, open to new experiences as I like to think I am, I know that intrepid is not an adjective anyone would apply to me! The same cannot be said of Sheila. I have been trying to find an inspirational quote to send her, Jae and Oscar on their way …   “stiffen the sinews” didn’t seem quite right (stiff sinews surely won’t help on such an endeavour), nor did “summon up the blood” (enough of bodily fluids already!), though Sheila is certainly standing “like a greyhound in the slips” after all her training.   So I will just send much love, positive thoughts and a mental image of them standing on the summit!

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!

Note from Jae: Well, we had our first male guest blogger earlier this week when Da shared his questionable photos of the 3GKiliClimbers doing a 7 Minute Workout. Quick on his heels comes a guest post from another male – Sheila’s great nephew Ben (Leslie’s grandson, and Lou’s son for those of you who have been reading the blog regularly). Better still, it includes a cameo by his twin brother Alex – so that’s three male contributers in less than a week. Thanks lads!

Me and my family have been climbing mountains for over six years. Though none have involved altitude sickness, overnight camping or sub-zero temperatures, we can relate to the incredible experiences of great views, challenges and just being high up! There is nothing like reaching a summit and looking back at the way you have come. For the 3G Kili Climbers, they will have come a long way. Not just the climb, but everything before, including the support from family and friends and of course the blogs. So before the Kili trio make many more Mountain Moments, here are two of mine and my brother’s.

Alex: Helvellyn
We had already climbed Swirral Edge. I’d felt a bit scared because of the sheer drops on either side and scary scrambling. We’d reached the summit of Helvellyn and I was ‘looking forward’ to the even scarier Striding Edge on the way back down! It was bitterly cold and horribly windy on the summit plateau; all in all, I wasn’t very happy! I decided to vent my frustration, verbally. I shall not repeat all of what I said but it was something like ‘Get me off this f*****g mountain!’ In my defence, it was so windy that no one would have heard my, erm, colourful language!

I went on to thoroughly enjoy Striding Edge and I can safely say that Helvellyn, in all its terrifyingly technical, seriously sweary and furiously freezing glory, is my favourite Mountain Moment!

Ben: Snowdon
As it is the tallest mountain in England and Wales, I was very excited to climb Snowdon. We were staying with the Chamois Mountaineering Club in Llaanberis (do not check spelling!). I don’t know what I was expecting of Snowdon but there was one thing I wasn’t prepared for … As we came round a corner after leaving half our party who were climbing Crib Gogh, a hair raising, craggy edge of rock (again, do not check spelling!), I was struck by the immensely beautiful view of a mountain lake and the summit towering above everything. After being interrupted by a rescue helicopter performing a daring rescue on a stricken climber, we reached the top. The view from up here was even better. It felt like the top of the world and I was on top of the world!

Another lovely swim in the sea with Canterbury U3A recently, although strangely, the water seemed to have become slightly colder – not what you expect at the end of July. Happily the jelly fish seem to have departed – could there be a connection with the water temperature?  An all-time record was set: twelve people turned up for the swim!  Our beach at Seasalter is normally pretty deserted apart from the odd dog walker, so we were quite a spectacle.

We sat chatting on the beach while we waited for the tail-end Charlies to arrive, and anyone listening in would have been pretty surprised at some of the conversations.  Margaret (fourth from the right) proudly told us that her nephew, Andrew Williams, has just won both Olympic Gold and Bronze Medals for swimming at the Special Olympics which took place in Los Angeles at the end of July.  He has been training hard and has effectively swum the distance from the UK to Los Angeles to raise money for the trip through sponsorship.  He can be justifiably proud of his achievement.

Mary, far right, told us about her impending trip to Mongolia.  No sedate holiday for Mary: it is a cycling trip, with Exodus Travels.  The trip lasts 17 days – including 11 days of cycling up to 47 miles each day – and involves wild camping as well as nights in Mongolian gers, which look a bit like yurts.  Exodus say they go through areas where the sight of visitors is still quite unusual.  If anyone can do it, Mary can!  She is a regular sight in the Canterbury area whizzing by on her bike.  I was amazed when she told us she used to travel to work in Ashford on her bike from her home near Canterbury – nearly 20 miles each way!  Most of us would need a lie down when they got there, not a day’s work, before cycling back again.

And of course, the conversation got round to the looming Kilimanjaro trip too: I wish I was half as fit as Mary is.

I doubt if any youngsters passing by would suspect for a moment that the conversation of the bunch of geriatrics sitting on the beach was ranging round the world in such a way: they would probably expect us to be discussing the next episode of Coronation Street or Eastenders!

We all went back to our caravan for a cuppa afterwards, where we sat outside putting the world to rights as usual.  Once everyone had gone, I was tidying away the Kiliman-JAR-o, into which the group puts the odd pound or two towards our charity fund raising, and was surprised to see a small white object through the glass.

I tipped everything out, and discovered a baby tooth in the jar: that certainly didn’t come from any member of U3A!  I can only suppose that it must have been put in the JAR by either Jae’s son Milo or his friend Charlie, who had spent the previous weekend in the caravan with Jae’s husband David.  Now how thoughtful is that?  We all know that baby teeth are a form of currency: after all, they turn into money overnight when left under your pillow – so by putting it in the jar instead, did the donor expect the tooth fairy to turn it into money for our charities?  In fact, it might be the most generous donation to date, relative to the donor’s total weekly income!

I had a look on line to try to establish what a baby tooth is worth these day.  When I was a child, I used to find a “wooden thrupenny bit” – 3d, worth slightly more than a modern 1p – under my pillow.  I think we probably put 10p or so under our children’s pillows.

 

I discovered a recent “Mail on Line” survey – not the most reliable source, perhaps – and found surprising differences in how much the tooth fairy leaves according to location.

Places where children receive the most money:

1. London £5.05
2. Cambridge £5.00
3. Cardiff £4.75
4. Liverpool £4.50
5. Manchester £4.35

Places where children receive the least money:

1. Hull 5p
2. Portsmouth 10p
3. York 10p
4. Nottingham 11p
5. Glasgow 11p

I can’t see any logic at all in these bizarrely differing amounts!  A full set of 20 gnashers is allegedly worth £101 in London, but only £1 in Hull!  Is there some sort of cultural explanation?

Anyway, however much it is worth, the 3GKiliClimb team are thrilled to have received this extra donation, and hope that it is a Cockney rather than a Hullensian tooth fairy who eventually rolls up to the caravan to make the pick-up from the Kiliman-JAR-o!