Author: 3GKiliClimbers

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!

Before Paula’s thought provoking guest blog on her life in Africa, I had started to do a guest post about my tourist view during a ‘Safari Lite’ of four different countries in Southern Africa.   Paula’s experiences made me feel so inadequate I shelved the project.  People like Paula and Sheila make me feel quite humble by the amount of energy they put into helping others in need while I spend great chunks of my life travelling for my own pleasure.  And then I thought back to the key themes about which I had planned to write – education and opportunity.

During our travels in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, we encountered many people who looked after us in hotels,  Safari Lodges, or in the various shops where we bought colourful and beautifully crafted souvenirs.  Almost without exception they were all delightful, friendly and talkative people, keen to ask about our life and also to tell us of their hopes and aspirations.  They admitted that they were desperately trying to improve their English as that was a requirement for just about all the better paying jobs.  I found it really heartening how anxious people were to get on, at the same time, especially in Zimbabwe where unemployment is 80%. I was saddened by the thought that ‘getting on’ would mean most of them leaving their homes and families.

Our safari guides, drivers and trackers were especially enthusiastic about the opportunities ‘Safari Tourism’ has given them.  Just as Exodus Travels train their porters and guides for the Kilimanjaro climb, good safari companies or reserves also train their people.  One of our guides told us how outwith the Safari season, he is sent to school where he learns about nature conservancy and how to protect the animals on his patch.  His ambition was to go to work in a special reserve for rhinoceros – an animal rapidly heading for extinction in Southern Africa.  The breed has been hunted more of less to extinction in Asia, where there is still the ridiculous idea that rhino horn restores potency.  Our guide laughed when he said that the Asian men would be as well collecting their nail clippings.  Ugh!

Another senior guide was busy studying for exams that would let him become a wildlife instructor and possibly lead to research projects.  A driver, who was already a trained guide, was working as a driver simply to improve his English and driving skills; his ambition was to form his own safari company.  He was engaged to a girl who cooked for a safari lodge, with a younger sister a housekeeper there.  They, with help from their families, were building their own lodge that his wife-to-be and sister in law would run to western standards.  All that was needed to make their dream a reality was another season of driving to provide enough money to buy their own Toyota “animal viewer”.   I think Leslie (17 July) would be proud of their ‘dream’.  There were so many more stories of hope and ambition in the Safari industry,  that I ended the holiday feeling not too bad about being a well off tourist in a poor country.

There was however, another side to this desire to get an education and get on.  In Namibia, we were lucky enough to visit a small, traditional village of about eighty people, where nearly everybody was related to each other; sensibly, the young men were sent to other villages to bring back wives.  The age profile was noticeable.  There were quite a few elderly women (possibly about fifty but that is old given the toughness of their lives).  The ‘Village Elder’ was in his early forties and there were no elderly men to be seen as most had died, and most of the younger men were away from the village – either working the land or if very lucky working for one of the Safari Companies, the most sought after work.  The younger women about the village had young families – the unmarried ones being away working in shops and hotels. Everybody lived in traditional mud huts, increasingly with corrugated iron roofs, as the elephants – carefully conserved on the reserves – had destroyed the reed beds that traditionally gave them the insulating thatching for the mud huts.  So that was one downside of animal conservation.  Our Head Man showed us around and told us about village life.  Children from the age of six go to school in the nearest village about four miles away, where they ‘board’ with friends or relations during the week, and then some move to the towns or cities for secondary education.  Our Elder was very proud that his two daughters (but not his sons) were in the town.  His greatest wish was that his daughters should go to University.  I thought,  “What an amazingly liberated, and far-sighted man, pushing his daughters to an education”.   I just about exploded with laughter when he said that if his daughters got degrees, he would get twice as many cows when a suitor came a-courting!

Come to think about it, we never had a female guide, tracker or driver.  Maybe Sheila and Jae will help inspire a generation of females round Kilimanjaro.

 

When US President Barack Obama was in Kenya at the end of July, he mentioned in an interview with Capital FM that climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, the 5895 meter (19,341 foot) peak, Africa’s highest mountain, just over the border in Tanzania, was on his bucket list for after his presidency.  He said:

“I know that there are places in this beautiful nation that I haven’t discovered, so I am gonna make sure I get back, and it is not just Kenya, it is an ecosystem connected from Uganda to Tanzania.  Climbing Kilimanjaro seems like something that should be on my list of things to do once I get out of here. The Secret Service generally doesn’t like me climbing mountains, but as a private citizen hopefully I can get away with something like that.”

So Jae, Oscar and I can consider that we are pretty lucky to be getting the chance to do something that the American President can’t at present.  When I think about it, it must be quite scary doing something you might fail at in the public eye, when you are a famous person.  At least if the 3G climbers don’t quite make it, the whole world won’t know – just our few hundred loyal supporters, who, I am sure, will all comfort us with kind words.

There have been some very famous people on Kilimanjaro. Radio One DJ Chris Moyles famously made it to Uhuru Peak in 2009 along with a team of celebrities including Gary Barlow and Cheryl Cole, to raise money for Comic Relief.  Weighing 20-stone, Chris was certainly not in top-condition for the climb, but he made it all the same!  That makes me wonder why we have bothered about keeping fit and getting our BMI’s into the lower part of the healthy scale.

Just going to prove that money cannot buy everything, Billionaire and Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, did not make it all the way to the Roof of Africa, and had to abandon his attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro after suffering breathing problems…

As did tennis legend Martina Navratilova, who set out to conquer Mount Kilimanjaro in 2010.  Hoping the climb would help her overcome a tough year, the nine-time Wimbledon winner was overcome by a combination of altitude sickness and a stomach infection, which led to her being carried down the mountain on a makeshift stretcher and hospitalised.

Money, fame, and physical fitness may not help you get to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.  Let’s hope that willpower, determination and the knowledge that all of our family and friends back home are supporting us, may just do the trick!

Today’s guest post comes from Jae’s Exodus colleague, Thidara. She has her own adventure travel blog and you can read about her Kilimanjaro summit climb earlier this year here. Thidara has done the below photo blog post just for us – to give us a taste of the different climates we’ll go through on the Lemosho route.

Kilimanjaro is a rare place in the world where you trek through four climatic zones in under a week.

From a humid African rainforest to a volcanic crater filled with snow and ice, I started the journey with shorts and a t-shirt and I ended it wearing 5 layers of clothing beneath a down jacket. It’s a surreal experience and the Lemosho Route is an unspoilt and crowd-free route up to the summit.

It is a breath-taking journey. Trekkers will pass through:

• Rainforest 800-2800m
• Heather and Moorland 2800-4000m:
• Alpine Desert 4000-5000m
• Summit Zone 5000-5895m

Below are some photos of the scenery you will encounter in each of the climate zones.

Rainforest 800-2800m (Day 1 – 2)

Heather and Moorland 2800-4000m (Day 3 – 5)

Alpine Desert 4000-5000m, Day 5 – 6

Summit Zone Day 7

All of the photos are Thidara’s own.

Thidara has lent us her gloves for our climb – they’ve already been to the top so maybe they’ll help lead us up!?

Stew and I had an outing to the Kent (CAMRA) Beer Festival on a farm near Canterbury one weekend recently with Jae, Oscar and Ivor, when they came for a visit.  We have been going there pretty much annually for more than 20 years, as our collection of beer glasses attests.  I am quite surprised we have glasses that old, given that they are in regular use in our house.  I don’t drink beer, but am quite partial to an occasional glass of cider, and that is served up too.  I especially enjoy going because it is a very pleasant walk across a few fields for us to get there from home, and there is usually good food – including excellent curries – and entertainment too.

This time, there was an extra attraction: we could practise our circus skills.  Jae, Oscar and Ivor had fun trying out various activities.  Jae is a great juggler, and the boys are pretty skilled too.  I decided – in the interests of maintaining my fitness for the Kiliclimb – that I should have a go at a hula hoop, and was extremely gratified to discover that I can still whirl it as well as ever.

I had not tried a hula hoop since 1958.  I thought that was the year of the hoop and have since looked it up on Wikipedia, which states:-

“A hula hoop is a toy hoop that is twirled around the waist, limbs or neck. The modern hula hoop was invented in 1958 by Arthur K. “Spud” Melin and Richard Knerr, but children and adults around the world have played with hoops, twirling, rolling and throwing them throughout history.”

So 1958 it clearly was!  That must have been about the time we got television at home in Hawick – the south of Scotland was not first off the mark in that respect.  Every day we saw news about this exciting hoop craze rolling across the United States, and due to hit the UK imminently.  My little brother Robbie became absolutely obsessed with the idea of having one, despite only being 7 years old.

He set out to do his research and discovered which shop in our town was going to be the first to get hula hoops and on what date.  At that time we got 3d a week pocket money – slightly more than a modern 1p – but worth much more. However, it certainly wasn’t enough to buy a hula hoop: they cost almost £1.  He had to make a visit to the Post Office to withdraw this enormous sum, saved up from money given to him on his birthdays and at Christmas by our Grandparents (£1 each time) and Yanos, our great aunt (10/-  or 50p, on each occasion).

He and I headed off across town on the great morning when the hula hoops arrived, to a shop across from the station (now long gone) where he chose a bright yellow hoop, the minute the shop opened – which resulted in his first moment of fame!  The local Hawick newspaper ran a feature about this exciting new craze sweeping the world, with a photograph of Robbie holding his hoop – the first in town!  We all quickly became proficient at doing the spin, and the article also mentioned that I claimed to have spun it round me over 2565 times without stopping.  I remember being quite upset by the word “claimed”, given that I had had four witnesses counting.

Robbie has always had a keen eye for innovation, particularly in the music industry.  He didn’t attend school any more after the age of 14, but got himself established in the music world while while still a teenager – soon after the Beatles and all that followed them, burst on to the scene.

He has had quite a few moments of fame since then.  His firm – Sound Technology Ltd – is one of the largest independent distributors of music instruments and professional audio products in the UK.  He has also for many years been the Director of Music for Youth – a national music education charity for young people.

Robbie is still a keep fit fanatic.  I am quite certain that he too can still swing a hula hoop.  He is also a big supporter of the 3G Kili Climb, both as far as keeping up morale is concerned and by making the biggest donation yet to our fund raising effort.  Thanks little brother!

Note from Jae: Despite having almost 200 posts on this blog, we haven’t yet had a single one from a man. Well, today that changes as my lovely Da has put the following together for us. Thanks Da (for joining in with the blog – although I’m not sure I’m thanking you for the pics!!).

You never know what you’ll come across in our house these days. The other weekend we have Jae, Oscar and his young brother Ivor to stay. We’re sitting in the living room in all apparent normality when Jae, who has been deep in iPhonery, jumps up and cries, ‘Oscar! Mum! 7-minute workout!’

Oscar immediately gets up and assumes the position (whatever the initial position was). Sheila assumes an approximation of same. (Ivor is nowhere to be seen.) There then begins a volley of instructions from the phone –

‘Shoulder rolls!’

‘Step-ups!’

‘Plank!’

‘High knees!’

‘Push-up and rotation!’

‘Crunch!’

– and a great deal of leaping about, sitting or lying down, standing up and twisting in various directions, accompanied by cries of ‘Is it nearly finished?’, ‘This is still the warm-up’, and the like.

I’ve been instructed to get out the camera to take 3G tee-shirt snaps, so am able to record these girations for posterity, or at least for the blog and the family album – see the below action shots.

I must say, in our youth we didn’t find it necessary to prepare so assiduously for assaults on, say, the formidable slopes of Cathkin Braes or, as has been mentioned, the mighty North Berwick Law. Mind you, we weren’t being sponsored then, so I suppose the burden of responsibility was less. In fact, I am glad to have the opportunity of reassuring backers that no opportunity is being missed to hone our Kilimanjarists to a fine point of dynamic sharpness.

Which reminds me, Sheila and I said we’d mount an expedition this afternoon, through the foothills of the East Kent range. Excuse me.

NB. The app we were using is the Johnson & Johnson 7-minute workout

In June of this year a beautiful tapestry, “The Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn”, the final one in a set of seven tapestries, entitled The Unicorn Tapestries, was hung in the royal apartments of  Stirling Castle in Scotland. This brought to an end an incredibly complex and difficult project which took 14 years to complete. These tapestries were all woven by hand using techniques dating back to the 1400s that require highly skilled, complex, and painstaking work – a labour of love, just like the daily writing of the 3G blog. All seven were commissioned specially for Stirling Castle in 2001 as part of a scheme to restore the interiors of the palace to how they looked in the 1540s when it was home to James V of Scotland, his wife and their young daughter, Mary Queen of Scots.

Four of the seven tapestries were woven in a purpose-built studio within Stirling Castle. Over the years when I went to Scotland to see our step-sister Jan, who lived in Stirling, she took me to see the weavers at work. As she paid council tax she was eligible to pop into the Castle whenever she wanted, free of charge, and this she did and so she saw the progress of the project and pictures gradually appearing.  Sadly Jan died just before Christmas last year and Sheila and I both miss her very much.

After James V’s marriage to a Frenchwoman, Mary of Guise, his palace in Stirling began to change as she introduced Renaissance refinement into the predominantly medieval Scottish way of life. Soon French fashion and ideas arrived in the Scottish court as messengers came back from France bringing Mary bolts of fine cloth, plant cuttings, masons and probably tapestries. We know from inventories that James owned over 100 tapestries; hanging them on stone walls was the only way to keep the huge rooms even remotely warm. We also know that at least two of the tapestries featured “The historie of the unicorne”.  At that time the unicorn was to be seen in the Scottish royal coat of arms and later, in 1603,  it came to England, to take its place in the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom when James VI, son of Mary Queen of Scots, became King James 1 of England. By the way, since according to legend a free unicorn was considered a very dangerous and powerful beast, the poor heraldic unicorn is always portrayed in chains. But he could by tamed by a virgin, so they say.

Inspiration and know-how for the unicorn tapestries came from the Metropolitan Museum of New York (which has a set of seven tapestries woven in the early 1500s in the Low Countries) and from West Dean Tapestry Studios in West Sussex where some of the weavers teach.  This was the biggest weaving project undertaken in the UK for 100 years and brought together an international team of 18 weavers. It reminds me a little of the daily 3G Kili Climb blog that Jae and Sheila have been writing for over five months now; a big project that is hard work. Fortunately they are supported by friends and family, with guest blogs like this one helping to keep the project going.  Jae, Sheila and team, keep going. The end is in sight!