Retrospective (July 2012): Peak Lenin: Pamirs 1, Hazenberg 0

Thunder Bay, May 8th

Asia Mountains base camp and its orange tents

This post may mark an all-time record for me in terms of not writing up my adventures at the time, and letting things slide.  It's been almost 5 years since I spent six weeks trying to live out my Reinhold Messner mountaineering fantasies in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, and only now am I finally sitting down to try to capture the experience in cyberspace.  The fact that I have now written something like 49 blog posts since I left Leysin in June of 2015 means that I can no longer be tagged with my friend Kent Foster's once-accurate label of "the world's laziest blogger", but there is still improvement to be made, including writing about adventures that happened during the five-year-long blur of working in Leysin.  I really enjoyed living in the Alps (even if there were only 2 good snow winters out of the 5 I spent there), but between teaching, sports and travel, I hardly had time to put fingers to keyboard in the service of travel writing.  I am trying belatedly to make up for lost time.

In the summer of 2012, after a wonderful month spent hiking in the high-altitude trekker's paradise of Ladakh with Terri, we went our separate ways; she to return to work at her school in Leysin, me to further adventures in Kyrgyzstan and China; having two and a half months off every summer was one of the biggest perks of teaching at LAS!  I had first planned to climb Peak Lenin, reputedly the easiest 7000-metre peak in the world, back in 2002 during my Silk Road bike ride.  I was going to meet up with my sisters Audie and Saakje in Kyrgyzstan for another XTreme Dorks adventure, but an attack of rheumatic fever that laid me low for 6 months put the kibosh on further riding or any thoughts of mountaineering.  A decade further on, after a couple of seasons of ski touring in the Alps, I thought I would be in as good shape as I would ever be in for mountaineering, especially after a month of acclimatization in Ladakh.  Once I had decided to try my luck on Peak Lenin, it was easy to tack on another mountain that had been on my mental radar for 14 years, since my bike ride (the original XTreme Dorks expedition) along the Karakoram Highway way back in 1998.  Muztagh Ata is a huge peak (at 7546 m it's 400 m higher than Peak Lenin), but it's a deceptively simple-looking snow ramp that looks relatively simple to climb.  My friend Eric, with whom I used to play tennis back in Yangon days, had also been thinking of Muztagh Ata and we decided to do an expedition together.  I had about seven weeks before I had to get back to Leysin for the start of the school year, and it seemed like exactly the right amount of time for two big peaks.

The various climbing routes; I was on route 2, the Normal Route

In the end, I decided to pay Asia Mountains, a well-regarded company based in Bishkek, to provide base camp services on Peak Lenin, and to do the same for both of us at Muztagh Ata.  It's not strictly speaking necessary to hire a company for Peak Lenin, but almost everyone ends up doing so, since security of your possessions can be an issue there, and it's also nice to have some good food and comfort at base camp before and after being up on the slopes of the mountain.  On Muztagh Ata, given the Chinese government's bureaucracy, paranoia and obsession with border security, it's obligatory (and much more expensive!).

The flight from Delhi to Bishkek took forever, as I was flying on Turkish Airlines and flew all the way back to Istanbul only to backtrack the same distance east again.  I got to Bishkek, dropped off my skis with Alyona from Asia Mountains (they were storing them until I needed them for Muztagh Ata), hopped on a domestic flight to Osh and was picked up at the airport by a car and driver from Asia Mountains.  We stopped off in town for me to buy food at the supermarket and pick up a stove and gas canisters at the Asia Mountains office, then headed into the mountains.  It took four hours to drive to the base camp for Peak Lenin, a bit faster than the three days it took me on a bicycle back in 2004.  In the intervening eight years, the Chinese had paved the road, so that what was once a rutted dirt track was now almost entirely smooth asphalt.  It's a spectacular drive, up a long valley from Osh, then up and over the hairpins of the 3615-metre Taldyk Pass where my cycling partner Antoine and I once had to hole up in a yurt overnight during a howling blizzard. It was beautiful sunny weather this time and we swept steeply downhill to the crossroads town of Sary Tash, where roads lead east to China over the Irkeshtam Pass, west to Dushanbe (Tajikistan) and south to the Pamir Highway through eastern Tajikistan.  Antoine and I had headed south back in 2004, but we had stopped and looked southwest longingly towards the huge white shape of Peak Lenin. This year the vehicle turned west for thirty kilometres before leaving the main road and bumping along a jeep track for an hour up a green and pleasant valley to Asia Mountains' base camp, which was to be my home away from home for the next two weeks.

I had last been atop a really high mountain peak back in 2001 with my sisters Audie and Saakje and their respective partners Serge and Lucas, on one of our XTreme Dorks adventures.  That year, after hiking the Inca Trail in Peru and spending time on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, followed by more hiking in the altiplano in Chile, we had climbed Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America.  At 6961 metres, it was less than 200 metres shorter than Peak Lenin, so I assumed that with similar acclimatization, I would be able to use a similar approach to climbing Peak Lenin.  Back then we had hiked in for two days from the road at Puente del Inca to the base camp at Plaza de Mulas, then ascended slowly to Camps One and Two (Canada and Nido de Condores), pausing to acclimatize at each camp for a couple of days while ferrying supplies further up the mountain.  Finally we did a big day to summit from Nido, doing about 1000 vertical metres, before returning to camp.  I envisioned a similar slow ascent on Peak Lenin, starting with ferrying gear to Camp One (Advanced Base Camp), staying there, then ferrying gear up to Camp Two and Camp Three before a summit dash from Camp Three.  I had my mountaineering tent, sleeping bag and mattress, plenty of food (including freeze-dried rations and some bacon, cheese, soup and noodles I had bought in Osh), fuel (small camping cylinders), cooking gear and a Kindle.  I felt ready!

Marmot near Peak Lenin Base Camp

There are a series of widely spaced base camps spread along the Achik Tash meadows at about 3650 metres above sea level, each run by a different mountaineering company.  You don’t absolutely need to stay in one of them, but they’re relatively inexpensive and provide a measure of security against pilfering.  Asia Mountains had a neat encampment of yurts at the foot of an old glacial moraine with a splendid view of the mountain and the rest of the Trans-Alai range, and plenty of marmots running around.  I was put in my own big orange half-cylinder tent and soon afterwards repaired to the dining tent to eat sumptuously.  This is the other advantage of using a base camp outfit like Asia Mountains:  at Base Camp and Camp One there are full-time professional cooks preparing meals that aren’t dehydrated noodles and soups.  I settled in for a great feed, and then packed my gear for an early departure the next morning. 

There were a number of groups at base camp that night.  There were 3 Muscovites (Nastya, Irina and Volodya) who were climbing together, and a group of 8 Slovenians, including a professional mountain guide named Branko.  As well there was a young Spanish snowboarder, Marcos, who was keen to make a snowboard descent of the mountain, but who was suffering from persistent dysentery and off to Osh to see a doctor.  I would see a lot of these folks over the next two weeks, and it was good to meet such a fun group of travellers and mountaineers.

How other expeditions move gear to Camp One

The next day, Thursday July 5^th, was a long, tough day.  My idea was to shuttle a load to Camp 1 to get my body used to carrying a heavy load, and to use the old acclimatization adage of “climb high, sleep low”.  I was up by 7 am, breakfasting at 8 (on a delicious spread of eggs, bread, yoghurt, jam and other goodies in the mess tent) and underway by 9.  My pack was really, really heavy, maybe as much as 30 kg, and it was hard going.  I had been told that it was a 4-hour hike to Camp 1, but it ended up taking almost 6 hours.  The heavy pack was definitely a factor in slowing me down (I could have hired a horse to take my gear there, but I thought it was a better idea to get some carrying into my legs, after a month of having horses carry my gear in Ladakh), but I seemed to be ridiculously unacclimatized to altitude.  This was quite strange, as I had spent most of the previous month above 4000 metres in Ladakh and had been completely acclimatized to that altitude.  I found myself really panting for breath on uphills.  I also, because I underestimated the time, didn’t have enough snack food and water with me. 

Between Base Camp and Camp One; Camp One is up the glacier to the right

The path led up the valley that the base camp was located in, through carpets of beautiful wildflowers, and then through gorgeous Onion Meadow (full, unsurprisingly, of wild onions with their pretty purple flowers).  I then left the valley and the greenery and made my way up a ridge of red rock to the top of Traveller’s Pass, topping out at 11:15.  There was a sweeping view out into the next valley (in which Camp One is located), and at the top I met a garrulous, enthusiastic retired Englishman with whom I chatted about trekking and mountains for an enjoyable (but windy) half hour.  I thought that I was close to Camp One, but it was another three hours of tough walking, often up and down across steep moraine scree slopes.  I was getting hungrier and thirstier (there was no water after I left Onion Meadow) and puzzled as to where Camp One might be.  I was almost on top of it before it appeared, a series of widely-scattered tents clusters at 4400 metres above sea level, one for each mountaineering company.  At 2:40 pm, leg-weary, surprisingly tired and very hungry, I got to the Asia Mountains camp (the closest one, luckily), dropped my load and tucked into a magnificent lunch in the mess tent.  While eating, I met three more skiers, companions of the ill snowboarder Marcos.  I was starting to wonder whether I should have brought my skis to Peak Lenin too, but it seemed to be a long trudge before skis could become useful.  I was shown to my small tent, where I stashed my gear before setting off back to base camp at a much more rapid rate, passing dozens of fat orange marmots in Onion Meadow.  By 7 pm I was back at base camp, just in time for another huge feast.  My calves felt empty and sore, and my left ankle wasn’t at all happy.  I went to bed tired but also worried about my lack of acclimatization and the excessive weight of food and supplies that I was lugging around.

Scenery between base camp and Camp One

That night I slept fitfully, as though unacclimatized to 3700 metres.  In the morning, I packed up the remainder of my gear (substantially lighter this time) and set off at 9:00 again.  The weather was cloudier, colder and windier than the day before, with a few fitful snowflakes, and I walked slowly but steadily, taking a snack break below the Traveller’s Pass.  I felt a bit fitter than the day before, but it still took me until 2:40 pm to get to Camp One, exactly the same time as the day before.  I tucked into another sizeable feed before sorting out my gear, trying to reduce weight for the following day.  The rest of the afternoon passed agreeably reading and napping in my tent.  The weather was ominous, with heavy thunder and fairly heavy snowfall, the tiny sharp ice pellets known as graupel.  Over supper I talked a lot with Nastya, Irina and Volodya, milking them for information.  They, as well as a couple of Asia Mountains guides who were at dinner, were dubious of me walking to Camp Two the next day alone, as there are some serious crevasses in the underlying glacier.  I arranged to set off with them the next day so that I could rope up with them in case of a fall into a crevasse.  However that evening, as we sat around the dining table reading and chatting, the graupel continued to fall steadily.  The Russian trio eventually decided to postpone moving uphill for a day, and I was happy to take a day off as well after two days that had been substantially longer and harder than I had anticipated.

Fresh snow at Camp One, with the summit behind

Saturday, July 7^th was a deliciously lazy day.  When we woke up there was a good 20 cm of fresh snow and my Asia Mountains tent nearly collapsed under the weight of it, and nobody opted to head further up until the snow had a chance to settle or melt.  I had slept poorly again, getting up several times in the night to pee, and tossing restlessly with a racing pulse.  I had to admit that I wasn’t at all acclimatized to this relatively low altitude of 4400 m, despite the previous month’s hiking.  I found it mysterious and not at all reassuring; part of my planning for the mountain had been predicated on being acclimatized and fit and moving uphill relatively rapidly.  Between the bad weather and the lack of acclimatization, this relatively rapid pace seemed unlikely to work.  I packed a bag to take to Camp Two the next morning; again I was planning to do two carries to Camp Two, sleeping at Camp One inbetween.

Beautiful view of the summit from Camp One

Those of us heading uphill the next morning were up in the dark at 4:30 am (I slept through a couple of alarms and was only woken by the noise made by other climbers getting ready).  By 5 am we were at breakfast, and by 6:15 am we were underway.  This early start was said to be necessary to get firm ice on the glacier as well as to beat the heat in the much-feared Skovorodka (the Frying Pan) just below Camp Two.  Once again I felt poorly acclimatized, panting and moving slowly.  I stuck with the three Russians until we had gotten over a pretty scary crevasse that we crossed with a running leap, aided by a rope pull from ahead (Volodya had leapt it cleanly without the rope, but Nastya and Irina and I were grateful for some assistance).  We stayed roped up on the flat section of the glacier, reputedly the most crevasse-ridden part, and then up the first steep pitch, but then I let them move ahead as I was moving like a slug.  The distance between us widened rapidly as I laboriously trudged up the slope, easily the slowest climber on the mountain.  

Climbers retreating downhill from Camp Two across the Frying Pan

By noon I had only made it to an altitude of 5000 m, and it was 2:00 pm before I entered the Frying Pan.  It lived up to its name, with no wind to cool me and the UV radiation off the flat snow and ice roasting me.  It seemed unbearably hot, and it seemed to take forever for me to cross this open space, past an avalanche-prone slope.  In 1990 avalanches, triggered by earthquakes, wiped out Camp Two in its previous location underneath this slope; 43 climbers died in what is still the largest single death toll in mountaineering history.  The snow had softened enough in the afternoon heat that I was constantly sinking in to mid-thigh, further reducing my snail’s pace.  It was 5:00 pm when I staggered, completely spent, into Camp Two, a compact village of perhaps 25 tents on a fairly steep slope at 5350 metres above sea level.  It had taken me almost 11 hours to cover what fit, acclimatized climbers usually do in 5 hours.  My lack of fitness and lack of altitude acclimatization was clearly evident. 

Since it was so late in the day, there was no question of retreating back to Camp One that evening.  I put up my Crux mountaineering tent, first digging a new tent platform into the snow slope with my avalanche shovel.  I was on my own now; Asia Mountains’ tents and food stopped at Camp One.  I used my shovel handle and blade (separately), my ice axe and two ice screws to fasten down the guy ropes of the tent.  I set up the tent, melted some snow (always a slow process) and cooked up bouillon with croutons, eggs and cheese, chatting with a couple of ultralight mountaineers from Kamchatka squeezed into one tiny tent.   I made some instant ramen noodles as well, but I just couldn’t stomach them, so I put them aside for breakfast instead.  One item that I hadn’t brought up from Camp One was my ThermaRest air mattress, so I made do with my foamie undermattress, not ideal on the snow.  I was very cold and bone tired when I crawled into bed at 7:30 pm.

I was in my sleeping bag for over 12 hours that night, although the second half of the night my slumber was disturbed by the sound of howling winds.  I had heard from other climbers who had been further up the mountain that it was unrelentingly windy once they got above Camp Two, and now the winds were scouring our camp as well.

The peak reflected in Irina's sunglasses

I felt really tired and sore when I got up, and it took two groggy hours to melt snow and cook up some breakfast.  By 10:30 I was headed back down the mountain with an empty backpack, leaving my tent erected and my gear and food inside.  It took only 3 easy hours to descend what it had taken 11 hours to ascend, and much of that time was spent on the flat part of the glacier on the final approach back to Camp One.  I had been dreading the killer crevasse all day, wondering whether I would have the nerve to leap it on my own, and yet I never even saw it on the descent; in only one day the glacier had moved far enough for it to fill in the crevasse by itself.  It was more than a little unnerving to find the ground beneath my feet so rapidly changeable.  When I got back to Camp One, I was glad to tuck into a hearty stew and some freshly baked bread.  In my absence Marcos, the snowboarder, had returned healthy from Osh and had been moved into my tent as my tentmate.  I had a sociable afternoon and evening chatting with him, and with Asia Mountains’ most glamorous guide, the young powerhouse climber Dasha Yashina, as well as her client Alex Goldfarb, a Russian-born Harvard Medical School researcher on kidney function.  I fell asleep to the disconcerting booming echoes of seracs falling somewhere up on the glacier.

Showing off my crampons, with the summit ridge behind

The next morning was Tuesday, July 10^th, and I was up at 4 am (I heard my alarm this time!), breakfasting at 5 and off by 5:30.  The skies were clear and cold, and Jupiter, Venus and Mercury were all glittering in the pre-dawn sky.  The snow and ice were much harder than two days previously, and I finally felt as though I might be getting a bit better acclimatized; perhaps retreating back from 5350 m to 4400 m had improved things.  I had another load of food, fuel and gear in my bag, although it was definitely lighter than two days before.  I was still slower than most climbers on the mountain (particularly the professional guides and porters, who scampered past me), but I was at Camp Two by 12:30, seven hours after setting off.  On the way I was passed by Dasha and Alex, and met Volodya, Nastya and Irina retreating back to Camp One for a rest, along with my Kamchatka neighbours.  Six of the eight Slovenians I had met in base camp were on their way up as well.  It was good weather and everyone was on the move. 

Camp Two that afternoon was oppressively hot and still, with UV radiation pouring off the snow.  I tried to nap in my tent, but it was too hot.  I repacked a load of food that I planned to carry up to Camp Three the next day, cooked up some eggs and scarfed down as much nuts, cheese and bouillon as I could stomach.  I had been talked into buying no fewer than 10 gas canisters from the Asia Mountains office in Osh, but only now did I finish the first of them; I was clearly carrying an excessive supply.  After lunch the first clouds of the day rolled in and soon enough it was snowing again, blowing through a small gap in the fly where I had melted the zipper in a fit of inattention earlier in the day.  More eggs and more hideously indigestible ramen noodles, along with my first package of dehydrated rations (a potato stew), with lots of butter melted into it for extra calories, did for supper. 

That evening I lay in my tent listening to the wind howl.  I had been gathering intelligence from other groups of climbers, and what I heard didn’t sound very good.  Although the next stage, up to Camp Three, was shorter than either of the previous two legs in terms of horizontal distance, it was still another 800 vertical metres, and via a somewhat convoluted route up a ridge, over a bump (Razdelnaya Peak) and then down to a slightly sheltered spot where Camp Three is usually pitched.  The accepted figure for time held that it would be three hours to Razdelnaya, and then another hour to reach the camp.  The 4 Canadian med students I had met at Osh airport had been up towards Camp Three that day and had been turned back by howling winds halfway.  I heard that it was in fact the first day of the season that anyone had made it as far up as Camp Three, although that didn’t seem entirely plausible.  The winds were said to be strong enough to pick you up off your feet, and to have been this strong for a week.  I wrote up a plan in my diary that evening that saw me on top of the mountain five days later, then went to sleep.

Wednesday, July 11^th marked a week since my arrival at base camp, and I was up early to crisp, cold, clear weather.  I felt tired and groggy, so I had a leisurely breakfast omelette, then sat lazing and talking, trying to overcome lassitude.  My plan was to carry a load of supplies up the mountain to Camp Three, stash them there, and then come back to Camp Two.  At 9:45 I set off up the steep slope right behind camp.  I made good time, reaching the top of the pitch within an hour.  As began walking along the relatively level ground from there, somebody flipped the weather switch and suddenly clouds started to roll in, driven by a pounding wind.  I struggled onwards, trying to follow previous tracks (not an easy task, given the blowing snow that was filling them in), and talking to groups retreating from above; several groups had turned back before Camp Three, and nobody recommended going onwards, as the wind just got worse with altitude.  I kept trudging, but at noon, atop a knoll at about 5700 metres, I decided to turn back in the face of some of the worst winds I had ever felt on a mountain.  I buried my food and gas canisters in the snow, marked it with a distinctive arrangement of rocks and turned back at 12:30.  It took only half an hour to race back to camp, blown downhill by a wind that seemed to have a malevolent personality of its own.  Camp Two was also raked by the same gale-force winds and I spent the afternoon sheltering from the wind, eating a ton and chatting with Dasha while dramatic clouds formed over the ridge before being ripped away by gusts.  It was awe-inspiring, but hardly confidence-inspiring. 

Dasha Yashina

I passed out in my tent for two hours of oblivious sleep and woke up to continuing gales.  For the first time I found myself wondering if I was really going to be able to summit, between the terrible weather, unseasonably deep snow, continuing lack of acclimatization and physical weakness.  I had been shocked that afternoon to feel how much leg muscle I had lost during my week on the mountain; the only other time I had ever experienced that was during my bout of rheumatic fever in Urumqi back in 2002, and that hadn’t ended at all well.  I continued to be puzzled at how poorly my body was reacting to altitudes that I had had no problem with a month earlier.  I also found myself tearing up with emotion as I lay reading classic poems on my Kindle in the tent, and remembered that this had been an early sign of physical breakdown on my bike in the weeks before Urumqi.  The fact that far more experienced climbers than myself were also talking about the low odds of success also gave me pause for thought.  I had read beforehand that about 29% of climbers on Peak Lenin are successful, and I was beginning to see why that might be.

That night I lay in my tent, unable to fall asleep because of the deafening roar of the wind and the crackling and shaking of my tent.  I was glad that I had such a well-constructed tent, but it didn’t make sleeping any easier.  I finally passed out from pure exhaustion at 2 am.  When I awoke at 8 am, the winds had dropped slightly, but were still fearsome.  Most of the climbers in Camp Two were on their way downhill, and I saw several tents that had completely shredded during the night.  I decided to sit tight and see how the weather developed, and spent the day lying in my tent reading, napping and eating.  By evening there were only a handful of us left in camp, and my diary records that the two things that concerned me the most were the continuing evaporation of muscle from my legs and my butt, and the fact that snow was being driven up under the flap of the fly and onto the mesh of the inner tent, from where it fell in a fine dust onto me and my sleeping bag to melt and increase the misery factor.

My view from the tent in Camp Two

Friday, July 13^th was a decisive day.  I barely slept again as the wind continued its sonic assault, and I awoke tired, sore and weak.  I had breakfast, then trudged uphill with an empty backpack to fetch the fuel and food I had cached two days earlier.  Even without carrying a load, I was slower and weaker than I had been before, and was barely able to stagger up to the cache.  This made my mind up.  It was going to take far longer than the time I had allotted for Peak Lenin to get acclimatized and fit, and given the weather, success was going to be doubtful for anybody in this weather window.  I returned to Camp Two, packed up everything and set off on the long, heavy trudge back downhill to the sybaritic comforts of Camp One.  Just as I approached Camp One, I met a group of several British climbers with whom I had a good chat; one of them, a hard-looking nurse named Tim, would end up being the only climber (other than mountain guides) that I met on the mountain who would end up summiting.  I settled into my Asia Mountains tent and had an enormous meal, trying to regain some of the weight I had lost over the past week.  I felt very disappointed not to have summited, but I figured that I might as well rebuild my strength and focus on making my Muztagh Ata ascent a more successful enterprise.  Ironically the weather had improved, and everyone else in Camp One was planning to move up to Camp Two the next day, even as I was descending.  I was assailed by self-doubt; was I just being a wimp, or was it the right move?

Lovely sunset colours seen from Camp One

The next day I lazed around Camp One, eating, reading, taking pictures and waiting for a horse to carry my luggage back to base camp; I had decided that carrying heavy loads hadn’t helped me acclimatize; it had just made me tired, and wasted my leg muscles.  After lunch a horse and owner appeared from Base Camp and I negotiated a price to carry my gear.  It was amazing how easy it was to walk downhill, breathing progressively thicker and thicker air, unencumbered by weight.  We set off at 3, and by 6 o’clock I was back in a big orange tent, overjoyed to be surrounded by green grass, wildflowers, marmots and relative warmth.  After being in the lifeless white desert of the high mountains, this profusion of plants and animals was balm to a bruised and battered soul.  I spent the evening chatting with Dasha’s client Alex, and playing chess in the mess tent against a couple of my fellow climbers.  Alex and Dasha's presence in base camp wasn't surprising; the standard Russian/post-Soviet plan of attack on a big mountain like this was always to establish camps up the mountain, then retreat to base camp for a couple of days to rest up and recover before moving briskly up the mountain to the summit.  Dasha and Alex were planning on heading up to Camp One the next day to start their final push to the summit.

At Peak Lenin base camp, with the peak just out of view to the left

I spent Sunday, July 15th in Base Camp, in beautiful weather, as there was no jeep available to take me back to Osh until the next day.  I walked, talked with climbers, took photos and sunned myself in the afternoon warmth.  I felt a bit of envy looking uphill at what looked like good climbing conditions on the slopes of Peak Lenin, but it still looked windy higher up, with flags of spindrift hanging from the ridges and the summit.  That evening, after more chess (I love the fact that the post-Soviet world is so full of keen chess players!), I drew up a list of mistakes I had made, and reasons why I was leaving Peak Lenin empty-handed. It read:

• Insufficient time budgeted (the ultimate root of the failure)
• Insufficient sense of how big a mountain Peak Lenin is, and how much distance is involved
• Too few rest days budgeted in
• Not appreciating the importance of descending to recharge physically and mentally
• Carrying too heavy a load
• Assuming that my Ladakh acclimatization would carry over  
• Not realizing the extent to which my muscles would waste at high altitude (it had never been an issue before) 
• Overestimating my own physical strength and stamina
• Underestimating the effects of heat and glare, particularly on the climb across the Frying Pan
• Letting myself get physically run down
• Wearing myself out on the first two days unneccesarily
• Relying too much on analogy with my experience on Aconcagua
•  The fact that I was now 43, instead of 32 as I had been on Aconcagua
• Overconfidence
• Extraordinary wind 
• Deeper snow than usual for this time of year
• A probable mild case of sunstroke on the first trip across the Frying Pan

I started reading up on Muztagh Ata, and trying to sketch out a plan of attack; it may have been Pamirs 1, Hazenberg 0 but I was going to try to equalize the score on the next mountain!

Alex Goldfarb saying prayers in base camp

On Monday, July 16^th, barely 12 days after arriving in base camp, I found myself being driven back to Osh by the same driver as before, Marat.  Four hours later I was deposited in the Sunrise II guesthouse and went out to try to get a flight back to Bishkek.  There was nothing until Wednesday, so I had an enforced day of eating, reading and catching up on e-mail.  I also finally got a Kyrgyz SIM card for my phone, and used it to call Terri in Switzerland.  When I got through, she was in tears, and told me that Roger Payne, her neighbour in Leysin and a close personal friend, a man whom I knew well, had been killed a few days earlier in a massiveavalanche while guiding two clients up Mont Blanc.  A huge slab of ice and snow had hurtled down hundreds of metres off Mont Maudit and killed Roger, his two clients and six other climbers in one of the worst climbing accidents in recent years in the Alps.  Terri was devastated at his sudden death, and it put my own “failure” on Peak Lenin into sobering perspective; I hadn’t summited, but at least I was safely down in the lowlands afterwards.  Roger’s death would hang over my thoughts and my decision-making over the weeks to come.   Roger had left behind his climbing partner and wife to grieve for him; I really didn't want to impose the same burden of grief on Terri, so I was determined to err on the side of caution.

Finally, on Wednesday, July 18^th, exactly two weeks after flying from Bishkek to Osh, I flew in the opposite direction, headed to the Asia Mountains hotel/headquarters and met up with my friend Eric, ready for the next phase of this summer of Central Asian mountain adventures.

Stanley's Travels in Review: Top 10 National Parks and Wildlife Areas in Southern Africa

Thunder Bay, April 18

So as snow belts down outside, lashed by Arctic winds, it seems like a good time to look back longingly on a year spent living mostly outdoors in Africa, sleeping inside our faithful bakkie and camper combination "Stanley", and visiting as many of the great wildlife spots in southern Africa.  I thought it might be useful for any of my faithful readers who might be thinking of an African odyssey of their own to have a look at what Terri and I thought were the top 10 spots along our route to see wildlife.  We were lucky to visit many, if not most, of the great national parks and other wildlife hotspots of the southern end of the continent, and these are the ones that stuck most in our minds.

I've embedded a Google Map in the post, so you can have a look to see where these various parks are located; hope that's useful.

1.  Chobe Riverfront, Chobe National Park (Botswana)

Buffalo in the early-morning dust

Chobe is the great remaining stronghold of the African elephant

This is really the epicentre of large-scale big game in all of southern Africa.  Botswana is the country that has done best at preserving its elephants and its other big game, and Chobe is the jewel in its wildlife crown.  There are something like 350,000 African elephants left in the wild, according to the Great Elephant Census, completed in 2016.  Of those, something like 130,000 are in Botswana (that's about a third of the entire continent's population) and of those, something like 60,000 are in Chobe.  So something like one-sixth of all the African elephants in the wild are found inside this one park, many of them concentrated around the Chobe River.  You will likely never see such huge numbers of elephants in one place anywhere other than Chobe.  If only for this reason, Chobe would be worth visiting, but it's got equally impressive numbers of almost every charismatic megafauna species.  If you go to only one African wildlife park, you really should make it Chobe.

A well-fed Nile crocodile

Lioness hunting in Chobe

It is a big park, but particularly in the very dry conditions that we encountered in September, 2016 the animals are almost all right along the Chobe River, in incredible numbers and concentrations.  In the course of a day's game-driving, you're sure to see thousands of impala, hundreds of elephants, lots of lechwe, waterbuck, puku, kudu and buffalo, along with more waterbirds than you can see almost anywhere in Africa.  There's also a very good chance of seeing lions and a good chance of spotting wild dogs (endangered and hard to see most places), along with some possibility of seeing roan and sable antelope.

An African darter takes flight

One of the most enjoyable ways to see the wildlife and the birds is on a river cruise.  The town of Kasane, on the edge of Chobe, has lots of operators offering boat trips, and they're not that expensive. We went twice with Kalahari Tours, and both times I took hundreds of photos.  There's a common 24-hour package deal with a river cruise, lunch, an afternoon game drive, an overnight at a private campsite in the park (no more than 16 guests at a campsite on a given night) and then another morning game drive.  We did this with our group of KLAS students back in March, 2016 and it was an overwhelming non-stop series of "wow!" moments. 

A seriously muddy buffalo

It's difficult (that is, impossible) to get camping reservations for the campsites inside the park, unless you start a year ahead of time.  We didn't do that, but we found quickly that you can stay outside the park and do day trips into the park every day, despite what you read in guidebooks and online.  There are tons of places to stay in and around the town of Kasane, but it's quieter and nicer on the western side of the park.  We particularly liked camping at Mwandi View, about 20 km south of the western end of Chobe Riverfront.

Magnificent male sable antelope

Southern carmine bee-eaters

Another campsite that's well-nigh impossible to get reservations at is Savuti, deep in the interior of the park.  It's a long, tough, dusty, sandy slog through the park to get there, and we didn't make it.  We didn't have Savuti camping reservations, so we were going to have to try to power right through the park and out the south side to Dijara Community Campsite in one day.  Mechanical issues with Stanley scotched this plan, and in retrospect that was no bad thing, as the longer drive around on paved road through Nata and Maun was beautiful and interesting.  We met a number of people who did the dusty grind through Savuti and saw almost no animals to reward them for some pretty hard 4WD driving.

Queleas in front of the sun over the Chobe River

2. Khwai River Conservancy (Botswana)

Posing leopard

Baby elephant protected by adults

This is a small area immediately adjacent to the much larger Moremi Game Reserve in northern Botswana, just to the south of the Savuti sector of Chobe National Park.  We visited it in September, 2016, basing ourselves just to the south at Dijara Community Campsite.  It was an amazing place to visit, a real jewel of wildlife.  

Technically, only people staying at the Khwai Campsite and the Khwai Lodge are supposed to visit the conservancy, but there is no gate and nobody checking admission tickets, so we drove in from the main road on consecutive days and spent the entire day absolutely open-mouthed with amazement at what we were seeing.  On both days we saw lions and leopards.  Leopards are tough to see; on our entire trip, we only saw leopards seven times, and two of them were here at Khwai.  One of the leopard encounters was really memorable, with a young female leopard spending almost an hour posing in a tree, then walking casually along the ground between the gathered tourist vehicles, passing us at a distance of no more than three metres.  It was amazing, perhaps the best single wildlife encounter of the entire journey.

Handsome male waterbuck

There was a lot of wildlife that wasn't lions or leopards, too.  There were prodigious herds of elephants, sometimes so numerous that they blocked our way for half an hour at a time.  We saw lots of baby elephants trotting along with their mothers, having dust baths or drinking at the river.  There were big herds of impala, lechwe, waterbuck and other ungulates, with tons of waterbirds and raptors to satisfy our birdwatching instincts.  

Magnificent leopard

If you can manage to get reservations in the Khwai campsite, you should stay there, but otherwise the Dijara Campsite is conveniently nearby.  You could even probably camp wild just south of Dijara; pretty much nobody lives there and it's beautiful bush.

We found Khwai to be much more densely packed with game than its more famous neighbour Moremi, and with much less driving involved to see it.  It's an absolute jewel of a spot, and a must-see in northern Botswana.

Our farewell sunset at Khwai

3. Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (Botswana/South Africa)

Big male lion near Twee Rivieren

Our first view of a brown hyena

That unpronounceable name is just another way of spelling "Kalahari", and it's probably the most impressive of the arid-zone parks in southern Africa.  We visited two sectors of this huge park, one on the eastern edge in Botswana, near Mabuasehube Gate, and one on the South African side near Twee Rivieren.  We absolutely loved this park, and would go back in a heartbeat, trying to get reservations for the more remote and smaller campsites.

A gaggle of baby ostriches

The Kalahari is a magical place, not really a desert (it gets too much rainfall during the rainy season) but with almost no surface water for nine months a year.  The landscape consists of vegetated sand dunes with seasonally flooded pans inbetween.  During the dry season the pans are where the action is, particularly where the wildlife authorities have made waterholes for the animals to drink from. The main grazing species are the desert-adapted gemsbok (also known as the oryx) and the springbok.  There are plenty of ostrich about (we saw a big group of baby ostriches one day; they are impossibly cute), along with the iconic kori bustards and secretarybirds, both striding across the grasslands in search of snakes and rodents.  The predators are more easily seen than elsewhere, with prides of lions (with the dark manes so characteristic of the Kalahari), quite a few leopards and lots of cheetahs.  We also saw several hyenas (relatively hard to see, as they're generally nocturnal; Mark and Delia Owens, of Cry of the Kalahari fame, studied them), spotted hyenas, bat-eared foxes and black-backed jackals.  

Billy, the southern yellow-billed hornbill

If you do go, see if you can get reservations well ahead of time for the isolated campsites around some of the interior pans near Mabuasehube Gate (like Khiding, Monamodi or Mabuasehube Pan), or for the Botswanan campsites near Twee Rivieren (like Rooiputs and Polentswa).  We wanted to drive right across the heart of the park from Mabuasehube to Nossob, but we couldn't get the necessary campsite reservations for Motopi and Nossob.  If we were to do it again, we would want to do this crossing.

Juvenile cheetahs follow their mom off towards the waterhole

Mother cheetah near Rooiputs

Rooiputs is where we had an amazing encounter with a mother cheetah and her two subadult daughters, sitting right beside our vehicle for about 40 minutes.  We also saw a huge pride of at least nine lions near there.  It would be great to camp at Rooiputs for several days and just watch the animals passing by (or through!) the camp.

Southern ground squirrel

4. Etosha National Park (Namibia)

The vast empty space of Etosha Pan

Early-morning spotted hyena

Etosha is a special place in a very special country.  We visited in February, 2017 just as it was starting to rain, and we were lucky to get out without getting stuck.  The park is based around an immense salt pan that floods during the rainy season and which provides reliable waterholes during the dry season. It's full of springbok and gemsbok and ostrich in the dry short-grass plains in the west of the park, and has lots of other less dry-adapted species in the slightly moister east end of the park. Two specialties of Etosha are the black-faced impala and the Damara dik-dik; we saw lots of the former, but none of the latter. We had amazing encounters with hyenas (two came right up to the car to drink water from a drainage ditch, giving us very up-close views), lions (two lionesses drinking at a waterhole early one morning) and aardwolves (very rarely seen nocturnal hyenas who eat exclusively termites).  

Black-backed jackal

Early-morning pair of lionesses

The feeling of space you get driving out on a causeway into the pan is transcendental, while the birdlife is spectacular, with various raptors, blue cranes, flamingoes and chestnut-banded plovers particular highlights.  The two main rest camps (Okaukuejo and Namutoni) are pretty crowded, but the central one, Halali, is quieter.  All three are built around floodlit waterholes that apparently draw in black rhinos at night; we weren't lucky on that front, but the waterholes are peaceful, beautiful spots to sit.  We didn't venture into the far west of the park, only recently opened up to the general public, but we heard good things about Olifantsrus campsite; if we go back to Etosha, we will check out that area.  

Flamingoes

Black-faced impala

Overall Etosha is great, with lots of game, easily-seen predators, good scenery and wonderful birds. It's also well-run and (at least when we were there) not overly busy.

Two aardwolves

5.  Bangweulu Wetlands (Zambia)

Black lechwe herd

This is probably the most obscure of all the places on this list, but don't let that obscurity fool you.  This is a world-class wildlife attraction and pretty much nobody goes there.  You might have this area entirely to yourself.  It's a long, rough drive to get there, and it's in the middle of nowhere, northern Zambia, so the lack of tourist traffic isn't that surprising, but it's not that there's nothing to see.  This area, not really a national park but managed by African Parks and (formerly) the Kasanka Trust as a community-based conservation area, is full of animals.  The main species in terms of numbers are the black lechwe, a graceful and powerful antelope that congregates in groups of tens of thousands on the flat short-grass plains of the area.  We cycled among them on our folding bikes, and it was an amazing experience.  There are also said to be tsessebe (a kind of hartebeest) around, although we didnt' see any.  There are apparently predators to eat the lechwe (lions and leopards and hyenas).  

Fishing village in the marshes

Blinking shoebill

The real attraction of Bangweulu, though, is a very rare species of bird, the very prehistoric-looking shoebill.  If you've never heard of the shoebill, you really need to watch this clip from David Attenborough.  It's a ridiculously rare bird, with only a couple of thousand individuals thought to reside in the wild, scattered from Bangweulu along the lakes of the Rift Valley and up into the impenetrable Sudd swamps of South Sudan.  Bangweulu is one of the very, very few places where shoebills can be seen with any degree of ease, and it's an adventure.  We saw the shoebill twice, setting out on foot to walk through the grasslands, occasionally fording streams or walking across floating mats of vegetation in the papyrus swamps that are the hiding place of this reclusive fish-eating bird.  They look like something out of Jurassic Park, particularly when they roll up their opaque eyelids from below.  We went to see them twice because a computer error made me lose all the photos I had taken on the first visit; luckily our guides found the birds again and even got us closer than the first time.

Terri riding across the grasslands

Terri and Stanley at our campsite in Nsobe

As well as shoebills, there are crowned cranes, wattled cranes and white storks to be seen, along with huge clouds of pratincoles and larks.  It's an ornithologist's dream, and it was great fun to cycle among the birds along the jeep tracks.

The campsite at Nsobe was an outstanding place to stay.  It's really cheap (US$5 per person per night) but well built and well maintained.  Each site is situated beside or on top of a giant termite mound with a shade tree growing out of it.  The sites are very widely spaced, and at night you can barely notice that you have any neighbours.  The night sky is spectacular and the sounds of hyenas fill the darkness and make you a bit nervous.  There were grass fires around when we were there as the locals burn off long grass to stimulate new growth; the flickering fires at dusk and after dark were eerie and more than a bit alarming.

It may be hard to get to and far from anywhere, but that's part of what makes Bangweulu a must-see wildlife location.

Morning fog

6.  Nyika Plateau (Malawi)

Roan antelope

Common reedbuck

This is another fairly obscure park, way up in the highlands of northern Malawi, but it was surprisingly good for animals as well as having a unique setting and a fabulous camping area.  My friend and former colleague Nathalie used to live in Malawi and raved about Nyika, and we were glad that we took her advice.  

Two elands passing our campsite, one with a twisted horn

Baby bushbuck at our campsite

The plateau rises to 2000 m high above sea level, and 1500 metres above the surface of Lake Malawi. It's cold up there in the winter (we were there in July), especially at night, but the campsite attendants stoke up huge campfires to overcome the chill.  The campsite is unfenced and animals wander right by in large numbers, and sometimes right through the camp.  We woke up to find cute bushbucks right beside Stanley our last morning, and every evening we had elands, zebras, reedbucks and zebras wandering past in the late afternoon light.  Our first evening we were convinced that there was a leopard skulking in the underbrush, causing the reedbucks to issue frantic alarm calls, but we never managed to spot it.

Late-afternoon zebra mother and child

Terri toiling up a hill on the Nyika Plateau

Another nice thing about Nyika is that it's good for cycling; we rode around on our bikes taking pictures of the roan antelopes; it was nice not being confined to our car as is often the case in parks with big predators and elephants around.  We did a bit of hiking as well, although the area right around the lodge was a timber plantation and didn't give much in the way of animals.  From our bikes, we got great views of roan antelopes and eland, both magnificent big antelopes.  The roans are spectacularly coloured, and I was pleased with the photos we got of them.

7.  Kruger National Park (South Africa)

Leopard at Punda Maria

Elephant at sunset

Kruger may be the most famous national park in all of southern Africa.  It's South Africa's flagship park and we spent more time in Kruger (10 nights) than in any other park on our trip.  That said, we both felt that despite Kruger's size and variety, it wasn't as great an overall wildlife experience as some other parks, notably Chobe.  When we were first there, in May, 2016, Kruger was in the grip of a multi-year drought and there was precious little in the way of game to be seen.  We did, in the end, see a reasonable number of elephants and, on our second visit at the end of May, plenty of white rhinos, but there were not that many of the basics:  herds of impala and waterbuck and zebras, big aggregations of buffalo and wildebeest, lots of giraffes.  We would often go a couple of hours an a game drive without seeing much of note.  

Thick-tailed galago (bushbaby)

We found the rest camps to provide some of the best wildlife viewing in the park.  They're often located on riverbanks, and even though most rivers in the park were bone dry, there were still a few waterholes here and there that attracted elephants, waterbuck, buffalo and impala down for a drink.  At night we would wander around the perimeter fences of the camp with a spotlight, looking for nocturnal creatures, and we were rewarded with views of hyenas, a genet, bushbucks and a few impossibly cute bushbabies.  One of our favourite wildlife moments in Kruger was having three thick-tailed galagos (large bushbabies) walk right under my chair and up the tree behind us.  

Parked at a picnic area in the south of the park

African spoonbill

Kruger was outstanding for birds, particularly birds of prey, and over the course of ten days we ended up seeing almost everything we wanted, even our first leopard of the trip on a sunset game drive up at Punda Maria.  I shouldn't be too hard on Kruger; it has a lot of animals, and a lot of different species. It's just that it's hard to see them in great numbers.  The northern half of the park, from Letaba onwards, is much less visited by tourists, as it's a long way from the southern entrances, and is the main elephant population centre of the park.  Unfortunately it's also an area of thick mopane forest, so it's a bit monotonous on the eyes and hard to see the elephants until they're right on top of you.  The far north, from Punda Maria to the Limpopo River, was perhaps our favourite bit of the park, with lots of riverside trees, great birdlife and plenty of elephants, in addition to the leopard.  One of the best features of the park are the picnic sites, always in beautiful locations, good for looking for animals and birds.  We got into the habit of setting off early on game drives, fueled only by tea and coffee and rusks, and then having a big cooked eggs-and-bacon brunch later in the morning at one of the picnic sites.

Wildebeest

Tawny eagle

Kruger's campsites are well-run and have everything you need to stay there indefinitely (including well-stocked grocery stores and washing machines), but they are big and a bit crowded.  They're certainly not the place to go for solitude in the wilderness.  There are so-called rustic campsites which are much smaller, quieter and wilder, but they book up very quickly, so we could never get reservations for them.  

Overall Kruger was a good park, well-run and with good infrastructure, but at least while we were there, it didn't knock our socks off with the quantity of animal encounters that we had.  It's still one of Africa's great parks, though, and no trip to southern Africa should exclude it.

Chameleon seen near Punda Maria

8.  Central Kalahari Game Reserve (Botswana)

Gemsbok

Springbok

We didn't, to be honest, have as many predator encounters in the CKGR as we did in the Kgalagadi, but in every other respect the CKGR can hold its own against any other park.  It's remote, it's wild, it has very few tourists and you can live out your hunter-gatherer fantasy around a campsite under the stars that feels pretty unchanged from how it must have felt 10,000 years ago.  

Bat-eared fox

Crimson-breasted shrike

We were able to get campsite reservations at the last minute at the DWNP offices in Maun.  Unlike the Kgalagadi, this park is far enough from the South African border that the number of South African tourists is low enough that the campsites aren't perpetually booked solid.  We camped at Kori Campsite, and it was absolutely idyllic.  The campsites in the CKGR are very far from each other, so that you really have the illusion of being completely alone under the African stars.  The Kalahari is really very beautiful, full of birds (like the kori bustard and the pale chanting goshawk) and very wild feeling.  

Kori bustard

Slender mongoose

As in the Kgalagadi, the pans are where the action is, and where the best campsites are.  We didn't try to drive all the way across the CKGR from Deception Valley (where Kori is) to Xade, but if we go back, that will be on the list.  We didn't make it all the way down to Piper Pan, which was a pity since we met people coming from there who said that it had a big pride of resident lions.  We had to make do with lots of springbok and gemsbok, a few wildebeest, plenty of mongooses and bat-eared foxes and jackals, and lots of smaller stuff.  The isolation and pristine beauty of the Kalahari is amazing, and I would gladly go back to spend more quality time there.

The all-important campfire

9.  Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park (South Africa)

The green hills of Hluhluwe

Some skinny-looking white rhinos

This is a place that we heard about a lot from South African wildlife enthusiasts.  We ended up adding it to our itinerary around the New Year, and I wish we had had more time to spend there.  These two parks (which are really one larger park, divided in two by a highway) are where the white rhino was rescued from extinction back around 1900; there were fewer than 50 individuals left in the wild in 1895, all in Imfolozi, and now there are over 20,000, all descended from those few survivors. In the 1950s and 1960s Ian Player, the older brother of golfer Gary Player, led Operation Rhino, repopulating other parks with white rhinos from Imfolozi and reducing the chances of extinction (at least until today's murderous assault on the rhinos).

Elephants in the distance

Imfolozi and Hluhluwe are very hilly and green, located in the moist coastal area of KwaZulu-Natal.  Driving around the parks the scenery is strikingly beautiful, much more so than in most of Kruger.  The hills are steep and dramatic, and are a great place to spot white rhinos.  Both days that we were in the park, we saw plenty of white rhinos, along with lots of impala, zebras, giraffes and buffalo.  There were elephants around, but we didn't see too many, except at a distance down in the river valley.  We heard that in the northern sector of Imfolozi there are a couple of packs of wild dogs, but despite having a good look around, we had no luck on that front.  In general, though, there are a lot of animals around and you are guaranteed lots of wildlife encounters, especially with white rhinos.

Baby zebra

The only drawback to visiting Hluhluwe-Imfolozi is that there is no camping inside the park.  If you want to sleep in the park, you have to fork out the money to sleep indoors in a lodge.  There are plenty of campgrounds not too far from the park; we stayed at lovely Bushbaby Lodge, about a half hour's drive from the Hluhluwe entrance.

Supercilious giraffe

10.  Kasanka National Park (Zambia)

Sitatunga buck seen from our campsite

Puku

This is another slightly obscure park in northern Zambia.  It's a success story in rehabilitation, as it was once more or less abandoned to poachers and encroachment.  The private Kasanka Trust brought it back to life and now it's a well-run park full of animals. We spent a couple of nights camped at idyllic Pontoon Campsite, where we were spoiled by attentive service by the attendants (lighting fires, getting the hot water going) and by having the normally shy and secretive sitatunga antelopes wander out every evening and morning to say hello.  This was the only place that we saw these beautiful creatures.

Canoeing near Luwombwa

The rest of the park has plenty of puku, as well as a herd of sable antelope that we didn't get a very good look at.  We headed up to Luwombwa Fishing Lodge, hired a canoe and spent a fun couple of hours paddling up and down the river, spotting lots of kingfishers and bee-eaters and enjoying being out of our car.  Lots of birds, including coppery-tailed coucals and the lovely African pygmy kingfisher.  The park landscape is striking, with patches of bush interrupted by dambos, seasonally flooded grasslands punctuated by thousands of very small, narrow termite mounds.

Dambo with tiny termite mounds

Malachite kingfisher

What Kasanka is most famous for is its massive bat gathering which takes place every November and December, with something like 7 million bats gathering from parts unknown (presumably the jungles of the DRC) for a couple of months of feeding and breeding.  It must be an amazing spectacle, and if we're ever in the neighbourhood at the right time of year, we'll certainly be there!

The Rest

We visited a number of other parks, most of which had their good points, but these ten stuck in our minds in particular.  There were several parks that we chose not to visit (Lower Zambezi, South Luangwa, Hwane) that are probably very impressive but which we didn't think would give us much that we hadn't already seen and experienced.  We never made it to Addo Elephant Park, which is supposed to be really beautiful and full of elephants.  There were others like Kafue National Park (in Zambia) that just didn't impress us very much.  Liuwa Plain in Zambia was interesting, but if you don't go there in October, November and December there are almost no animals to see; we didn't think the slender pickings justified the tough sand driving that we had to do to navigate the park.  And finally Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique is supposed to be beautiful and full of endemic birds, but with the renewed civil conflict in Mozambique in 2016, it was a no-go area.