Rock climbing mostly. And flying to get there. That was the idea and it sounded like a fantastic idea. A dream adventure and as a dream you really shouldn’t let reality get in the way to create doubts or slow your excitement and plans down. I had never done any rock climbing before and was uncertain about what to expect. I thought that if I was tied on securely then I would feel confident enough to try some climbing. Well, that’s what I thought …
James Pitman is a wild child. A really good friend but a wild child lawyer and rock climber. His climbing partner is Marianne Pretorius – a beautiful and softly spoken professional photographer who glides up sheer rock faces with courage and feline grace . They are best known for climbing the Trango Tower, a slender Himalayan finger of ice and rock rising over 18,000 ft into rarefied air and uncertain weather. That was last year. This year James and Marianne’s game was to terrify Mike.
So their idea was simple in it’s beauty and challenge. Fly to 3 or 4 big wall climbs around southern Africa, climb them and then fly home. All in 18 days. Take Mike up one of them if he doesn’t crack before the time.
Now I am used to being in the air and often push myself but this was going be a whole new flying challenge for me. And then there was the climb looming like a dark and uncertain cloud hanging over my head. In total the climbing would take about 6 days and the planned flying distance was 5,500 km. That left just 10 days for the flying including the bad weather days. There was no allowance for rest days or any kind of problem along the way days.
The trip started out with a bang! Marianne arrived late at the airfield because her flight from the Surviver TV series in Panama had come in late and she needed to go home and change and do things with her boyfriend first. By the time we had the 2 planes packed it looked like the 4 hour flight to Jay Naidoo International as we had named it, would see us landing well and truly in the dark and I announced this to James. His positive, optimistic brain just pointed out that maybe we could still make it and we should try. And tried we did. With both planes set at max cruise and hunting high and low for the best tailwind the estimate for the sliver of a runway on the edge of the cliff was 35 minutes after sunset. So we pushed harder.
We screamed over the peak of the mountain and roared past the fluttering pieces of cloth that had been strategically placed near the runway a few weekends before. With a tailwind keeping me honest I landed safely with James just behind. Marianne and James were shouting their joy and relief as they leapt out of the Cheetah and in a crazed spinning dance we held onto each other and howled at the darkening sky.
And so the adventure began!
An hour before dawn the birds woke us and reminded us where we were. The cave of the headhunters was our first home. On our trip up the mountain a few weeks before we had walked through the kraal of the mountain men and it had sent a shiver through us when we saw monkey and baboon skulls, some of which looked remarkably human-like, hanging from a tree.
The view at sunrise was breathtaking – we were looking down a valley to the west and as far as the eye could see was the green and gold of dense African bush. The Blouberg has a rich and interesting history – in 1894 the South African Republic declared war on the Hananwa tribe after they showed dissent about Boer and other tribal encroachment onto their lands. The Hanawa tribe eventually surrendered to the Burghers after they had retreated to the mountain fortress.
That morning we had the mountain to ourselves (or so we thought) as James and Marianne prepared their equipment for their first big wall climb. As we walked towards the 2 planes to retrieve the ropes and other climbing gear before us stood 3 men in climbing attire, the largest of them, a burly red headed man by the name of Graham was wincing in pain. What happened is after walking in the dark to the base of the climb they had started to climb at the first sign of dawn, what they thought was a reasonably easy route, rated as a medium 18a. Instead they had inadvertently started climbing the much talked about and feared route called Wall Of White Light – a route only ever attempted by the strongest and most fearless of climbers. It wasn’t long before they became stuck and Graham fell, badly hurting his ankle. So James acted as the air ambulance driver and ferried Graham down the mountain to a farm road where the other 2 collected him after the usual 4 hour scramble down to where their car was parked.
The next morning James and Marianne did their Blouberg climb. I walked, crawled, and scrambled with them to the base of the climb and watched in awe as they made their way up the 1,200 ft sheer wall of rock. Later in the day I flew past the cliff to film them climbing and struggled to see them – after a while fearing that they had fallen and perished on the rocks and dense bush below. I was about to give up and go to the base of the cliff to look for them when I saw a small blue dot moving - they looked like 2 tiny ants on a wall the size of a house. For 7 hours they climbed that brown sunbaked rock, stopping only long enough to take a drink of water. As the sun set they walked into the cave exhausted but elated. Over a cup of wine and between gulping down spaghetti bolognaise they related their day on the mountain to me. I sat and listened to every word, marvelling at their courage and skill and trying to learn as much as I could because I knew my life might depend on it ….
We encountered 2 problems at the same time. After walking across the low bridge spanning the Limpopo to the Botswana border post we were turned around and told that we had to land at a nearby airfield to do the border formalities. Then within 5 minutes of taking off James announced that he had engine problems and would be landing on a deserted airstrip which miraculously appeared under him. Fighting against time, James and I set about trying to locate the problem while Marianne made us food. The engine started running rough as soon as it warmed up but we were unable to determine what the cause was. After an hour of fiddling we decided to continue with our journey, knowing that the light was fading.
As the sun set we landed at Kubu Island in the Makgadigadi Pans. The place has a mystical aura with the large round boulders and huge baobab trees protruding from the flat landscape - it has to be one of the most beautiful spots on earth. We were shown footprints of two elephant which had walked through there in the middle of the night one week before. Where the elephant were headed to was unknown but certainly they knew where they were going and were probably from the herd of eleven elephants which passed through Kubu Island six years before heading in the opposite direction.
As we flew over the border into Namibia with James following the Trans Kalahari road for safety James had complete engine failure. While Marianne hitch hiked to the border with our passports, James and I set about stripping a head off one of the cylinders. The damage was severe – the rings had broken and smashed into the head and there was a huge gouge out of the cylinder wall. On stripping the remaining three cylinder heads we discovered that all four pistons were smashed. Clearly we were not going anywhere with the engine in it’s sorry state. I called Gideon and Niren for advice. We were able to establish that a tankful of low octane fuel together with the high compression X-Tra pistons had been enough to cuase the grief. Niren pulled out all the stops to get the necessary parts to the waiting Air Namibia pilot at Johannesburg International which Hanno Snyman, the Chairman of the Namibian Microlight Association, had managed to persuade to help us. The next morning Hanno drove the 350 km from Windhoek to bring the new parts to us. In the fading light at the end of the day, James took off to properly test the repaired engine. It had been a total of 30 hours from engine failure to test flight and the work had been done with just a few spanners and a Leatherman on the side of the road.
Spitzkoppe is the name given to the mountains rising majestically out of the Namib desert near to Swakopmund. The uniquely shaped granite mountains are well known to climbers from around the world. The granite is very rough with tiny grips for the climbers who brave attempting the featureless faces. The better and less nerve wracking routes up the many cracks vary in difficulty but all have the same fate to a climber who slips and falls. The Spitzkoppe are huge steep egg shaped mountains where falling means sliding down very rough rock and scraping oneself badly.
James and Marianne taped up their fingers and hands to protect them and then set off up the route they had chosen – a route with cracks to aid the climbing. Together with a group of campers I watched them in awe as they slowly made their way upwards. I estimated the height that they would climb to be over 1,000 ft. Half an hour before sunset I became concerned that they would not make it off the mountain before nightfall, so I took off and in a strengthening east wind flew over them to assess their situation. It was not good. It would be dark soon and they still had a way to go.
Once it was completely dark the wind picked up quickly but between lulls in the wind I could faintly hear James and Marianne’s voices as they shouted to each other. After some time had passed James started shouting something to me which I could barely hear. It sounded like he said spot light and so I ran to the campers and asked for help. Eventually someone drove his bakkie close by and we trained his spot lights onto the mountain. It was impossible to see what was happening as the distance to the rock face was over half a kilometre and with the wind howling there was a lot of dust. Within an hour James shouted that they were OK and would spend the night on the mountain. I pitied them – it was very cold and the wind was roaring and whistling between the peaks with such ferocity that I imagined it could pluck them off the mountain.
At nine the next morning they arrived at the base. Marianne was strangely quiet nursing an infected eye but James couldn’t be stopped from relating the danger that they had found themselves in after the sun had set. Marianne had been leading the pitch and had taken a wrong route which had put her out on a tiny single foothold with no handholds and the rope tied 10 metres below her. There she became rooted as the last of the light disappeared. She could not move up or down and the real danger was a rocky ledge 15 meters below her upon which she would fall before the rope could save her. James was certain that Marianne would not make the night standing on a sliver of rock the size of a box of matches and that surely she would die if he didn’t do something. That was when he shouted for me to get a helicopter from Swakopmund to pluck Marianne off the mountain. With the dim light from the spotlight below James had managed to climb up to within five metres of Marianne and threw her a rope which she then used to climb to safety. Relieved at surviving such a harrowing experience, they spent the night shivering while huddled together on a chock stone the size of a chair base and waited for the light and warmth of the morning.
At times when undertaking a risky pastime one may come within a hairs breadth of being gravely injured or losing your life and immediately the danger is passed feel that there should be some kind of acknowledgement of what happened from the gods or at least from your peers. Invariably no one notices and probably no one cares and the world goes on unchanged – even though you might feel your life is forever altered. I related entirely to what James told me - he felt such a momentous occurrence should not go unnoticed…
(Rest of diary coming soon.....)