The ascent to Toubkal: Selling our souls and our physical well-being to Africa's second highest peak


Advertisement
Morocco's flag
Africa » Morocco » Souss-Massa-Draâ » Imlil
November 2nd 2007
Published: November 2nd 2007
Edit Blog Post

Seven years of bad luck.Seven years of bad luck.Seven years of bad luck.

We took a grand taxi (diesel engine white mercedes sedan, with three people sandwiched in the front and four in the back) from Marrakech to the mountain town of Imlil. The drive was slightly nauseating, full of twists and turns, but definitely worth it for the scenic beauty.
From the rocky desert outside the city our taxi pointed toward the vague outline of the High Atlas mountains, eventually climbing through low red hills until the turns grew tighter and we were deposited in our small-town mountain destination. Imlil is the sleepy Berber town that exists primarily as a starting-point for trekkers who set out to hike the Toubkal region and summit Toubkal, Africa’s second tallest mountain.
Imlil is like many of the other small mountain towns that I’ve encountered. Endless budget hotels, restaurants that offer more or less the same few dishes (no menu to speak of), and provisions stores selling all the canned tuna and Snickers bars that the unprepared trekker could hope for. We bargained our way into a small hotel (where we slept on mattresses on the floor) and at five o’clock set out in search of lunch/dinner. A few stops led us to a restaurant that (for the same price of our hotel room, after we bargained) would make us a vegetarian tagine (which describes a clay pot style of cooking). We parked ourselves on a terrace and sipped tea while we watched the local children--with the pink flushed cheeks characteristic of most high mountain
Candle light vigil.Candle light vigil.Candle light vigil.

Our hotel in Imlil (Hotel Cafe Aksoual) had a customary rooftop, where we (Lib, my classmate Elizabeth (pictured) and I) sat and talked with our new friend George, a freelance writer and photographer doing a piece on the role of the international film industry in Morocco. For example, just above Imlil is the monastery built for Martin Scorcese's Kundun (now the five-star boutique hotel, Kasbah de Toubkal), about the early life of the current Dalai Lama.
people--return home from school.
The tagine was incredible; we burnt our tongues soaking up the juices of tomatoes and onions that still bubbled in the tagine. And though the tagine was massive, we did it justice, swiping up all the khubs in the basket to pick up the last bits of vegetables and savoring what we knew would be an important meal for our next two days of hiking.
To walk off our full bellies we headed further up the road out of Imlil, finding nothing much but the slow fading of town into fields and pastures. A small path off the main road led us along the edge of some fields until, noticing the fading light, the strange stares of the locals who passed us, and the chill creeping into our bodies through our toes, we turned back to the main road. The coming darkness revealed small clusters of mud and clay houses that clung to the mountain slopes, made visible by the bare yellow bulbs that lit up the small windows on the high walled buildings.
In the dusk the call to prayer sounded from a mosque that must have been tucked away invisibly behind some mountain fold.
Hot mamas on the trail.Hot mamas on the trail.Hot mamas on the trail.

Need we say more?
We were surprised that these sparsely populated villages could support independent mosques, and were even more surprised when two more voices sounded out from the surrounding valleys. These were more characterful calls than I had heard before, with one hidden recitor drawing out the syllables and changing his inflection in particularly unique ways. The sounds projected from their various unseen towers and reflected off the mountain sides, imposing silence on us as we walked, wrapped in evening light, back down the road to town.

Day 2

We only got lost once on our self-guided hike to the refuge, and it was more of a long-cut than a case of being truly lost. We had arrived in Imlil not knowing how much this trip would cost us and whether we would be able to do it without a guide, and had been relieved to hear that it was easy enough to do without a guide and (according to a British friend that we had made the night before) could be done fairly cheaply. Past the small hamlet where our British friend had told us to stop and drink some of Mohammed’s excellent mint tea (the tea tasted and smelled
Snowy refuge.Snowy refuge.Snowy refuge.

Day one of hiking took us from our hostel in Imlil, through many Berber hamlets, past a large mosque made of a hollowed out boulder, through a hail-storm, and finally to our destination: the Jebel Toubkal Refuge. With only our spandex pants and light-fleece jackets, we were soaked through and it took a good hour of thawing in front of the fire until we regained feeling in our toes.
distinctly of pot, though everyone there insisted it was just made of a special kind of mint), we turned into the valley of the Toubkal range; the air grew cooler and the clouds darker.
Our pace was slowing. I had gone into this trip knowing that we would have a handicap. MC and I both had moderately serious colds—bad enough that we were losing sleep at night from coughing and blowing our noses until they were raw, but not bad enough to keep either of us off a mountain. On top of that the Moroccan water had finally made its way into my system and my stomach was putting up a bit of a fight; but parasites are old news and I knew what to expect, so we carried on.
The larger problem was what I didn’t know. Just the day before I had been let in on the fact that Elizabeth—MC’s friend from Arabic class who had never done any altitude hiking before but had been intrigued by our plans--had been born with an unusually constrictive rib cage that had impeded her lung growth. When she was a child, doctors performed an operation to remove some ribs in the
Yes, we are crazy.Yes, we are crazy.Yes, we are crazy.

We spent a rather sleepless night at the refuge (Lib and I shared a blanket that our friend, Mahdi, the refuge cook, lent us), and woke up at 4:00 in the morning to begin our hike. After a small breakfast of a quarter of bread (we were so unprepared we didn't bring food, so all we had to eat the day before was some soup that Mahdi gave us), we set off in the pitch black, following close behind a friendly Scottish couple (they met at St Andrews) and their guide (yes, we were too cheap to hire a guide, but no worries, people do it guide-less all the time). We picked our way through the awkward clumps of volcanic rock using flashlights, until finally the sun rose, offering amazing views of the surrounding range.
hopes that it would allow her more room for lung growth. Instead, they accidentally punctured a lung during the operation. Though the lung was cauterized, it filled with liquid and neither of Elizabeth’s lungs ever reached their full size.
Elizabeth had warned us that she would be a slow hiker, but as she dropped farther behind us and took more frequent stops, the limits of her lungs became increasingly clear. Somewhere after lunch and before the sky opened up on us, Elizabeth (perhaps humbled by the extreme difficulty that she was having breathing and the prospect of several more hours of hiking) confessed that she also had a heart murmur.
It was only a matter of minutes between the moment I realized we were about to be caught in a storm and the moment the storm hit. At first it was just light rain but then, after several peals of thunder echoed their way up the valley, the rain turned to hail. By this point Elizabeth had sharp pains in her chest and was stopping every few minutes to sit and collect her breath. We couldn’t have been higher than 10,000 feet.
Eventually the hail turned to snow. It dampened
We refuse to be anything but first.We refuse to be anything but first.We refuse to be anything but first.

After three hours of hiking, we approached the summit. By then we had accumulated a group of a dozen or so (well-prepared) hikers. At the saddle, right below the summit, everyone stopped to take a break, but of course Lib took off full speed ahead (and I desperately tried to keep up). For the finaly 100 yards (Lib was already at the marker), I had the idiotic idea to run and catch up with her. I think my lungs almost popped. But once I recovered, I found myself breathless once again from the beauty of it all and the sense of accomplishment (my first peak).
out fleeces and worked its way into the toes of my sneakers. We passed several groups heading down to Imlil from the refuge, and we considered the option of putting Elizabeth on one of their mules so that she could return to lower altitude. She would have none of it, however, and insisted that she would continue on at her pace.
Worried that I was signing myself over to an eternal head cold if I stayed in the valley, I went ahead. Almost an hour after the storm broke I caught sight of the refuges: two grey stone buildings, each several stories and placed squarely at the base of a three-walled mountain range.
The first refuge was unfortunately disappointing. It was large, cavernous and cold, and they were asking for 80 dirhams each. George our British friend had told us that this, the first of the two refuges, was the nicer of the two, and that it had cost him only 40 dh the night before. I tried to explain this to the owner of the refuge, who looked at me like I was crazy and told me there was no way he would have let anyone pay 40 dh. Clearly there was some mistake.
I went back into the snow and ran up the stone steps to the second refuge; at this point my socks were soaked and I was ready to settle inside somewhere and wait for the girls. At the top of the stairs I was greeted by the amused stairs and sarcastic applause of the guides and cooks who were gathered outside of the refuge door and who had watched me run up the steps. Several of them began talking to me at once. “How are you?” “Are you alone?” “Are you tired?” “Come inside, it is warm.” I was ushered through the entrance and introduced to the boy who managed the refuge. Convinced that this was the cheerful, warm, cheap place I was looking for, I asked how much it was for one person. 96 dirham! I think my eyes fell out of my head when the boy told me this, so he took me over to where the rates were clearly posted: 96 dh per person, 69 dh if you had a lonely planet book. I was terribly confused. I explained the George story and the kid looked at me like I was nuts. 40 dh? Impossible. I was starting to wonder whether George had traded drugs for a cheaper rate, or whether he had just been so high all along that he hadn’t properly remembered how much he’d paid.
A great deal of pleading and questioning ensued, and I tried desperately to impress upon this kid that our limited budget wouldn’t really allow us to stay, rent blankets and eat. In the middle of my exasperation the girls arrived; they were both soaked through their fleeces and looked slightly short of miserable. I was worried that we would all catch pneumonia if we didn’t figure something out soon, so we let ourselves be ushered into the sitting room, where there was a fire and a furnace. Because it was the only warm room in the whole building all of the other guests were sitting in there, assessing us sternly as we made a very wet, loud and dramatic arrival. By this point it was clear to almost everyone what situation we were in, and it felt like all the eyes in the room were on us. A tall and big-eye guide (who looked something like an over-sized Berber teddy bear) approached me at one point and told me not to worry. “Sit down and don’t think about money,” he said. “I will negotiate some price for you.” Later the same guide arranged for us to have a pot of mint tea and told the refuge manager to take care of us. He then disappeared, the only guide who seemed to want help us in the absence of some other agenda.
The three of us huddled on a bench in the sitting room, literally shivering and trying to recover feeling in our hands and toes as we peeled off wet layers. We hadn’t yet agreed to pay the 69 dirhams each (between the three of us we had one page that we had torn out of the Lonely Planet, and we figured this was sufficient to guarantee us the lower rate), but it was evident that we had no practical choice. We had so far been successful budget travelers and bargainers, however, so we believed that there was still hope.
Mahdi, the young employee of the refuge, had been trying to show me to a room and get us to commit. So after conferencing with the girls and overcoming some of the initial misery of being damp, I stood up, prepared to engage whatever harmless tactics I could to save us a few bucks. “Girl, work it. See what you can do,” Elizabeth joked.
Next to us in the sitting room was a group of Irish men who had summitted that day. In their post-summit daze they had sat quietly and witnessed our saga, listening to our semi-private complaining and scheming as we discussed how distressed and cheap we were. As I stood to follow Mahdi one of the men turned to me and chuckled, wryly capturing the ridiculousness of the situation: “If you’re going to do that, you might want to change your socks first.” I looked down at the mismatching hiking socks that I had pulled up over my spandex pants. There I was, in high fashion in the High Atlas, attempting to bargain in a position in which I clearly had very little bargaining power. I was also, however, in no position to change my socks. And the three of us were not in a position to dish out 100 dirhams for a room and 50 dirhams for a meal; at least not without a fight.
Not surprisingly, in an isolated refuge populated primarily by young male mountain guides, cooks and mule boys, our fight was welcomed: our circumstances understood and our challenge just as quickly accepted as turned into an opportunity.
As Mahdi led me upstairs to show me one of the dorm-style rooms, he made small talk.
“You like Morocco?”
“Yes, it’s beautiful.”
“You like Moroccan boy? Or you like American boy?”
“I like boys from all countries.” (It seemed like a diplomatic and honest response to me).
“Why you have problem with money? All beautiful girls are rich,” he said, turning to me and smiling. “And you are beautiful. Really.”
I explained to Mahdi that we were all students (a partial truth), that we had been misinformed about the cost, and that beauty really had nothing to do with travel budgets. Back downstairs Mahdi told me not to worry about money; we would work it out later. In the meantime he showed us the furnace where we could dry our clothing one article at a time (and where we accidentally left some of our items too long, leaving me with a pair of pants with melted elastic and MC with a half-melted Nalgene in bubbled plastic) and brought us mint tea, which helped slow the chattering and shivering significantly. We sat by the fire and Mahdi and his guide friends came and sat by us, playing Berber music videos for us on their cell phones and entertaining our questions about Moroccan hip hop.
Before the Irish group had left one of the men had tossed us a 20 dh note and told us to splurge on a hot meal; a Swiss couple we had shared a cab with from Marrakech had pulled me aside and offered to lend us cash if we needed it. It was all fairly pathetic and embarrassing. But as it became clear that we were going to make our own way, the rest of the trekkers turned cold toward us. We had become the American girls who were willing to be flexible with cultural norms and talk to Moroccan boys (clearly to some benefit of our own), and this was obviously looked down upon. Our rejection by the European hikers and the attention from the Berber boys, however, turned out to be no loss to us. Instead of chatting with the Europeans (who, as representatives of their continent, seemed rather moody and somber), we passed the afternoon and evening drinking tea and eating biscuits with the boys who made a second home of the refuge. We talked about local marriage practices: the bride price of an average Berber woman (3000 dh and two cows), the tendency toward polygamy, and the unfortunate educational circumstances of young Berber girls (who are commonly married off around the age of 16 and taken out of school long before that in preparation for a domestic life).
Mahdi told us about his own family. His uncle ran the refuge, which is why he worked there while the rest of his family was in Marrakech. Mahdi’s grandfather (the uncle’s father) was featured in a framed photo in the dining room. He was now 92 years old; his wife, who Mahdi claimed was of local celebrity status, was also alive at 80-something (most children in contemporary Berber villages still aren’t registered at birth and therefore have only hazy ideas of how old they are). In her lifetime this woman had given birth to 14 children (seven of whom made it to adulthood) and been the first Moroccan woman to climb Toubkal. Mahdi says there are videos and posters featuring her exploits; in the refuge, however, only the grandfather was featured.
When the guides made dinner for themselves they saved some left-over soup for us, providing us with what would amount to our only pre-hike food that wasn’t stale bread or tea. Mahdi even offered to make us pasta from the small provisions store and only charge us half the price. Lines of appropriateness, however, were becoming blurred, as Mahdi managed to scoot his way next to me and practically sit on my lap while Hossan -the youngest and loudest (and most good looking, MC would like to point out) of the guides—put his arm around MC. So we refused the offer.
Eventually I had to have a chat with Mahdi when he conveniently appeared in the basement at the same times as me. I told him that I was extremely appreciative of everything that he had done for us and that I enjoyed talking to him, but that I didn’t want him to think that there was anything between us. He instantly changed gears and assured me that he thought nothing; he only wanted to help us and spend time with us, whom he thought of as sisters.
The rest of the evening was more quiet, as we took our leave of the guides and watched them move in on the group of three young Moroccan girls who had arrived after us.
By the time night came we were hungry and sick from all the mint tea we had consumed, but we knew that there was no food and that the best thing to do was sleep. I asked Mahdi which of the rooms we should sleep in and how we could get some blankets. Eager to prove that he was genuinely concerned about his sisters, Mahdi told me that we could sleep in the sitting room. It was forbidden to do so, which he made a point of showing me on the “Rules” sheet, but it was also at least twenty degrees warmer down there than in the dorm rooms. Mahdi insisted that we sleep there and be comfortable; he even gave us his own blanket for MC and I to share (Elizabeth was clearly more prepared than MC or I and had brought a sleeping bag, compass, tea bags, and nail kit, among other strange but useful things), promising that he would find another for himself.
We curled up onto our cushions (MC and I head to foot, so that we could best share our blanket) into what struck me as a suddenly uncomfortable silence. Although I was feeling like we had harmlessly managed some free tea and a warm place to sleep, Elizabeth and MC had just begun to articulate to me their discomfort with the whole situation. The girls felt that we were receiving unfair privileges simply because we were American girls, and that we had manipulated the situation to our advantage and possibly even compromised some of our self-respect (and the image of American girls in general) in the process. The more they expressed their concerns to me (in a hesitant way that seemed to place some of the blame on me), the more I began to question myself.
Was it wrong to flirt with Berber boys for tea and a blanket? Was it really flirting? Or was the problem that we were behaving as we might with American boys: not particularly flirtatious, but in a way that, in Morocco, had very different significance? Can we, when we travel, behave the same way that we do at home—creating friendships and having interactions that push the boundaries of local social codes? Was I doing a disservice to other American girls by sending a message that my affections could be bought? Or was it harmless? Is it so wrong that I actually enjoyed the conversations that we had with these boys about their lives? The enjoyment of time spent was clearly mutual, so does it have to be reduced to some sensitive issue of gender and nationality?
In the lowlands I would say no. In Marrakech, for example, I wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a Moroccan boy, because the energy there is so aggressive and sexually charged. But in the mountains the relationships between locals in the tourism industry and the tourists seem to be less predatory. In the isolation and the intimacy of the mountains there is less rigidity and more room for relationships. Or this is what I’ve concluded, anyway.
I tried to explain to MC and Elizabeth that two of my best friends that I’ve made in India were the guide and cook who accompanied me on my trek in Sikkim; who called me behni (“sister”) and with whom I felt more comfortable and open than with most of the girls I had met in my two stays there. In India especially, but also in Morocco, there is a palpable difference between mountain cultures and lowland cultures. There is a casualness in the mountains that dilutes the social stringency of the lowlands; wealth inequality is lower, so there are more comfortable and genuine interactions; separation of the sexes is less practical, so there are fewer taboos; and human interaction is less frequent than it is in cities, so when it does occur it seems to be more sincere and open.
It is true that what passed between the boys and us took place in a realm of uncertainty, where each of us was negotiating the balance of gender, cultural exchange and our own personalities and beliefs. But to me it was a successful and valuable interaction, because we steered ourselves from that potentially dangerous territory and arrived in a place where we were honest about our relationships with them.
I suppose the problem is that I can’t speak for the other party. I can’t say whether Mahdi and Hossan and Hossein valued these interactions for similarly simple and honorable reasons. But in most relationships we can’t—we can simply be sure about where we stand and proceed from there. And I would rather take risks and walk that line of uncertainty than refuse to engage people like Mahdi in any way. If I was unwilling to play with and manipulate social norms and values, would I ever make friends with locals when I traveled?
Our circumstances may have been different because they involved a material exchange, but I feel no guilt for what we gained. In the end this was not about a few glasses of tea or a cup of soup. We could have survived without these things. And by the end of the day I honestly felt as though those gestures were simply an extension of the brief friendships we had built with those boys.
I don’t think I ever successfully convinced Elizabeth and MC of the validity of these viewpoints, and in some respects I am still working to sort them out in my own mind. But when I went to bed warm that night I felt content.
After we had already tucked ourselves in, Mahdi came into the sitting room and switched on the lights. He wanted to know if it was ok if he slept in the room as well; he was uncomfortable with the idea of us three girls alone is this room in a house full of boys. He made a point of saying he would sleep on the other side of the room (next to a barricade that he had built with stools, as if that would stop anyone from coming in) and we agreed. A few minutes later he came back with his cot and blanket. He switched on the lights again and marched over to MC and I blanket in hand. “This is for you,” he announced, as he forcibly took our original blanket and gave us the new one. “This blanket is warmer,” he said as he spread it across us. “And you are like my sisters. I want you to sleep warm. I want to take care of you.” He smiled and said goodnight.
And that, to me, was the proof. The human moment (as my dear friend would say) that testified to the ability of people to care about others without further motive—for people like Mahdi, a young Berber boy living in the mountains, to look after near strangers like us, simply because we had shared conversation. MC and I slept warmly under our blanket that night, and Mahdi slept quietly on the other side of the room.

Day 3
In the morning we were up at 4:15, moving quickly to clear the evidence of our stay in the warm sitting room so that the other hikers wouldn’t despise us more than they already did. We each had a quarter loaf of left-over khubs (Moroccan bread, which comes in Frisbee sized round loaves) and part of a peanut bar that MC had bought in one of the valleys bellow. While the other hikers piled on layers of fleece and gortex (hats, gloves, fancy hiking boots and zip-off pants) we sat around awkwardly in the clothes we had slept in: the same spandex and running short combos and thin fleeces on top.
Many of the other tourists had hired guides, but we had been told that it was a relatively obvious and easy path. At 4:45 we stuck our heads out of the door, hoping for an early start that would accommodate our pace. The obvious path, however, was apparently still in hiding. The mountains (we presumed they were there) were the same color black as the sky, which was the same color black as the ground; aside from the stars indicating the line where mountains peaked and sky began, there was no way to differentiate the landscape. We knew the vague direction of Toubkal (up) but had no idea where exactly in the blackness the path began, and our lack of flashlights clearly wasn’t going to help the situation. We withdrew our heads from the cold dark and decided we needed a new strategy.
Mahdi had already tried to convince us to tag along with one of the guides but we had refused, attempting to our assert our independence. Standing in the dark and feeling the cold air sneak through our layers and raise goose bumps on our legs made us re-consider. Mahdi stood expectantly by the door as we retreated, and when he insisted again that we hike with his friend, we accepted.
We set out with Hussein and the elderly British couple that he had been guiding for almost a week. Luckily their pace was slow and allowed us to pick our way through the dark, memorizing the terrain of the path as their flashlights illuminated it piece by piece and then stepping gingerly forward. Hiking in the pitch black under pre-dawn stars feels like an incredible secret that you have been let in on, especially in isolated mountains like these. We knew we were the first group to leave that morning and that knowledge lent an extra weight to the experience: the mountain slopes around us were bare and unpopulated, waiting only for us to make our way steadily up.
As the path steepened Elizabeth’s steps grew more labored. MC and I had tried suggesting to her in the morning that her lungs might not be built for higher altitudes. She had briefly considered not going but decided, while brushing her teeth, that she had made it this far and wasn’t about to concede. So we hiked with the British couple, taking stops at each switchback and hoping that Elizabeth’s lungs would warm up and acclimatize. Twenty minutes into the hike our stops began to slow the couple down. We insisted that they go on and stayed with Elizabeth, as she sat on a rock, her head in her hands, and drew quick, short breaths.
We knew that we wouldn’t be able to find the path on our own in the dark. We also knew that the chances of Elizabeth being able to summit in a safe amount of time were slim; if she did make it, it would take hours, and we certainly wouldn’t make it out of the refuge by night. Elizabeth eventually reached these conclusions as well, though with much regret and hesitation. It is hard to watch someone my own age have to suffer the realities of physical limitations, and I stood with her on the mountain having gained a greater appreciation for the morning. For the fact that I was there and that the mountain was mine to climb, as many more mountains would be in the future (inshallah).
We waited with Elizabeth in the dark until another guided couple came up the path (we had attempted to climb in the dark but discovered that we were all fairly useless path-finders). Seizing the opportunity to attach ourselves to another guide MC and I followed them up the mountain, leaving Elizabeth to wait for the coming light and make her own way back down to the refuge.
We followed the Spanish couple and Hossan until it was light enough to make our own way. At this point sunlight was squeezing over the Toubkal range in front of us and lighting up the crest of the opposite range. MC and I split up, hiking at our own paces as the terrain went from rocky to snowy and the refuge was reduced to a grey dot in the valley below us. The sun was washing more of the mountain tops in yellow light and eventually the path opened up into a glacier-cut bowl.
The British couple, the Spanish couple, the guides and MC and I hiked within snowball throwing distance of each other, only interacting once in the two hours to help each other across a particularly narrow path that edged over a steep snowy bowl. Hossan and Hossein shouted Berber songs back and forth to each other, letting their call-backs echo in an otherwise silent, snowy ascent.
There was a final steep climb (as I tried to match my sneakered foot into the footprints that proceeded me and had to steady myself against the ground to keep my balance, I noted that I would never do this again without hiking boots and gloves) before we broke out into a more gradual approach to the pass. It seemed like we had just started hiking, but from the pass we could see that morning had settled on the High Atlas and the surrounding planes. We found our first direct sunlight of the day, and for the first time that morning I felt life return to my appendages (at the same time a renewed hunger for the summit set my blood pumping faster).
The other couples and guides had stopped, but I wasn’t ready to settle with a pass when I could have summit. As soon as MC reached the pass we set off, eager to not get stuck behind the other couples’ pace and ready to see what we had come for. Hossan and Hussein called us “crazy American girls” and shouted directions at us as we picked our way below the ridge that led to the summit. Hossan and the Spanish couple left shortly after we did and pretty soon Hossan caught up with me, singing more Berber songs about Toubkal and helping me pick out the powder-covered path that ran below the ridge.
I was at the head of the first group of hikers and there was an incredible glory to charting the first steps to the summit that morning. The snow had fallen in large flakes the day before, and it glistened in crystalline banks of powder under the sun. When the summit marker came into view Hossan and MC were just far enough behind me that I was allowed a moment with the mountain: a feeling of discovery and maybe (vainly) a sense of ownership.
This was beauty and I had discovered it. My breaths were shallow but I was filled with a newly discovered purpose of being: in that moment of isolation from humanity, standing on a mountain that I had pushed myself to the top of, I felt that I existed simply to travel the world; to experience it and understand it and look upon it from mountaintops.
Thirty seconds later I was brought back to the real world, as Hossan came panting up from behind me to give me a high five. “Hey gazelle,” he said. “Nice job.” MC ran up behind him and the three of us stood together, taking in 360 degree views of different landscapes (rugged mountains, folding hills, green valleys and red plains) colored in different shades of morning light. Hossan sang us more Berber songs and was soon joined by Hussein in serenading the other hikers as they flooded in over the round edge of the summit.
There was a certain satisfaction to being first up the mountain that day, aside from the personal moment that it afforded with the mountain. As the dozen or so other hikers from the refuge eventually made it to the summit they seemed surprised to see us up there. I think, in our persistence and triumph that morning, we earned back some respect in the eyes of the other hikers who had discredited us. We may not have had the gear or the money to do the trek the way they had, but we proved that we had as much of a right to experience the mountain as they did.


Advertisement



Tot: 0.095s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 10; qc: 59; dbt: 0.0595s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.3mb