I have to climb a mountain in June. A proper one, with ice and axes and plastic boots. I know nothing about mountain climbing, but it seemed like a good idea when Mr. Salter suggested it. It wasn´t until I had eight hours on a bus to Mexico that I started to read a book about climbing mountains. I suddenly remembered I am afraid of heights. For examlpe, I can´t get too close to the windows at the top of the Sears tower. Despite my fear, I have jumped out of planes, bungeed over gambling towns, scaled buildings without ropes, and abseiled from the odd mountain here and there. The ascents generally involve alcohol, and the descents involve a brief push with no opportunity to turn back. But none of these things has involved sixteen hours of tortuous high altitude slog dressed like a Gundarm.
The book I was reading didn´t help. It´s the story of multiple simultaneous expedition casualties on Everest on May 10th 1996. True, my target of Mont Blanc isn´t anything like Everest. It isn´t even the highest peak in Europe. But then again, I have no training in mountain climbing, whereas the Everest teams had variously accomplished much in the field before their demises. It made me want to get off the bus and run back to the local gym in Austin and start using a Stairmaster wearing a backpack full of bricks. I need to train it seems, to avoid vomitting and exploding and discontinuing at altitude. As I left the comfort of my solid stool lifestyle in Austin and crossed into the slightly less hospitable man-with-watery-bowels-and-a-backpack routine in Mexico, I fell with a bump from my cotton wool cradle.
So I arrived in Nuevo Loredo at about 9pm last night, hot, tired and in no mood to lay waste to my body. The whole point of my trip is one of administration and passport stamping. I had orginally planned to paint the seedy border town seven different shades of red for a few days, and then head back to Texas with a fresh 90 day US tourist visa in my passport. But I was now terrified by my lack of fitness, and feared the decay that my body would suffer if subjected to too much fun and not enough sleep. I decided on moderation, and robust dining.