by Edi Fine
PureTravel Writing Competition 2025
Well I’m sorry. People talk about you as one nobody should travel with. There was a decision to be made, there was snow and smoke. You were in great shape, You have climbed a lot of mountains. I was a guest in unfamiliar weather – like an Agama lizard in an ice cold ocean. This trip was a mistake. My choice of a traveling partner was far from perfect. The recommended duration for the track was 14 days. It included times of rest, in order for the body to adjust to the height. My partner and I teamed up with a group of athletes. They were in a race against themselves and walked twice as fast than the recommendation. It was not too hard, but the scenery became something to pass through rather than a sight to be admired. My legs carried the weight, but as we climbed higher and higher, weird sensations started to indicate something was wrong.
Three days later, I was sitting on a small horse, descending from the same mountain. I should have stopped before. I was Deaf to my own intuition and that led me close to death. We slept on the second floor of a wooden guest house. Smoke from the kitchen penetrated my lungs making me breathe heavily. I had a severe case of altitude sickness. I felt as if my head was pressed with a vise, squeezing my temples. There was nothing I could do but wait. I told you and your friends you should go out to the mountain pass. It’s a challenge for people in good health and I was ill. I hate quitting but I guess I dislike dying even more. It was cold and I blamed myself for accepting the rooms that were full of smoke. I knew smoke could irritate my respiratory system and might even cause me to have an asthma attack. They agreed and went on ,leaving me all alone.
I gave the peak a last look and started walking in the opposite direction. Weak and exhausted, I slowly dragged my feet in the cold snow. It took me four hours to go down a section of the mountain that a day before took me only half an hour to walk uphill. Every few seconds I stopped, catching my breath. My water ran out. I took some snow that lay on a branch of a tree and put it in my mouth. I was sure it was clean and that it would help me but it had the opposite effect. My nausea only got worse. Each step created an echo that sounded like the chewing of a giant. My spit had a strange taste like it belonged to an old man I did not know. My face was numb, the lips were cracked. I tried to wet them with my tongue. They were swollen and rough. I hoped that no part of my face would fall. The nose felt as if I got punched by a professional boxer. My ears were in pain, they were partly covered with a hat but it didn’t help much.
With no water, no doctors around, I decided to perform a kung fu kata that is designed to increase energy level. I took a deep breath, as much as I could. Then quickly exhaled the frozen air. With my arms alongside my body I closed both of my palms into fists. Then I bent my arms with a big “hoo” sound. I opened the index fingers, pointing them to the sky, while the other fingers were kept relatively closed. Then I pushed an imaginary enemy, shaking and making horrible noises like a crazy bear. Some moves resembled a grasshopper being electrified. I stood there surrounded by a carpet of white snow in a kung fu horse stance. I bent my knees slightly, not as low as needed. It was impossible to bend my knees more, I barely stood as a normal human being. I stopped in the middle of the kata, because I did not remember the rest – a quitter, again.
Performing the kung fu kata helped a little. I dragged myself to the nearest lodge, a small and crumbling structure nobody rented but me. I lay on the bed with no power to move, and ate a very strange garlic soup from a tin can. I almost threw up. At night I didn’t have any strength to walk to the toilet so I urinated in the tin. This was humiliating. I felt so helpless.
Morning came. I approached the owner of the motel and asked for his assistance. I said I needed a horse to take me down the mountain. An hour later a small boy, maybe eleven years old, came with a very short pony. I sat on the pony and he walked me down the mountain. It was very expensive, the cost of a week’s traveling. I paid. Each meter we descended my lungs thanked me. The sun began to shine, warming my sick body and mind. I used to ride horses and I felt like a baby who needed somebody to hold the horse for him. My masculinity took a hard blow.
Some tourists spoke between themselves: Where are his friends? Did they abandon him? What’s wrong with him? I was too exhausted to answer. I felt ashamed. Everybody is going up. I’m the only one coming down. Finally I got off the horse, rested and took my time – giving my body a chance to recover. I warned people not to sleep above kitchens. That was the only thing I could do. I reached the home base, where I drank hot tea and observed the lake. The group arrived. They told me that the pass was hard. Some even had to use oxygen masks. Short, tall, fat, slim, girls, boys, old people – all passed but me. A failure. The guy who traveled with me and left me behind claimed that I didn’t miss much. He said the view of the rest of the track resembled that of the first half. Something died between us. I was the one who suggested that I stay there and gave him my blessing to continue. Yet we both knew that I could not ask him to stay. He was closer to the other group members than he was to me. The friendship was exposed for its mediocrity. It was on a train a week later. He met a local family and continued with them. He said he would sleep there for a couple of days. We didn’t meet again. Since then I never went on a track in the cold mountains. I’m like an Agama lizard. Next week I will fly on a trip to Africa.
Photo by Stephanie Bergeron on Unsplash
