Opinion: Peak performance

Posted on 12 Oct 2009 at 11:22

 

Gallery

After climbing to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro with a stag party from Essex and a foul-mouthed parrot, David Robinson celebrates by trying to send a text message.

This last month has been one full of milestones. The most significant, I suppose, is that I've finally qualified for a bus pass. I wasn't looking forward to the event but, as Effing Jeff had reminded me, the alternative - ie, not making it to 60 - was definitely less desirable.

At least there are some benefits, including cheap rail travel and the winter heating allowance. It seems that the government tracked the anniversary and sent me, without prompting, a colon cancer test kit that consisted of six small sticks and an envelope in which to return the samples. Apparently it's standard procedure for all new senior citizens. It brings a whole new dimension to the game of Pooh Sticks, though (sorry for conjuring up that image).

Also this month - nothing to do with either the 60th birthday or Comic Relief - I completed an ascent of Kilimanjaro. A year after our Everest trip, Lee (see Shopper, 240) had wanderlust again and decided that, since K2 was too dangerous, Kilimanjaro, via the harder Machame route, would do as a substitute. Like last time, we booked everything through The Adventure Company (http://tinyurl.com/kp865m), who took care of all the mind-boggling details.

Weight and scree

One lesson I'd learned after Nepal was to take as little with me as I could get away with. So, instead of a DSLR camera and multiple lenses, I took a Fuji FP710 compact. Email? Well, the Palm Tungsten and JVC laptop were staying at home, too. All that weight adds up when you're slogging up a 30° scree slope at an altitude of 15,000 feet.

Despite being a complete klutz at micro device interfaces, I decided to rely on my Nokia N73 phone. I'd always shied away from using this for email as composing text on the tiny 12-key keyboard is tedious; I've never acquired the familiarity that teenagers seem to have for rattling off texts at 60 words per minute.

Various blogs of Kili-climbers had mentioned that you could get a mobile signal from the summit, so I hoped to send a message home if I ever made it to the top.

Setting up the N73 to send emails was easier than I thought it might be; at least, it was after I'd RTFM and settled for mail going out with a dr@o2.com type address rather than my 'normal' address based on our own server.

Receiving mail from the server was somewhat less easy. OK, make that nigh on impossible. There were no big security issues as all I needed to do was access the right POP3 mailbox, but nothing seemed to work. So I resorted to O2 tech support. The man there led me through a couple of million screens with half a million settings and, mirabile dictu, it worked first time.

I opted to download just the message headers so I could save on bandwidth and not clog up the inbox with loads of marketing rubbish. That way I could download just the message bodies for the ones that looked like they needed attention which, from customers, tend to be text-only anyway.

Coarse and groom

The party we were with had the usual Adventure Company maximum of 16, including four Essex lads on a stag do (in my day we went to the pub the night before the ceremony and your mates chained you to a lamp-post. Now everything seems more complicated and expensive.)