notes and images
If you like hiking and you have a child, well, the good news is you can keep hiking. I did a lot of research online before our kid arrived about the best heavy duty child carrier. I wanted something that could conceivably support an overnight camping hike. The Osprey Poco gets a lot of love online, and deservedly so.
This thing transformed my life, because it showed me you can take your kid anywhere.
The wind only howls when you’re inside. Something about the pipes and cavities in a building seems to cause the eerie wail that changes pitch like a theremin in a fifties sci-fi classic. Outside, at nearly 4,000 meters, above a glacier and far from the nearest building, the wind just roars. It’s less like a vintage cinema score and more like standing behind a jet airliner at the end of a runway; a relentless loud roar that varies only in how hard it buffets you as you balance – or try to – on a path made of loose boulders on a twenty degree slope. That’s all I was aware of, that and the fiercely bright blue sky, as I made my way up the shoulder of Malchin Peak, a 4,050 meter high pile of grey boulders above the Potani Glacier in the far west of Mongolia. The altitude didn’t bother me; the boulders didn’t bother me. But that roar was so loud it seemed to consume the very oxygen around. The summit seemed so close, the visual definition crystal clear in the frighteningly bright and blinding sun. But I knew I wasn’t going to reach it. That roaring wind literally blew it from my grasp.
Turns out you can do pretty much anything with a toddler. Sure, it can be tiring. Yes, it’s sometimes daunting. And true, the idea of brunch every Sunday can often seem more appealing in the short term than planning and doing an eight day camping trip in a remote place far from any services. But, really, all you need to do is get out your door. That’s always the hardest part. And like many things that are hard, this trip was correspondingly memorable, and so rewarding. To see our child in the wilderness, playing happily with new friends just met, with only the unspoken language of childhood in common; to lay a foundation in her subconscious for a lifelong love of the outdoors; this alone made it worthwhile. The incredible trip we had while doing that was just a bonus.
The first time I took my daughter hiking without her mother, she was just learning to walk (the kid, I mean!). Because this was a test run, I brought my sister along (now a new mum herself). But the challenge arose from the fact little W was still breast-feeding. My sister’s great, but (back then) she couldn’t help with that. Instead, I had a bottle of frozen milk and my PocketRocket…
There’s only so many Chinese New Years you want to spend in Beijing. Cold, fireworks so incessant it sounds like one of those week-long artillery barrages from some horrible war, and smog spikes from all that gunpowder smoke. Oh for somewhere a little warmer, clearer, and quieter. This year, having run out of entries on our China visas, we travelled “guo nei” and took the short hop down to Fujian Province’s Wuyi Mountains…
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