Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 3
If I were an ant, I reckon I’d find the world very mountainous. So many humps and bumps that we strange two-legged creatures take literally in our stride. However, I’m not an ant but I do have a fascination with mountains. I’ve seen a great variety of them. When choosing a holiday destination in South Africa, it was usually a choice between the beach, mountains or a game reserve. I always wanted to go to the mountains, but the family usually voted for the beach. In some instances, one could combine both beach and mountains. In and around Cape Town, one could include game parks as well.
Anyway, today I’m going to take you on a tour of mountains I have either seen or climbed. First of all, I was born in Weybridge, Surrey, England. No mountains there, although as a small child my dad would take me in winter to the golf club in St. George’s Hills where, if the snow were thick enough, we would toboggan down the slopes.
During World War II, I was evacuated from Weybridge due to the proximity of the Vickers Armstrong aircraft factory built on the site of the old Brooklands racetrack (the first major motor vehicle racetrack in Europe, built in 1907). The factory took advantage of the then-derelict area of the abandoned track. Although Weybridge was not an industrial town, Vickers Armstrong became a prime target for German bombers. Our house was about three miles away, so I was sent to Devon, then Wales and finally Scotland. The latter two places boasted of small but actual mountains. In Wales the valleys between the peaks were so narrow that it gave an illusion of height. It was also very beautiful.
After the war, my parents decided to immigrate to South Africa (my mother was born there) but ships were booked up for months ahead and air travel was still in its infancy. My dad decided that we should travel any way we could and did not wait. He secured berths on a Greek liner leaving from Marseilles for Alexandria in Egypt – at some undisclosed time in the future. So, we went to wait for the ship in Switzerland. Not very logical but my dad did have many strange ideas.
Fortunately, it brought me into close proximity with some real mountains and I fell in love with the glorious Alpine peaks, starting with the rather rounded and not very high mountains encircling Lac de Genève, where we stayed in the village of Pully just outside Lausanne for a month or so. We then relocated to another even smaller village in the Engadine Valley outside St. Moritz. We were now surrounded by some serious mountains, many with snow on the peaks even in spring, when we arrived. I was in my seventh mountainous heaven. We would climb the lower slopes and I would stare with a kind of longing at the tops of the mountains but there was no way a child of ten could make it to the top.
Nevertheless, we went for long walks in the valleys and lower slopes. We even got caught in a rock avalanche one day and had to hide behind an enormous boulder while a sizable shower of smaller rocks and boulders bounced around both sides of our refuge. Later, my dad went with a group to climb a nearby glacier where they saw (of all things) a wooden leg frozen beneath the ice. How did a man with one leg get up there, let alone leave his leg behind? The mystery was solved when they found out that a film crew had made a movie there and left the leg behind. Although it was now summer, we explored the St. Moritz ski jump, climbed to the top of it and wondered at the brave souls who launched their bodies into the air on their skis and landed way below. We also saw the Cresta Run bobsled track where my grandfather had represented Britain in the Olympic games. e also raced cars at Brooklands track and in all other respects was a pretty useless being with more money than sense – the money finally he spent, leaving nothing for the family!
On to Egypt, when the ship left eight months later. No mountains but on the way, the ship passed by two volcanoes, Mount Etna and Stromboli, one of which was erupting in an unspectacular way. In Egypt we did at least see the pyramids and the Sphinx, even being taken inside the main pyramid by the curator of the Egyptian Museum, whom my dad had somehow befriended.
We flew to Kenya (with an overnight in Khartoum – planes didn’t go that far in those days) and arrived in Nairobi the following day to stay with my slightly mad grandfather. He reluctantly showed us some wildlife, although he was by now a leading butterfly collector and not interested in the big stuff. We did see some distant mountains, in particular Mount Kilimanjaro. Despite being virtually on the equator, it did have snow on its peak.
We took a ship to Durban, South Africa, saw no mountains there, but drove 1,200 miles to Cape Town, with a couple of spectacular mountain passes along the way, arriving at arguably the most beautiful city in the world.
Of all the mountains in my life, Table Mountain looming large directly above the city probably had the greatest effect on my mountain mania. Every school holiday I would walk to Kirstenbosch Gardens (not far from our house) and from there climb up Skeleton Gorge which rose up at the back of Table Mountain. Quite a long walk from there on the top of the mountain took me to the cableway and restaurant overlooking the city. If I was tired, I would take the cable car down and catch a bus home. If I had some energy left, I would return the way I came. One day, showing off with a group of friends, I trotted along a narrow track above the gorge, tripped and fell over the edge of a drop of at least a hundred feet. Luckily, I landed in a tree just below the lip of the gorge and was pulled out by my freaked-out friends.
I went to school at Michaelhouse in Natal, a famous school modelled on the old English public school lines. To get there I would travel two days and three nights by train, where all kinds of adventures took place. In the far distance from the school, the glorious 1,200-mile-long Drakensberg range could just be seen. At the time, I only visited the mountains once with my parents. I experienced my first ride on a horse which obliging ambled along a track and across some streams quite high into the foothills. The moment I turned the dreadful nag around, it started to gallop back for home, with me clinging desperately to the pommel of the saddle as we splashed through the streams and narrow track at speed, and I arrived back at the hotel in a state of total terror. I have seldom ridden a horse again!
After leaving school, I joined my parents who were now living in Walvis Bay, the only port of what is now Namibia. It is surrounded by desert on three sides and the Atlantic Ocean on the fourth. Surprisingly much of the desert is very beautiful. Namibia has the highest sand dunes in the world and is the oldest desert on Earth. Naturally I fell in love with these monster dunes. Dune 7 on the outskirts of Walvis Bay is over 1,200 feet high. It has become a biker’s paradise as they venture up the side with a slope and try to avoid the sheer drop on other side. There have been some fatalities. Climbing a nearby dune, I encountered an ancient German gentleman putting skis on his feet and skiing down the steep slope. Before he went, he grumbled that it was not as good as snow back home, but it was better than nothing.
In the middle of the Namib desert, the Brandberg mountain rises some 8,500 feet. It stands virtually alone and is considered by the local tribes to have certain spiritual qualities. A friend of mine once took a plane belonging to Swakopmund town’s flying club and decided he could land near the top of the Brandberg. He did so but found that the plane’s engine did not have the power to take off again. He was not a popular person after that. Some months later, a team of mechanics took a larger engine, climbed the mountain and fitted it into the plane. My friend was them told to take off and return the plane to the flying club, which he did with his tail very much between his legs.
Whilst back in Britain for five years, at age nineteen, I hitch-hiked and canoed through France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. I saw numerous mountains in the process and remained in awe of these pinnacles to nature. In particular, I recall the fabulous Maloja Pass which descends from the Engadine at an altitude of 1,815 meters to the Val Bregaglia and the Italian lake district of Como, Lugano and Maggiore far below. The tiny mountainous principality of Liechtenstein was another special moment on my way to Munich for the Oktoberfest – a beer drinker’s heaven if you can take the noise of Umpa Brass bands and sweaty men dressed in lederhosen.
Back in South Africa, I got to climb the Drakensberg’s Cathedral Peak and the Cleft, the highest point in the mountain range. To be clear, there was no rock climbing involved. There was a path to both summits and the view from the summits was breathtaking. The nearest I got to rock climbing was when I went to the kingdom of Lesotho on the far side of the Drakensberg where a branch of the “Outward Bound” movement had been established.
The original “Outward Bound” was created during World War II in Wales. It provided a tough series of challenges for young merchant seamen, who were frequently torpedoed in the Atlantic by German U-boats. It was found that the much older seamen survived better than the youngsters because of their life experiences. The youngsters generally had not encountered much adversity and could not cope with surviving a sinking ship. The Lesotho version was primarily aimed at both black and white students from the cities, to teach them survival and, often, leadership. This course comprised canoeing, sailing, hiking and the art of abseiling, descending a rock face surface using a rope coiled around the body. I was there to research a script for a film on the place and therefore participated in all of their disciplines. Abseiling was initially terrifying when I had to step backwards over the edge of a 300-foot cliff and then lower myself on the roping gear that ensured a smooth descent. Once I started descending, it was actually an almost euphoric experience, so much so that I descended too fast and thumped into the ground at the bottom of the cliff. Sadly, the funding for the film never materialized but it was a great experience.
Visiting North America, I went to Yosemite, probably the most spectacular cliff face in the world, with climbers actually pitching a tent and sleeping overnight on the cliff face. It was a two-day climb. I drove past Mount Shasta, an extinct volcano, and in Canada staying with my cousin in Vancouver, I was treated to the experience of visiting a ski slope on the Rockies in the morning and watching yachts sailing on the same day in the sea below.
Later, my wife and I took a cable car ride in Austria and looked far down on a white wonderworld of snow and rocky mountain slopes. It was the day I decided that mountains had been a significant part of my life that I will always remember.
The creation and launching of the ExoBrain is another mountain to climb and once it is fully on its way to reach the summit of all computing successes, I shall gladly rappel down and write some more poems!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.