Conquering Kili in Trek4Mandela
Sibusiso Vilane is off to Everest for the third time – after two marathons and the Trek4Mandela
SIBUSISO Vilane is gearing up to climbing Everest soon. And when he’s finished, he’s going to run the Comrades in June, then climb Kilimanjaro for the Madiba Centenary edition of Trek4Mandela. But before then, he’ll run the Two Oceans over Easter.
It’s a stupendous amount of exercise, but then, Vilane is no ordinary person. The first black African to summit Everest, in 2003, he repeated the triumph two years later from the other side. Then he did the seven summit challenge, knocking off the highest peaks on the six other continents, in 2008, as well as going to the South Pole with fellow mountaineer, Alex Harris.
They walked from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole unassisted – 1 200km, the first – and, to date, only – South Africans to do this.
By 2012, he’d completed the triple poles (the two ends of the earth and the highest point), when he trekked to the North Pole.
To look at him, you’d never think it. He’s humble to the point of self-effacing, lithely built, but when he speaks the room quietens and everyone listens. There is an unmistakeable authority he exudes, even if you didn’t know who he was.
“I don’t climb mountains,” he tells aspirant climbers at The Nest in the Drakensberg, “I walk up them.”
There’s nervous laughter at his self-deprecation. The 40 hopefuls are in the Berg as part of this year’s Trek4Mandela, bidding to summit Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak at 5 895m. This will be Vilane’s 23rd ascent of the Tanzanian peak – if you count last year’s double ascent on the Trek as two.
He pioneered the Trek4Mandela with Caring4Girls founder and social entrepreneur Richard Mabaso, after Mabaso phoned him in 2012 with his idea to scale the peak to raise awareness of the plight of poor girls forced to miss school because of their periods – and break the taboo associated with it.
The first year it was just the two of them. Now there are 40 people ready for their briefing before what will be for many of them their first climb in the Drakensberg, a “leg-stretching” 22km hike up 1 000m and across the face of Cathkin Peak and Monk’s Cowl the next day.
“Don’t think about tomorrow,” Vilane advises, “in the mountains we only focus on one day at a time.”
In the group are three of the six climbers who will be accompanying him to Nepal on April 2. Two of them are products of the Trek4Mandela project.
They are going to climb with him Base Camp at Everest, then he’ll spend 58 days building up his strength and acclimatising, before tackling the world’s highest mountain – this time, without oxygen.
“It’s absolute madness to go back for a third attempt,” he says. “I last summited nearly 13 years ago and then the curiosity entered my head: only a handful of climbers have done it without oxygen, can I? I’m not interested in reaching the summit with oxygen – I’ve done that twice.”
Vilane is inspired by Reinhold Messner, the Austrian mountaineer who was the first to summit Everest without oxygen in 1978. Messner stunned the world’s doctors with his successful ascent without oxygen, disproving medical theory that the rarefied air, with only 30% of the oxygen there is at sea level, would disorientate climbers and kill them on sustained exposure.
But Vilane’s not foolhardy either – he will carry oxygen with him in his bid, but if he feels he has to use it in the mountain’s death zone above 8 000m, he will turn back and go down.
“The summit will be when my body says ‘no more’.”
There’s every chance though that he will succeed in his quest. He is in incredible shape and training hard. If he does, the fairy tale will continue, like when he first summited Everest in 2003.
Then, he was on a whim. He had been challenged to climb Everest after being told by a guest at the Malolotja Nature Reserve in Swaziland where he worked that he had all the makings of a natural mountaineer. Vilane had dismissed the thought – he’d never even seen a picture of the mountain.
But then the man, John Doble, asked if he would do it if money wasn’t an option. Vilane said yes.
He started by climbing the peaks in the Drakensberg, followed by his successful first summit of Kilimanjaro in 1999. In 2002, having forgotten about Everest, he suddenly received a letter from Doble.
Doble had found a group going to Nepal to summit Everest for the 50th anniversary of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s historic ascent, but first Vilane would have to join a trekking group going to Khumbu valley near Everest to practise ascents on the nearby peaks. Vilane applied for his annual leave from the game lodge, without telling anyone why or where he was going. “I didn’t think they’d let me,” he says. He hadn’t trained, but summitted Pokalde and Island Peak, both over 6 000m. He was in, but had to raise $40 000.
“I told John, who would sponsor a novice?” But he did get sponsored, by a Good Samaritan who believed in his dream, getting to the top of Everest in 2003 and making history.
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For more about Trek4Mandela or to donate to Caring4Girls,e-mail: nkateko@imbumbafoundation.org or call: 011 883 0379.