Beating the cold
OUR COLDEST EXPERIENCE? We were in the middle of a nine-month tour of South America. It was before the World Records and Globebusters had been thought up and before heated vests were on our pack list.
We were two-up, heading up to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. We’d read about a field of geysers near there called El Tatio, at about 4320 metres in the Andes. All the locals were telling us how wonderful they were but you had to be there at first light, when the heat and steam of the geysers mixes with the chilly/chile morning air. We knew it was high altitude and that it wouldn’t be as warm as San Pedro, but we had all our camping kit with us, so we thought: why on earth not?
The ride up was a bone-rattling dirt road. Two-up, it was an excruciating two-and-a-half hours and as we climbed higher and the temperature dropped lower, it became apparent that our kit was woefully inadequate.
In those days, we rode wearing just normal walking trousers with some knee pads; we didn’t have thermal layers or even an over-jacket. We arrived at the geyser fields shivering uncontrollably, just as the sun was disappearing behind the looming volcanoes.
The temperature plummeted. We started putting on what layers we did have with us: jumper, riding jacket, woolly hat, extra socks...
We decided a meal would help, so we boiled up a bit of pasta but it was still unbearably cold. We finally climbed into our sleeping bags, fully clothed.
I must have dozed off to start with but I don’t think it was too long after that I woke up. I looked up at the ceiling of the tent, to see the condensation from our breath frozen solid on the inside. I tried to shift position in my bag to get a bit more comfortable but I became aware that I was unable to move my head; the woolly hat I was wearing had frozen to the side of the tent. Everything in and outside of the tent was frozen solid.
There was no chance of getting back to sleep. We just lay there, freezing cold, waiting for the sun to come up. Finally, it did and the geysers started to perform.
An hour or so later, we were just starting to feel the warmth from the sun coming through but it was still bitterly cold. We packed up and headed back down towards sea level and warmth.
Lesson learned.