I’ll be really honest Ethiopia came from James.
That was one year ago and we had a three
month old baby and my head was full of nappies, pee,
poo and how to survive the next night.
I mean I think in a normal situation I would have been
able to place Ethiopia on the map but I think
I might have even asked on which continent it was.
Coming to Africa with a baby… yeah…
might be shocking for a lot of people to hear, but why not?
We wanted to bring him here to share with him our
experience but actually in reality I think we’re
here with him sharing his experience of Africa.
He looks at camels and donkeys for the first time with these
giant wondrous eyes.
I guess for us life’s all about curiosity and not
being afraid of the unknown.
It’s that kind of drive you have within just
to go look around the corner and just see what’s there.
I guess we’re trying our best as parents to lead
by example and we want Arthur to be part of this trip not
only for him to experience the now but also because he’ll
be able to draw strength and courage
from it in the future.
As we travelled through the north of Ethiopia we saw
all these churches. Some of them —
you can see the access is makeable. Some of them,
they’re like 30, 60,
or 70 metres up the cliff and at an era where
there were no dynamic ropes, no modern protections —
it’s so impressive actually to come closer and to see
what has been done so long ago.
All of that in the name of faith. That made us curious.
We wanted to see how hard the climbing was gonna
be there you know.
Our first objective for the trip was Sheba tower.
This amazing tower first climbed by Pat Littlejohn
who’s a bit of a legend in British trad
climbing way back in 2005.
You can really understand why Pat would have chosen
this tower as the first tower he climbed in Tigray,
as it’s basically the most visually
impressive tower in the region.
It’s somewhere around 150 metres high…
definitely the highest tower that we’ve seen here
and it’s got this huge crack running all the way
from the floor to the summit.
I mean the thing is so big that you can see
it from the road and I guess the general rule of thumb
is whenever you can see a crack like that looks
like it’s going to be a hand crack or maybe a wide crack,
actually it’s going to be much much bigger than that.
The first pitch is somewhere around 40 to 50 metres long
and I think I placed two pieces of gear
which is not very normal.
It is actually really incredible this Sheba tower.
You have this giant hundred and fifty metre tower
and pretty much the only way up is up this chimney.
And it actually is a crack that just breaks
the whole tower.
It’s just about the right width for a human to just squeeze up.
Every single time you take a new hold you have
to like bump on it to kind of break whatever is not
solid and then when you place your foothold you have
to like crunch everything and go with whatever’s left.
And if you go faster than that, for sure you’ll fall.
At some point you step out from the inner sanctums
of the tower and get onto the summit and
it’s just incredible.
All around you down there are these yellow plains.
Standing on top of the tower like that is simply magical.
I think this is exactly why we came.
One thing that I definitely didn’t think about bringing
Arthur on this trip with us is how
easy it’s been to connect with the local people,
thanks to Arthur.
As soon as they see you walking down
the street everybody just wants to come
over and look at him… touch his hand… give him a kiss…
say hello. And Arthur’s really cool,
he interacts with these people in such crazy wonderful ways
really and everyone’s been totally in love with him
and through that I guess ice breaking experience
it’s like suddenly Arthur makes everything possible.
James and I really wanted Arthur to be a citizen of the world.
We don’t feel French or English.
We feel human and we really want Arthur to be like that.
We want him to remember either consciously or via the pictures
that he’s been there.
He’ll know that when he was one he did it already.
He climbed this mountain. Okay, he was on my back…
you know he doesn’t have to cross these big
barrier into the unknown.
I think it makes a massive difference between the ‘what
can I do’ and ‘what can I not do.’
He’ll know that he can do it because he’s already
done it anyway.
So we climbed a few more of the existing towers
in the region just to get a feel of things. And then,
well, it was time to go look for our own thing.
We took days to search for the best tower and that one…
I don’t know.
There was something really special about it.
Maybe the fact that it was leaning
so much and it looked like it was about to fall.
The problem was there was there was no crack whatsoever…
No easy path up.
It meant we would have to climb up the face.
I’m heartbroken this morning.
Every morning we leave Arthur with Jane and my dad
to take care of him all day.
And yesterday he played with the kids of the village.
So I think you had a really cool day.
But then he didn’t manage to fall asleep
for his first snooze today.
So when we left Arthur was crying out of his mind
and that makes me really (sad).
I think you can be selfish as a parent and want adventure,
and this is a place where clearly we can’t bring Arthur,
as long as you make sure your baby’s having a great time.
And I think he’s way happier playing than like climbing up
with us and he’s not roasting which is - for a white British,
half-British baby – you know, sun is a big problem.
You’re gonna gear up everything?
Yeah, I’m going to gear up here.
Well, it means I don’t have to haul it in the bag.
As soon as we started I think James went for the lead and he…
He took about two hours to do five meters and I think
this is really the moment where both him and I, we knew
our chances were not very high.
The rock here take things to another level completely.
Sometimes you get these strange iron deposits
on the face of the rock which seem to be good holds
but they’re glued to the rock by this very
very unstable sandstone.
And if these things protrude and make decent grips
basically they just break off as soon as you put
any weight on them.
When you’re not climbing on the iron rock you’re
climbing on just very loosely held together sand.
So much so that if you just rub the surface with your
fingers you can see all the grains coming off
immediately and any small gear —
if he doesn’t pull through straight away you might be
lucky and be able to fall on it once before the placement
explodes it’s ruined forever.
So it is a very very complicated rock to climb on.
Allez! Come on, good job! Good job!
That’s it you’re at the belay. Okay. Okay.
This is mental.
I’m serious, this is really mental…
It’s okay. You just gotta be careful.
You didn’t know… you don’t know.
Alright, bad news is next pitch looks worse.
And it’s your turn.
James only gets cramps when he’s done dangerous
climbing and he was just he was climbing like that.
It must be getting on for about 5 p.m.
and Caroline is setting off up the next pitch.
I think we’re both pretty tired.
I’ve got loads and loads of cramps from basically
I don’t know hammering and hanging around and just
doing all sorts of silly things.
But Carol’s still got some energy so we’re pushing
on and we’ll see how far she can get before we decide
to call it a day.
If James hadn’t been at the end of his life I would have
never stepped in but I had to.
I went through the whole process of like every hold
you take you like,
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I can’t do it!”
and you’re kind of really like shitting yourself,
basically. You know this moment where your
stomach is kind of a kind of liquefying a little bit?
Like, this was really happening and James was like,
“You’re doing good. You’re doing super well”
Like just exactly the way he was encouraging
me through birth.
It was getting the end of the day and I really
wanted to finish that pitch because we would have to fix
the ropes and it was much better to be able to finish the pitch.
But I had to basically mantle and like palm on top
of a pebble.
That’s all that there was…
the whole time was like,
”Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
And somehow I didn’t fall.
And it was fine and I finished the pitch
and we went down.
It’s gonna take forever to pass that.
I don’t know.
We’ll find out when we get there.
But it’d be cool standing on top.
If it’s not full of cactus.
Might be full of cactus.
Well, we’re back today to try and finish it off.
We’re going to try and free all the pitches that we,
that we climbed yesterday and had to stop to maybe check
out some gear or place a piton.
So hopefully today is the day we’re going to be on top
of that thing a little bit later.
Yesterday was definitely the first
first time I really went for adventure climbing since Arthur was born.
Physically I’m fully on it.
Mentally I’m fully on it as well.
I just didn’t have any practice time for trad climbing
because we were mainly focusing on bouldering.
You can’t do multi-pitch trad climbing with a baby.
You have to have somebody take care of him.
So it was the first occasion we had and we just
went for Ethiopia desert shitty sandstone tower!
James: “Okay Carolina! Climb when ready!”
Okay.
There’s a few theories going around as to why they built
these churches in these incredibly
isolated hard to reach places.
You know one being that they wanted to be all
alone so they could focus 100 percent on their religion.
Another obviously being the higher up you go
the closer to God.
I’m not a religious person but having stepped
on the top of one of these towers for the first time
and felt the power that brings
I think I can understand why they want to be up there.