- ‘If I’d met someone who told me they were climbing volcanoes to bring back memories of their dead father I’d have thought they were nuts,’ Sophie Cairns writes
- Her book about her quest to set a climbing world record and to escape ‘this grief-stricken world’ comes alive when she reminisces about her Hong Kong childhood
Climbing the Seven Volcanoes: A Search for Strength, by Sophie Cairns, Amberley, 4 stars
When Sophie Cairns' parents announced that the family was leaving Hong Kong, where she was born and raised, she vowed to return. A teenager, biracial and fluent in Cantonese, she never felt like she belonged in the UK, and longed for the Hong Kong of her childhood.
Cairns later joined the South China Morning Post as a reporter and was working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Shanghai, China, when her father suddenly fell ill from lung cancer in 2008. She asked for a transfer to the agency's Paris bureau and told her father she would be back in a week after she cleared out her Shanghai apartment. She never saw her father alive again.
Cairns suffered from massive guilt over her father's death. To deal with her grief, she started climbing mountains. This evolved into a project to climb the tallest volcanoes on each continent, with the objectives to set a world record, raise money for cancer research, and, somehow, feel more connected to her father.
Climbing the Seven Volcanoes tells the story of her climbs, the literal and figurative ups and downs of reaching the tops of these volcanoes, often more than 5,000 metres above sea level, a challenge complicated by asthma.
Cairns chose to climb these seven volcanoes because most mountain climbers concentrate on reaching the highest mountain summits. But no one had yet climbed all of the seven highest volcanoes. The stories of her climbs are exciting and often frustrating, especially when she's grouped with taciturn guides and hotshot climbing partners. But it's her flashbacks to Hong Kong that brings her story to another level.
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"Lush waterfalls of bougainvillea hung over the walls of our weekend house in Hong Kong. Every Friday evening, my parents and I drove out to the New Territories to spend lazy afternoons by the pool and hike the nearby hills. My father especially loved his garden, with its fat waxy grass and tropical plants. Sometimes my Chinese grandparents and cousins visited, and the whole family spent a happy afternoon picking lychees and longans off the trees, packed them in newspaper to take home."
On her climbs, Cairns was careful to share her real reason for her goal of reaching the top of these seven volcanoes. As a solo woman traveller (her husband stayed at home in the UK for all but one of the adventures), she often stood out, and felt she had to prove herself strong enough for these climbs.
"If I'd met someone who told me they were attempting to climb volcanoes to bring back memories of their dead father, I'd have thought they were nuts."
As it turned out, Cairns was stronger than most of the other climbers she encountered, including many of the guides. But she did experience setbacks on almost every climb, which prompted her to re-evaluate her reasons for trying to set this record and her guilt over leaving her father on his deathbed.
"I wasn't going to chase the past any more. I'd been living in this wistful, grief-stricken world for so long. I knew I would never really forgive myself for not being there for dad. But the truth was, there was no way to repair my mistake," Cairns writes.
"We only have one chance to appreciate the people we love, and I'd squandered mine. I no longer wanted to punish myself or search for long-gone memories, when there was so much to cherish in the present."
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