The Mysterious Mountains of the Moon

The Mountains of the Moon. Just the name conjures images of mystery, mystique, the bizarre. Throw in the fact that they are Africa's largest mountain range, nestled in its tumultuous heart straddling both the equator and the border of Uganda and the DRC and its enough to get even JM Coetzee to take up tap-dancing and travel writing. They eluded the cross-continental European explorers for decades - hiding behind their perpetual shroud of misty goodness. It took the might of Henry Morton Stanley to finally bludgeon his way into the range, part the mists and note their snow-capped equatorial peaks and - at a loss for humour and originality - named the largest of them 'Mount Stanley'. How he came to be one of the regions great explorers is just one of the great mysteries of the mountains.

To unravel these and other mysteries, our expedition needed fortification. Reinforcements were called for and arrived in the form of Tough Guys indomitable family. Our clan - now five strong - began in high spirits. The verdant humidity of equatorial jungle gave way to bamboo forests, pygmy-swallowing marshes, cavernous valleys of enormous Senecio and Lobelia, interstellar lunar rock formations, mountain-top glaciers. These varying landscapes became more extreme with every day. As did the nausea pervasive in our party. Altitude sickness and corned beef are not the best of friends, it turns out. As the air thinned, so did our numbers - and so answering one more mystery: that altitude-prevention tablets are about as effective as beetroot, olive oil and a positive attitude.

For the summit we were only three. The Proclaimers 'I Would Walk 5000 Miles' a worthy substitute for 'Eye of the Tiger' as a motivator to gear us up for the culmination of our trek. The full moon cast cryptic shadows on the glaciers, the sun was rising over the clouds thousands of metres below us. One of our party began to believe that she was being swallowed by giant mouths rising out of the snow. I drew on ten years of hard medical experience and diagnosed that she was buggered. The mountain had claimed another.We were down to two. As our incompetent guides fumbled from one obstacle to the next, we somehow found ourselves on the summit of Margherita peak. It was now blizzarding - the only view on offer that of our guide tripping over his own harness. But we had made it, so offered the mountain a sip of whiskey and a Super-C as an offering of thanks for sparing us her various perils. Perhaps it was time for us to make a speedy descent.

The three-day descent down to base camp was achieved unceremoniously by sliding the better part of four-thousand vertical metres on my arse. And all the way, as chafe and haemorrhoids set in, I pondered the questions that still remained. Such as: why a landscape as spectacular as this one remains so obscure? How are those guides still alive? And, perhaps most pressingly, why everyone in the Rwenzoris is named either 'Willy' or 'Johnson'?

I reckon its better some things about those mountains remain a mystery.