Intrepid Joe Hildebrand conquers kiddy mountain

WHEN a friend invited him to go rock climbing, Joe Hildebrand was confronted by his two biggest hates: heights and hippies.

Voyager of The Seas

THE other day a friend of mine invited me to go rock climbing.

Having said that, I am not sure Peter is truly a friend, as it is well known that the only two things I truly hate in life are heights and hippies, and rock climbing comprises pretty much nothing but being up high with a whole bunch of hippies.

Worse still, they are all kind of extreme hippies that only eat freegan and smell like the bottom of a yoga mat and yet are still strong enough to beat you up.

Even more confusing was that Peter is not a hippie at all but a right-wing individualist whose idea of paradise is a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter in which all central government has collapsed and he is the only one left with a cache of weaponry and access to drinking water.

He also likes bushwalks.

At any rate, he was somewhat surprised when upon arriving at the indoor rock-climbing venue and being confronted with a bunch of sweaty dreadlocked bodies scaling the walls I expressed some reservations.

"What's the matter?" Peter said.

"Well, I hate heights and I hate hippies, and this place is full of nothing but heights and hippies," I explained.

"But you didn't say any of that when I asked you if you wanted to go rock-climbing."

"That's true," I replied. "I just said 'no'."

"Well," he said. "We're here now."

As it turns out these were the exact same words with which my mum's special friend Don had my dog spontaneously euthanased at the vet’s because he didn’t want to make a second trip into town but that’s another story. Needless to say, however, it didn’t fill me with confidence.

The first step in rock-climbing is to strap yourself into a harness whose sole purpose is to prevent you from falling while at the same time jamming your testicles halfway up your lower intestine.

It’s the sort of sensation that I imagine could give you quite a thrill if you were a younger man or had just been released from prison but as a happily married man who still got regular sex once a month it wasn’t quite the experience I was looking for.

Even so, after weighing up the options I decided by fear of plummeting to my death outweighed my fear of never being able to reproduce and so I lowered myself gingerly into the sweat-stained canvas and tried to think of happier times, such as when I was a boy soprano in the St Mary’s Children’s Choir.

After receiving some preliminary instructions from a nice young lady who looked like she could bench press a Landcruiser we looked for a piece of wall to climb. But the only spots available were in the kiddies section, which resembled not so much the north face of K2 as a series of stepladders placed against a wall.

Peter’s disappointment was matched only by my elation.

Having said that, it must be noted that some of the climbs were six, eight – maybe even ten – feet high, and so I took my safety seriously. This meant shouting down to Peter every five seconds or so to make sure he had my ropes in the locked position and likewise, when I was holding the ropes for him, making sure that I was checking out as many female climbers as I could before he fell.

But then, after much sweating and groin distress, I made it to the top of one of the walls which was graded a medium level climb by the management (who, clearly being illiterate, had mistakenly spelt it E-A-S-Y). And there, from on great height, I was able to gaze down on the world below.

It is incredible the perspective you get from being up so high. For example Peter is a tall man of about six foot four but from where I was he looked no bigger than six three.

By the time I had rappelled back down and landed as gracefully as a feather on my arse I was a changed man. Suddenly, for the first time in my adult life, I was no longer scared of heights.

I was still pretty worried about those hippies though.

Follow Joe on Twitter @Joe_Hildebrand

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