Johann after completing his climb; Johann and Jayanthi on a training mission
Professional hairstylist and model Johann Peiris became the second Sri Lankan to conquer 29,559 foot-high Mount Everest on May 22 this year, two years after Jayanthi Kuru-uthumpala scaled the world’s highest peak adding her name to history books also as the first Lankan woman to do so.
Sri Lanka is only the fourth country in the world – and the first in Asia – from which a woman has summited Everest before a man. The other three are Poland, Croatia, and South Africa. As of December 2016, a total of 4,469 people had conquered Everest, of which less than 10% were women.
In 2016 Johann failed in his attempt to be the first Sri Lankan man to climb the mountain along with Jayanthi and had to give up 400 yards short of achieving his life-long dream and turn back due to a defect in the oxygen tank. His team mate Jayanthi continued and reached the top of the Everest to become the first Sri Lankan to scale the challenging peak that year. Though Johann failed in his first attempt he was given a hero’s welcome when he came back to Sri Lanka.
This time when Johann went on his second attempt to scale the peak Jayanthi was waiting to welcome him in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, and encourage him.
Johann attributes a greater part of his success Jayanthi’s encouragement and team work to train in Sri Lanka and abroad climbing other peaks like Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Island Mountain in Nepal. The experienced mountaineering duo, have both individually or as a team successfully tried world’s most challenging treks, including Mt. Kinabalu (Malyasia) and the Andes (South America), Pyrenees (Spain) and all major peaks in Sri Lanka.
Jayanthi who obtained a Master’s in Gender Studies at the University of Sussex is also a feminist activist with years of experience working on women’s rights. She met Johann in 2011 and did the Island Peak in Nepal together in preparation for their big climb.
“Everyday in the morning we wake up, go to Independence Square in Colombo, do a one to one-and-a-half hour routine, then go to work, and sometimes we mix it up with swimming, cycling, running, jogging etc,” she said after becoming one out of 418 women to scale the world’s highest peak. Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei was the first woman to reach the summit on May 16, 1975.
Johann and Jayanthi had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Island Mountain in Nepal. including Mt. Kinabalu (Malyasia) and the Andes (South America), Pyrenees (Spain) and all major peaks in Sri Lanka in preparation for their Everest trek
In the weekends, Johann and Jayanthi met to run up and down Pidurutalagala – highest mountain Sri Lanka – and Kirigalpotta, for endurance. They carried rice bags on their backs, to toughen their shoulder muscles, just to get as fit as they could in preparation for the biggest climb of their lives.
Describing the most arduous areas of the climb, Johann said that trekking the Khumbu Ice Wall was most challenging. The Khumbu glacier is one that forms the icefall and moves at such speed that large crevasses open with little warning, and the large towers of ice found at the icefall have been known to collapse suddenly claiming the lives of many climbers. Most climbers try to cross the icefall during the very early morning trying to cheat nature, before sunrise, when it has partially frozen during the night and is less able to move.
“Some Ice Walls are of 80 or 90 degree slopes. The worst is and one could not really believe is that we see ourselves how some of our colleagues embrace death before our own eyes. It is heart-rending. Our guide pointed to locations where there were over 200 bodies of mountaineers according to them. I too saw four bodies,” Johann told the Sunday Observer in an interview.
He says that many people were sceptical about their attempt to conquer the world’s highest peak and faced lot of problems to raise funds for the project. A climber has to pay around Rs.10 million for training courses, climbing gear including other expenses and the two aspiring climbers had some sponsors who really believed in them while a part of the expenses was covered by crowd funding.
Johann had to complete one and half years of training to be Everest-ready. He had trekked the mountain this year with a team of 15 from various countries but most of them felt sick and withdrew.
Mountaineering is an extremely male-dominated sport says Jayanthi adding that she had to face more hurdles than Johann in her passionate pursuit to tame the Everest. She was unable to find women’s sizes in mountain in appropriate high altitude clothes. “I climbed Everest wearing an XS (extra small) men’s down suit, which was still too big for me. As for mountaineering boots: my feet are a UK size 4, but size 5 is the smallest available in the market. But I had to manage, as many of us do in a male-dominated world, where the playing field is seldom equal. And so I stuffed foam into my boots and went on”, she said. Jayanthi is five feet and one and half inches tall.
Johann and Jayanthi found that the equipment they needed was not available in Sri Lanka, since there are no icy mountains and mountain climbing is not a very popular sport in the island. “Fortunately I was able to travel to New York for a few days and Johann also joined me so we were able to purchase some of the equipment there, but we had to purchase the remaining items online.”
Teamwork was an important aspect of this journey, Jayanthi said, explaining that she was very happy that Johann and she undertook the expedition together, as a team. Preparing physically and mentally for the summit, Jayanthi said that she and Johann would engage in both aerobic and anaerobic fitness together: “Aerobic fitness focuses the heart’s ability to circulate air through the body,” she explained. “This increases your heart rate over extended periods. Anaerobic exercise on the other hand, builds strength and muscles.”
“It was freezing. It was beautiful, the landscape was beautiful, but there was also the sense of isolation; there was the spiritual sense of being on your own, up against the elements,” she said. Apart from that a climber should have a perfect knowledge of one’s physical limitations to survive in minus 60 celsius temperatures.
According to a 2008 study in the British Medical Journal, above 8,000 metres in Mount Everest’s is a “death zone,” causing a swelling of the brain due to the thinning air hitting with few preceding symptoms such as nausea or headache. That cerebral edema, which causes cognitive impairment and loss of co-ordination, is compounded by fatigue and cold. It is the reason climbers die during descent from Everest, the study adds,
Jayanthi said though she was bundled up in appropriate weather gear she always had to keep on moving to make her body warm to keep hypothermia at bay.
Having left Sri Lanka in early April, Johann spent much of his time at the Mount Everest Base Camp where he completed a number of trainings termed ‘rotations’, acclimatizing to the conditions during the ascent and the decent. Johann left the base camp on the 19th of May and was set to summit on the 23rd but his summit was advanced due to changing weather conditions.
Johann and Jayanthi carried rice bags on their backs to toughen their shoulder muscles and ran up Piduruthalagala, the highest mountain in Sri Lanka, just to get as fit as they could in preparation for the biggest climb of their lives.
A University of Toronto surgeon John Semple, who worked as a team doctor of a 2005 Everest expedition said the health threat is made even worse by the traffic jams on the mountain, particularly at the Hillary Step, a 12-metre spur that’s the last major obstacle before the peak.
When he climbed with Jayanthi in 2016, Johann faced a similar situation. The Everest was closed for three years after an earthquake devastated Nepal in 2013. Jayanthi started to climb earlier than Johann whose trek did not go as planned due a bottleneck on the way, and had to return to the camp as he had not enough oxygen in the tank to complete the trek. Jayanthi’s joy of conquering the highest peak in the world was marred after hearing that Johann had to turn back moving her to tears.
“There are so many people now on the top of Everest and the window of opportunity is quite narrow in terms of weather. So there are huge delays and people stand around … It takes a lot longer, they run out of oxygen on the way down. Once you stop climbing, you get very cold very quickly,” Dr. Semple said in an interview.
Shriya Shah-Klorfine was a Nepal-born Canadian woman who died while descending from the summit of Mount Everest in 2012. Neither Shah-Klorfine nor her guide firm had much climbing experience. The leader of the firm had asked her not to try to summit on that particular day, and previously warned her she was a below-average climber. One issue hampering the climbers that day was long waiting times on the mountain, caused by slow passage through certain bottlenecks on the climbing route. The 2012 season was noted as the worst since 1996, with about 11 deaths for the season.
The Himalayan Database records that she died on May 19, 2012, on the south side of Mount Everest at 8400 meters altitude. Shah-Klorfine, who was born in Nepal, died 250 meters from Camp 4 (Nepal side). Her last words, according to a friend, was ‘save me’ as she spoke to a team member when she lay dying.
Jayanthi and Johann who added their names to history are back to their day jobs. Apart from working to promote women’s rights, Jayanthi delivers motivational speeches organized by companies, schools, clubs, associations and even the military. But she says, at some of these events, she has been described as the “first Sri Lankan woman” to have conquered the Everest, instead of the “first Sri Lankan” to have done so.
Johann who has been working as a hair stylist for more than 30 years has opened several of his salon branches – The Cutting Station – in Australia and England.(www.newstrails.com)
