Maud Vanpoulle expedition

On the 31st of August 2022 I talked to Maud about her upcoming expedition to Pakistan with 3 other girls to open a new route, Raphaela, Babsi and  Lise.
If you haven’t read it yet, you can find the interview here:
https://extremelyinsain.com/2022/09/07/maud-vanpoulle/

Below is Maud’s story of how it all went down.

It says that on expeditions you should be prepared to be surprised by the unexpected – and this is how our adventure began!

Changing destination last-minute, from scarfs to short pants, from a remote basecamp to Italian-style cappuccino and the warm hospitality of a Nepali family and from a well researched goal to an area we knew nothing about, we faced surprises almost every day.

The challenge to adapt to high altitude in limited time, the new experience to deal with monsoon and the animals of the jungle, the curiosity to dive into a new culture and the life of the locals, the joy to deepen new and persisting friendships, the flexibility and creativity to explore unknown conditions and come up with new goals, facing altitude sickness and taking good decisions together and choose our well-being over summit success.

So…what had happened…?

Since Raphaela’s visa for Pakistan didn’t arrive we shifted everything to Nepal in one day.

As changing plans consumed some time, we had only a short time of acclimatisation and therefore only one chance for the summit.

This season in Nepal was far from good, retrospective we had a lot of rain…until a 5 day window arrived. We started super motivated, unfortunately without Babsi – she turned sick before.

We turned around just before the summit as Lise got sick of altitude.
But then we learned that we would have had to bail the next day anyways, as our 5 days window got shortened to 3 days. That’s life.

Nevertheless we had a great time. Always remember that the summit is just the cherry on the top of the cake! Lots of laughing, lovely discussions and definitely a time to remember!

What is the core of an expedition in the end?

Expedition is also about contradiction. You’d better not be an hyperactive person because you have to be patient. But, at the same time, you don’t have that much time, between packing/unpacking, preparing, getting acclimatised…

And just like that, the time has flown away, and all the books you brought and all the games you carried remained untouched, unfinished, or even unopened…

And just like that, this is the end of the trip, and you wonder where that time went…

This is what we like about expeditions, time off from time, at another pace of time.

Expeditions – alpinism ?- highlight our own contradictions.

We travel to the other side of the world in an attempt of reaching a useless goal: climbing a mountain. We spend a ridiculously low proportion of time actually achieving this action, to finally realise that it might not be the most important. Would the takeaway, the insights, the learning, the deepened friendship be the same without this « useless » keystone though ?

We embrace – if not actively research sometimes – difficulties, boredom, and risk, to feel and return more alive.

We seek a time off from the normal course of time.

We are left with a roller coaster of emotions, impossible to hide from others and from ourself. We discover such a great complexity to bring together, a tree with so many branches and roots: humans and nature, emotions and ambitions, life timings and obligations, different shades of risk acceptation, open communication and protected intimacy. Ever going research of balance… So many stars need to align to form the perfect dance. Sometimes the dance reaches its perfect flow with the achievement of the useless – nonetheless necessary – goal, sometimes you can hear some minor off notes. No matter what, at least, we are dancing together in the search of the right vibration.