I spent last night staying in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel together with my family. haha yes, you can call it a mini vacation, since my mum always complains that I don’t join the family for family vacations ever since i’ve started mountaineering. Anyway, it was some free gift and it was also quite a fun experience, although i would perhaps feel more comfortable staying in a tent somewhere in the wild as compared to a posh hotel. When you are in the wilderness, it seems okay to do away with social etiquette and all, but in a posh hotel, you feel like you’re supposed to bathe like five times in an hour in order to fully utilise the beautiful bath tub and the bathroom that can probably hold 20 couples for ballroom dancing.

I think it’s amazing how during our mountaineering expeditions, we do almost everything within that small 2-man tent of ours. From resting, to sleeping, peeing, shitting, cooking, changing to bathing (aka dry-cleaning ourselves with wet wipes that are actually not frozen if we are lucky). Once we are inside our tents, we usually do not feel like going out, as (1) there is a huge storm outside and you risk being blown off the mountain once you step outside (2) it is a hassle to put on your boots, which could take like 15 – 30min (3) feeling warm and snug in your sleeping bag, you are simply too tired to go out and (4) you can basically do everything inside your tent, so why go out? However, when I was in the hotel, I simply couldn’t stand staying in the hotel room for long. I felt so restless cuz there was basically nothing to do except switch TV channels using the remote, gazing out of the window to admire the city skyline, opening all the drawers in all the cabinets to see what treasure I could unearth, weighing myself on the weighing machine and climb up and down the relatively high super-single beds to practise my bouldering and down-climbing skills. And all those were completed in like 15 mins.

In our tents, there’s usually so much stuff to do. To melt snow for drinking, we will have to fill up our pots with snow and i personally enjoy the very act of re-filling the pot with more snow as it slowly melts. We would keep topping up the pot with snow until the maximum capacity has been reached. While waiting for the snow to melt and water to boil, we would choose the food to eat (not much variety anyway), but i think being able to look at all the food through a transparent ziplock bag provides some comfort. After that, we would lay out the necessary stuff for eating such as putting a base layer to put the pot on, preparing our cutlery, putting away our pee devices and pee bottles to make sure we don’t add unnecessary ingredients into our food etc. And then the actual eating occurs, which usually takes quite long (of which much time is spent psychoing myself to eat more than I would really like to). Then there’s also the cleaning up after the eating which can really be a pain in the neck if there’s grease in the pot (as we usually use only tissue and wet wipes to clean up). Including all the perpetual stoning, packing and unpacking, these activities can easily take up at least half a day.

So if you had to pay the same amount of money to stay in either a hotel or a tent, choose the latter as it provides a wider variety of activities to sustain you for a longer period of time – value for money!