Review | Grief and guilt led ex-Hongkonger to start climbing mountains. She’s written a book about her feats, full of poignant memories of growing up in the city

‘If I’d met someone who told me they were climbing volcanoes to bring back memories of their dead father I’d have thought they were nuts,’ Sophie Cairns writes

Her book about her quest to set a climbing world record and to escape ‘this grief-stricken world’ comes alive when she reminisces about her Hong Kong childhood

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Hong Kong-born Sophie Cairns on a lunch break during the 35-kilometre hike in to the base camp for an ascent of Mount Giluwe, Papua New Guinea, the highest volcano in Oceania.

Published: 6:00pm, 27 Apr 2020Updated: 9:40pm, 27 Apr 2020

Climbing the Seven Volcanoes: A Search for Strength, by Sophie Cairns, Amberley, 4 stars

When Sophie Cairns’ parents announced that the family was leaving Hong Kong, where she was born and raised, she vowed to return. A teenager, biracial and fluent in Cantonese, she never felt like she belonged in the UK, and longed for the Hong Kong of her childhood.

Cairns later joined the South China Morning Post as a reporter and was working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Shanghai, China, when her father suddenly fell ill from lung cancer in 2008. She asked for a transfer to the agency’s Paris bureau and told her father she would be back in a week after she cleared out her Shanghai apartment. She never saw her father alive again.

Cairns suffered from massive guilt over her father’s death. To deal with her grief, she started climbing mountains. This evolved into a project to climb the tallest volcanoes on each continent, with the objectives to set a world record, raise money for cancer research, and, somehow, feel more connected to her father.

Sophie Cairns and friend Tina Bowman on an acclimatisation hike on Mount Cheget, Russia, as preparation for climbing Mount Elbrus, whose West Summit can be seen in the background.

Climbing the Seven Volcanoes tells the story of her climbs, the literal and figurative ups and downs of reaching the tops of these volcanoes, often more than 5,000 metres above sea level, a challenge complicated by asthma.

Cairns chose to climb these seven volcanoes because most mountain climbers concentrate on reaching the highest mountain summits. But no one had yet climbed all of the seven highest volcanoes. The stories of her climbs are exciting and often frustrating, especially when she’s grouped with taciturn guides and hotshot climbing partners. But it’s her flashbacks to Hong Kong that brings her story to another level.