If the mountaineer Reinhold Messner had known the time we live in today. He wouldn’t have let himself be mollified after a few minutes. Messner once freaked out quite a bit on German television. That was in the late 1980s. He even threatened to stop writing books and give up mountaineering. At least on the Matterhorn.
Because he had taken it at face value, which was just a joke. For the program “Do you understand fun?”, in which people, including celebrities, were duped and secretly filmed, a kiosk was set up just below the Matterhorn summit, which offered what you can find in a kiosk sells: newspapers and magazines, sweets, souvenirs. Even books by Messner were in the range.
“What’s that?” asked the puzzled Messner when he saw the kiosk at an altitude of more than 4000 meters. He quickly got angry, ranting about all the junk that didn’t belong here, just like the whole kiosk didn’t belong here, and neither did the person in the kiosk. Messner announced that he would complain to the mayor of Zermatt. And of course he needs the current issue of the brightly colored Not.
“Do you have a phone there too?” Messner eventually asked the alleged kiosk operator. Possibly in the hope of being able to call the mayor right from the mountain. “We don’t have a telephone,” was the reply. After all, you think you can read Messner’s face if you look at the scene again today. Although he probably would have liked to make that one complaint call at the moment.
A good three decades later, however, the situation has turned into its opposite, and you can no longer believe it when, for once, you can’t make a phone call in the mountains. Or, almost worse, not even able to communicate in one of the long-established degenerate forms, i.e. chatting, posting, liking. Then you curse something about Stone Age and hillbilly people.
And recently, if you’re wandering through a dead spot somewhere in the Alps and you’re not connected to the Internet, you can get angry in your narrow-mindedness that “they can now do it themselves in Africa”. Because in the Kilimanjaro massif there is now high-speed internet. Even in the summit regions, which are up to one and a half thousand meters higher than the top of the Matterhorn.
Those responsible in Tanzania have understood that tourists appreciate good food and great beaches, unique monuments and breathtaking nature. But only if there is WiFi. The world is what I see, this saying no longer applies. Today the rule is: The world is what I see on Instagram.
And because Tanzania is economically heavily dependent on tourism, it urgently needs to be boosted again after the Corona slump. In the future, many pictures of proud tourists who are at the top of Kilimanjaro should spread on social networks. And these pictures will attract more visitors to the mountain, who will take new pictures and so on. The ice of the last glaciers there may have melted at some point: the only important thing today is that there are snowball effects. Digital of course.
Stefan Fischer has only climbed a few toboggan hills recently. But we took some very nice photos there.
(Photo: Bernd Schifferdecker (Illustration))