A journey that took my breath away - literally

It may be thrilling to visit a mountain range, but altitude sickness can put a damper on your travels, as Deirdre McQuillan found out in South America

BEFORE SETTING OFF for Peru recently I read cautionary advice about altitude sickness. Friends who had lived there were reassuring: just take it easy and you’ll be fine, they said.

I knew that when people arrive in the city of Cusco, which is 3,300m above sea level, they often experience breathlessness because of the thinner air. The old Inca capital may be literally breathtaking, but what I experienced, called acute altitude or mountain sickness, was something far more frightening – and it happened like a bolt from the blue.

The first attack occurred beyond Arequipa, the country’s second-largest city, en route to Colca Canyon, a four-hour drive across the sierra through a national park. As we climbed up a dormant volcano we stopped the car briefly, to take some photographs.

A few minutes later I started to feel strange. I went white and felt extraordinarily cold, my fingertips and toes tingled, and breathing and speaking became difficult. Our guide tried to calm me and keep me focused but was unable to open an oxygen cylinder. I felt as if I was slowly closing down.

We drove as fast as possible down to a village, where I was put on oxygen and given coca tea. Gradually, I began to feel normal again.

Knowing that we were going to have to retrace our route, I lay down in the car on the way back, and there was no problem. But that wasn’t the end of it. Two days later we took a flight to Cusco, to explore the city. At 2am I woke up feeling ill. I called the hotel’s receptionist, who sent up an oxygen cylinder, but I just got worse and started vomiting. A doctor who was called declared me an emergency – my oxygen level was way down – and transferred me to hospital, where I spent the night harnessed to an oxygen supply and on a drip, before being discharged at noon.

On the way to the airport a few days later the simple act of dragging my suitcase seemed to trigger another attack, but it passed.

Altitude sickness can strike anyone, no matter what age, even the fittest and most agile mountain climber. No one really knows why, but those who live at sea level are more likely to experience it than others.

When severe it can be life-threatening. For very serious cases, the clinic had a compression chamber that takes patients back to sea-level air concentrations. Doctors told me that acute mountain sickness affects four or five people a week in Cusco. I was just one of the unlucky ones.

You can take precautions, by using drugs like Diamox, which stimulates breathing to allow more oxygen to enter the bloodstream, but it can have unpleasant side effects, such as drowsiness and confusion.

Visitors are usually given coca tea, a light-green drink made from leaves that also contain cocaine, when they arrive, but I can’t say that it helped me much.

If you’re planning to visit Peru and trek across the Andes, you should spend at least two nights at each rise of 1,000m. And take it easy. You may love high mountains, but you may end up feeling that they don’t love you.