Altitude outweighs attitude in safety scare

There was no need to consult my smartwatch to know that we had climbed to an altitude of more than 4,500 meters. Bodily discomfort serves as a warning system on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

After a four-hour journey, our coach pulled into a parking lot in Madoi county, a sprawling herding district in the northwestern province of Qinghai.

I disembarked and took a stroll, but it felt like hard work.

What seemed like a slightly dazed feeling at lower climes－such as when I visited Lhasa, capital of the Tibet autonomous region, in 2019 at about 3,000 meters above sea level－had worsened into a severe headache because of the thin air.

As the atmospheric pressure fell rapidly, my sunscreen bottle swelled and its contents spilled out.

Trees were a rare sight. The soil was frozen. Rice tasted half-cooked.

I checked into a small hotel, where about 35 doctors and journalists would stay for the next few days as part of a volunteer medical program.

Most of our rooms were on the third floor, but all the elevators had been suspended by order of the local authorities.

About two months earlier, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake had hit Madoi, which is four times the size of Shanghai but has less than 15,000 residents. No casualties were reported, but aftershocks kept occurring, making elevators undesirable utilities.

I was assigned a roommate, a photojournalist in his 50s. We climbed flights of stairs carrying suitcases packed with winter clothes and other necessities to survive the sunburn-producing ultraviolet radiation.

The climb clearly worsened our symptoms. We were both breathless when we reached our room. He had trouble sleeping, and I developed a mild fever, which lasted until I left the place. I took pills, only to vomit later.

Cracks could be seen meandering across the walls of the room, a telltale sign of the quake's destruction and a reminder that the danger had not gone away.

It certainly hadn't. At about midnight, a magnitude 4.8 quake struck the county and made my roommate and I－both awake because of the discomfort we were feeling－jump out of our beds.

We scrambled for our clothes and shoes and argued about whether we had enough time to run outside.

Before we had reached agreement, the shaking had stopped. The street our room overlooked was quickly flooded with people. I always buckle up when riding in a car, and my survival instincts told me to join those life-cherishing people downstairs, but the discomfort told me to stay put.

The older man and I stared at each other and then decided to creep back to our beds, but we kept our pants on, just in case.