Acanela customer Tiffany Yu sits down with us and shares with us her experience climbing Mount Kilimanjaro (and great hiking advice). She also talks about her favorite travels, her adventure hiking Mount Kilimajaro, what she loves about Acanela Expeditions, and more! Listen to hear her Acanela Expeditions review!

In this episode, we discuss:

• How travel fits with Tiffany’s work around being a disability advocate (0:54)

• Tiffany’s most memorable travel experiences (2:21)

• What hiking Mt. Kilimanjaro with Acanela was like (5:26)

• Tiffany’s favorite part of the expedition (10:29)

• Tiffany’s advice for someone going to Mt. Kilimanjaro (18:50)

• Where Tiffany is going next (24:40)

Tiffany’s Background Advocation Towards Traveling and Disabilities

Dakota: Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dakota and today I'm here with Tiffany who traveled with us last month on our casting call to Mount Kilimanjaro. Thanks for being with us today Tiffany.

Tiffany Yu: Thanks for having me.

Dakota: We're excited to discuss your adventure and all of your future adventures. Just to get started, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Tiffany Yu: Sure. My name is Tiffany Yu and I run a disability advocacy organization called Diversability, which is focused on the celebration of the diversity of the disability lived experience.

A lot of my work is based from my own lived experience. I was involved in a car accident when I was nine years old, where my dad who was driving unfortunately passed away. I acquired a form of paralysis that impacts my right arm known as a brachial plexus injury. I spend a lot of my time focusing on de-stigmatizing disability, trauma and grief.

Dakota: Wow. How does travel fit in with your work?

Tiffany Yu: Yeah, I think a big part of working or being a disability advocate is leading by example. One form of that is I very much lead with vulnerability. I want people to be able to see the highlights, the low lights and everything in between, but also travel actually only really entered my life recently. I guess more specifically I'll say adventure travel.

After this car accident happened when I was nine and now I'm in my 30s, so it's been over two decades. I just kind of hid from the world and didn't really start discovering travel until maybe like 2015, like five years ago.

In college, I did study abroad in China. My cultural background, my dad is Taiwanese and my mom is from Vietnam. Kind of was tackling that part of my identity on that trip. Then most of my more recent trips have been around kind of tackling what it means to be permanently disabled, but still well, permanently disabled, but still healthy, permanently disabled, but still thriving.

Tiffany’s Most Memorable Travel Experience

Dakota: Okay. You just started traveling I guess, five years ago. Do you have a most memorable travel experience?

Tiffany Yu: Yes. I have two. The first is last year and actually both of these happened last year. Last year was a really good travel year.

The first one was I went to Burning Man, which is this week long event in the desert. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but you pretty much just pay to have a piece of the desert where you can put your tent and everything like that. There's tons of different programming.

A lot of it really reminded me of Kilimanjaro, but you're just unplugged the whole time. It's very hot and dusty. I'll talk about this a little bit later, but it's really where I felt like nine year old Tiffany come out to play. The way you get around Burning Man is via bicycle. I haven't really biked that much since I became disabled.

Acquiring a bike, finding one that fit me, I'm pretty petite as well, but then being able to explore the entire, they call it the Playa, to explore the Playa via bike. I actually learned on that trip that my favorite moments were really just biking during the early morning, biking with no destination in mind. Yeah. First memorable trip was Burning Man. Highly recommend people to go. If you do go, to make an intention before you go.

Then the second trip was to Iceland and that happened in October of last year. It has been on my bucket list to go see the Aurora Borealis, the Northern lights. Iceland to me was just the most beautiful celebration of nature and everything that the world has to offer. Again, felt nine year old Tiffany come out to play.

I was hiking on ice glaciers wearing these like crampons that had these really obnoxious spikes on them, hiking through waterfalls. We had three nights of our seven days there where the sky was so green and it was stunning. Have you been before?

Dakota: Wow, awesome. I actually was there a month before you in September.

Tiffany Yu: Some Northern lights?

Dakota: Unfortunately it was cloudy the whole time, but they were there above the clouds apparently, but I didn't get to see them.

Tiffany Yu: Yeah, and I think that the most interesting thing I heard from other travelers in my group on that trip that they were like, "If I don't see the Northern lights, this whole trip is ruined," but I think for me that was the least spectacular part about the trip. I mean, the country just in itself and how they have attempted to try and preserve so much of it was really impressive. I have never spent so much time outdoors in that cold of temperature.

Tiffany’s Experience Hiking Mount Kilimanjaro with Acanela

Dakota: Yeah, no it is beautiful. Even though I didn't see the Northern lights, there was so much more there. Awesome. Well, you've already started this year off with traveling about as much as last year. Tell us about your trip you did with us.

Tiffany Yu: Yeah, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with Acanela in February. Back in 2017, I decided last minute that I was going to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. That was the first time I'd ever decided to do anything in a higher elevation. I live in San Francisco now, so I'm very accustomed to my life at sea level.

It was really interesting kind of going into that Inca Trail trip because I didn't really know anything about preparation. I hiked the trail in sneakers. I did it in a backpack that didn't have a chest or a waist strap. It didn't know what a hydration pack or a bladder was like. I didn't understand why people needed trekking poles. I just learned a lot about hiking on that trip.

A couple of months afterward, another one of my friends did the Mount Kilimanjaro climb. I kind of just became really intrigued by this whole community of people who just found it really exhilarating to hike these peaks. Whether it was the 50 state peaks in the US, whether it was the Seven Summits around the world. There was a little bit of a seed that was planted for Mount Kilimanjaro.

Then interestingly enough, while I was in Iceland, I met this woman Lisa who had actually climbed Mount Kilimanjaro I think right around International Women's Day. So right around this time a couple of years ago and she was telling me about everything that she did to prep. Then the seed was kind of replanted, two years after this 2017 trip.

I figured I'd probably do the Kilimanjaro trip. Every single year, I'd try and do one big trip. I figured it would probably be my 2021 trip or somewhere way out into the future where I would like have more time to train. I got connected with Kylie and she told me about this February trip and why I needed to be on it. I just decided on a whim. At this time it was December 2019 that the February 2020 trip was the one I was going to do.

With all this like holiday travel, I just knew I wasn't going to have enough time to really prepare, but I also just know myself that no matter how much I prepared, I would just never be prepared. I think that's a good piece of advice that I would give to other people is that you just don't know how altitude is going to impact you. How a multiday hike is going to impact you. How traveling to the other side of the world, even how that like travel journey is going to impact you and how you show up in the hike.

I will say that Iceland trip and I know I've mentioned it a couple times now, was the first time that I just felt the most physically well that have in my whole life. I think that a lot of my own personal journey has been around viewing my own physical wellness past my physical disability. I think that so much of the narrative that I held was that because I had a physical disability, I just couldn't do any physical activity.

Getting to bike at Burning Man or going on these to glacier hikes in Iceland were really kind of steps in this journey of Tiffany discovering what physical wellness looks like.

Yeah, so before the hike would not recommend it, but actually this year has been incredible in terms of travel as well. I kicked off the year with a trip to Cambodia. Then the week before I left for Kilimanjaro, I was actually in Belize or kind of like a strategy offsite for my organization. I just knew I had all these other trips planned. I tried to do as much physical activity and outdoor stuff while I was in those places, but I also just knew I was just constrained by these work trips that needed to happen, the holidays that were also happening. I was also just excited about the potential to be part of this casting call.

I am not great at content. It's funny, I only took one picture on summit day and then my phone died. I think just being able to have Andrew and Trevor and the whole team they're capturing and documenting parts of it were also an attractive part to me because it was like, if I'm going to hike Kilimanjaro, I think I would like it to be memorialized in a way that I can remember. Also hopefully inspires other people to want to explore this type of adventure as well.

Dakota: Of course. Yeah. You want to relive it again and also have other people live it.

Tiffany Yu: Yeah.

Tiffany’s Preparation For The Big Climb

Dakota: You said you didn't really prepare physically, but was there anything that you did even though you didn't do a lot?

Tiffany Yu: If I could do it all over again, what I would probably do is I would do stair stepper. If I didn't have access to stairs... Well, San Francisco is a very hilly place, so I did have access to hills that I could do. Honestly, I think the biggest thing is just trying to do as much physical activity as possible.

I'm the type of person, I walk everywhere and stairs are kind of my jam. It's funny that I say that now because I was actually the slowest hiker I think of everyone in our group. I don't know how much stairs are my jam, but I know that I can hike long distances without getting super fatigued.

It was interesting after summit day I actually ended up getting pretty sick and had to be piggybacks and carried on people's shoulders for part of the descent. Kylie asked me on our last day and that entire day was a descent and it was about 12 miles. She's like, "Hey, I want to give you the option to take a car down," because a couple of the other hikers decided they're not in physical shape to do that distance.

I remember telling her, I was like, "The idea of doing a 12 hour hike downhill does not phase me at all. The distance doesn't phase me. I want to hike it." It's interesting because some of my most memorable moments of hiking Kilimanjaro where the descent. It was skiing down all the scree on the mountain on summit day. It was flying down with my trekking pole. Again, kind of just revisiting this like nine year old Tiffany. As she was flying down this mountain, that's really when I saw her come out.

The reason why I've been mentioning this nine year old Tiffany is I've been on this journey over the past couple of years of really tapping into this nine year old girl who experienced this pretty traumatic event and lost her childhood for a good number of years. Part of how I am approaching my own grief journey is through play.

Part of hiking, Kilimanjaro, I mean, really it was descending Kilimanjaro, and going to Burning Man and running around in Iceland have been, how can I let this little girl have her moments. To just run around and not be afraid of the world and wanting to be seen.

Yeah, so pre-trip, I know that was very long-winded, but pre-trip, just trying to do as much physical activity as possible. I know Kylie's written a blog post about this, about running every day. I'm not a runner, I'm a walker. Yeah, while I was in Belize I did a couple of hikes also pretty much at sea level. We were staying at a place right by the river.

While I was in Cambodia, did a pretty long half-day bike ride around the different temples that are around there. I think that I could've done more, but I mean, honestly, I just knew going into the hike, that number one, I'm a slow hiker. I'm probably going to be trailing the back of the group, but I also know that like I will be able to get to whatever destinations we will get to, but it just might take me a little bit longer.

Tiffany’s Experience On The Summit

Dakota: Do you want to go through I guess the actual trek in the summit day?

Tiffany Yu: Yeah. I mean, I will say summit day was probably my most memorable of the whole trip and I guess I'll start with summit day because I had a lot of really big learnings that day that I'm carrying out of the mountain with me as well.

The first was, I actually had a really beautiful moment as I was submitting, just looking around at our guides and our porters who all men and I had this moment of just really thinking about my dad. Before my dad passed away in the car accident, he was actually the one who took me biking and I grew up in DC. Summers in DC are just so hot and humid and he kind of had this no excuses mentality with regard to physical activity.

Even if I was complaining about how hot and humid it was, we would wrap our water bottles in towels and go out for a really long bike ride, or we'd go out hiking, or we'd go swimming. He was the one who really gave me my sense of adventure. After he passed away, my mom is actually the complete opposite. Part of this is coming from an Asian cultural background.

We don't like the sun. Even if we go to the beach, we're not even going to the beach, we're just sitting in the hotel looking at the view. Yeah, I had this moment on the mountain where I just realized that it was my dad who gave me the sense of adventure. I really just felt like my dad was there with me.

I know I mentioned this to you earlier, but I wrote something and I did post this on Instagram about what summit day meant to me and I'd love to read it to you.

Dakota: Okay, sure yeah. Please do.

Tiffany Yu: It says, "I've been thinking about what I want to say about summit day and I can't help but think about my dad. I don't talk about him much and he was perfectly imperfect, but he was my dad. He was the one who first gave me my sense of adventure. I still remember our never-ending bike rides in the middle of humid DC summers. After he left this world when I was nine, everything stopped. The bike rides stopped. The adventure stopped. I stopped."

"I thought about my dad because of the men pictured and not pictured here who supported me on this climb. The mountain was hard on all of us in different ways, but we were still helping each other. I thought about what it would be like if my dad joined me on this climb. I thought about how proud he would be if he could see me summiting this mountain, me. In those final steps to Uhuru Peak with [Dula 00:17:01] and Curtis supporting me on each side I knew my dad was with me too. This is for you, dad I did it. Thank you for giving me my sense of adventure. I know it took me a while to find it again, but I'm grateful that you're here to remind me that I never lost it."

That was kind of the biggest thing that happened to me on the mountain, which it's just so beautiful. There were three other lessons that I learned from summit day. I will preface it by saying that for people who have experienced childhood trauma, I think certain medical professionals will call them adverse childhood experiences. Depending on what age it happens, your brain is so malleable that it actually impacts the lens through which you see the world.

One of the interesting things that happened was, the number one rule that all of our guides told us was to be positive. I kept trying to positively affirm myself, but I knew that deep down my baseline narrative was pretty negative. My baseline narrative was telling me things like, "Why did you decide to do this hike? You aren't fit? How come you didn't train more? Why are you even here?" Things like that.

I actually remember coming back from the whole trip and talking with my therapist about this. I was like, "It really bothered me that I felt like I was so negative on this whole trip because the number one rule was to be positive." My therapist was like, "Tiffany, to be human is that you're going to have positive and negative thoughts and what is more important is the action that you take out of it."

What I think is really powerful here is that no matter what my internal narrative and these messages of self doubt and this negative self talk was telling me, I still summited the mountain. The action was, I still pushed through all of that negativity to show up.

I wrote like, "Even when you have doubts job anyway," and then the other thing was, there were so many moments where I was just caught in these negativity spirals. The day before summit day, I was 75% sure that I wasn't going to summit the mountain. Even Jonas, who was one of our main guides was giving us the briefing. The whole time my head was pounding, partly because of the altitude, but also just because I was so panicked and anxious.

The second lesson was, even when you think you want to give up, just take it a step at a time because literally it was like one foot in front of the other. Then the third lesson I learned, which I think I'm still trying to learn is, our guides and everyone who was there literally are risking their own lives as well to help us summit this mountain.

It's this idea of if your day pack is too heavy, ask someone to help you. If you run out of water, see if someone else has water to spare. I wrote like, "When the load you're carrying is too much, it's okay to ask for help." This idea of just being able to surrender to the fact that you don't have to do all of this on your own. There's a whole team behind you and supporting you to make sure you're successful. Yeah. So many great learnings from the mountain.

The coolest part about the whole hike in itself was just how many different types of I don't really know how to describe it. How many different like scenes you're in. The day it's all rain forest. Then the second day you're kind of moving out into this moon like terrain. There are not that many plants around. Very limited bushes to go to the bathroom. That was one thing I noticed the day before summit day. Was I was like, "There are no bushes to hide behind for me if I need to go to the bathroom."

Then yeah, I don't know. I mean, summit day it is just so crazy and baffling to me that on two to three hours of sleep, you wake up at midnight to hike and my summit day was 16 hours. I was probably one of the longer, slower hikers and me and three others we were literally like the last people on the mountain that day.

I think that there's just something so powerful to me about number one, a 16-hour hike is pretty brutal, but a 16-hour hike from 15,000 to 19,000 feet makes it even more difficult. I just love the significance of thinking about this 30-year-old woman, who's like trying to channel or her inner child. Just being the last one playing on this mountain that day. That was really beautiful to me.

I am very grateful. Again, you don't know how the altitude is going to impact you. I started exhibiting altitude sickness symptoms like a headache or nausea a day or two before summit day. I feel super grateful that I felt well enough to successfully summit and then come back down. Once I got back down, I started feeling really unwell.

The coolest part, I don't know, there were just so many cool parts about it. We summited under a full moon, which meant that the day after was a moon rise and it was the most beautiful orange moon rise I had ever seen. The funniest part about it, I guess, not really that funny, but to me now in retrospect was, I saw the moon rise sitting on one of our porters and our guides shoulders because I didn't feel well enough to make that two hour hike back down to a lower elevation.

I just remember looking at it, sitting on these guys' shoulders. I was like, nature is so beautiful. I feel horrible right now, but just the fact that the moon rises, and the sun rises, and the sun sets, this natural cadence of how the earth moves, it's always there. How can we always remember and remind ourselves to root ourselves in the fact that just the beauty of this world and the beauty of nature just never gets old.

Dakota:

Thank you for sharing all of that. I've interviewed a few people who went on that trek to Mount Kilimanjaro and I feel like the theme of everyone is kind of perseverance, positivity, rediscovering yourself. Thanks again for sharing all of that.

Kylie: For sure. Yeah and I think the biggest thing for me was I just felt like this Kilimanjaro trek felt like a life reset that I didn't know that I needed.

You are just forced into the most bare raw version of yourself. You're not thinking about Instagram, or who's following whom, or who's posting what or work because literally all you can do is just put one foot in front of the other.

Dakota: Awesome. I'm excited for the episode to be ready and we can watch it.

Tiffany Yu: I'm excited too. I feel like there was a moment during the filming where I was like, "I feel like a negative Nancy." Then one of the other people were like, "Tiffany, you're just saying what everyone else is thinking."

Yeah, I think to have the learning that because I do come from a place that is unfortunately or fortunately rooted in trauma, that is how that shows up even as an adult. How can I kind of work through that narrative in as intense an environment as hiking Kilimanjaro?

Tiffany’s Next Adventure

Dakota: Awesome. Well, thank you again for telling us about Kilimanjaro. Any places that you dream to travel to, any bucket list items?

Tiffany Yu: Yeah. Interestingly enough, as I've mentioned, I always try and do one big trip per year and my big trip for this year is I'm actually going to the Galapagos Islands in November.

Dakota: Oh, cool.

Tiffany Yu: I guess Kilimanjaro was my other big trip. In addition to the other big trips. Lots of big trips just happening. I do want to be cognizant of the fact that we are in the midst of coronavirus and I am thinking of everyone who is affected by it.

I am noticing that a lot of my own travel aspirations are being impacted right now as well. Yeah, I'm excited. I'm hoping that things will get better, but yeah. I do have this Galapagos trip planned.

Also on my bucket list. I would love to head to Antarctica. I'd love to head to Bhutan, which I believe Kylie is there right now, Australia, New Zealand. I mean, there's just so much to see in this world. I think the more that we have the opportunity and I understand that so much of this is coming from a place of privilege as well. Every single time I traveled to a new country, I gain some new insights around how my life is. Lessons I learn about the way I live and things I can be doing differently. Yeah. Any experience to hop on a plane, or go on a bus, or see something new, I'm always excited about.

Dakota: Awesome. Yeah you mentioned that your big trip this year Galapagos and I was like Kilimanjaro wasn't?

Tiffany Yu: The Kilimanjaro it just like happened, but it's so funny because no matter when you decide to do it, it will be the right time that you needed it. Everything about it just felt like expedited. I felt very unprepared, but it was exactly what I needed. The timing of when it happened couldn't have been more timely given the current public health situation that we're in right now.

Dakota: Yeah. Well, we love to have you travel with us again. For people listening, we're just wondering where can people find you the easiest? Whether on social media or a website?

Tiffany Yu: Sure. Yeah. The best place to find me for my most unfiltered views on life and my travel adventures is on Instagram. My handle is the letter I, the letter M, Tiffany, T-I-F-F-A-N-Y, and my last name, Y-U. So it's imtiffanyyu.

Dakota: Okay, awesome. We'll put that definitely in the blog, and the transcription and the show notes for people who are reading and want to listen. Thank you so much for coming.

Tiffany Yu: Yeah. Thank you. It was a pleasure traveling with Acanela.

Dakota: Awesome. Good to hear that and we'd love to have you again.

Podcast made in partnership with Acanela Expeditions

Theme Song - I’ll Just Be Me by Gravity Castle