I needed to buy a whole bunch of new kit for a trip, including a new stove which would work in very cold conditions, and in places where fuel might be dodgy or scarce. I'd spent ages in the shops, studying stove features and learning all about fuel types, ease of cleaning, stability, wind-resistance etc etc, and eventually settled on this little fellow, because it could burn just about ANY kind of fuel, including yak pee, and the guy in the shop had just sold a whole bunch of them to the British Antarctic Survey people along the road.
If it's good enough for use in the Antarctic, it's good enough for me! I'd read all the instructions religiously, checked and double-checked the method at home (sea-level) with unleaded fuel and it seemed to work pretty well, so I cleaned it, packed it up and put it in my bag, and forgot about it until the big trip.
So! For the first few days of the tour we went out on an easy road, just to get a feel for the climate and the environment. It was hot and heavy work and we weren't used to the altitude (relatively low, about 3,500m), so when we finally got to our destination for the day I was completely exhausted and really,
really looking forward to a hot meal and my sleeping bag. I got the stove out and fired-it up, but couldn't achieve the nice blue flame that I'd seen at sea level a month before. Could be the altitude, could be dirty fuel, whatever. I persevered, and barely managed to boil water for rice after about half-an-hour of belching, yellow, smoky flames. Ulrike was very uncertain about the stove, but I assured her that this is what happens at altitude - there's less oxygen so we get a yellow flame, and water boils at a lower temperature so it takes longer to actually cook stuff, or something like that. The next day was the same - we tried to cook some lentils but they remained hard, and I was really getting a bit depressed about the prospect of heading off into the wilderness with only lukewarm rice to eat every day. Bummer.
Once back at base for a couple of rest days, I took the stove out to give it a good clean, and only then did I realise that I'd been using it upside down. Doh! It did improve after that, but never quite worked as well as it's supposed to...