Moving

I am moving to Switzerland, so I have a whole flat full of stuff that I want to give to new owners. I am moving out of my place on September 16, so I need to get rid of things before then.

My main concern isn't making money of this stuff, it is getting it off my hands with a minimum of fuss. So, here is the deal: below is a list of all the things that I need to get rid of. If you think see something that you want, you can have it - so long as you come over and pick it up (and if you think that it is worth a bit of money we can come to an arrangement).

Whatever I don't give away in the next week, I will put on Gumtree.

- Volta powerlite vacuum cleaner - as good as new condition

- LG XA-14 micro hi fi - as good as new

- one tatty, but comfortable couch.

- cushions of all sizes

- A really comfy queen size ensemble bed.

- Very nice wool doona

- 4-bar heater (get it for next winter)

- A really nice wooden coffee table

- wireless and network gear, both less than 6 months old

- 1 dlink ADSL2+ model and router (model DSL-526B)

- 1 dlink wireless router (model DIR-615)

- 4 solid wooden chairs

- 2 canvas directors chairs

- A whole kitchen of plates, cups and utensils. Includes some really good plates.

- A whole bunch of books. You don't have to read them, just put them on your book shelf to look smart.

- A monsterous 500L fridge - Kelvinator "impression series".

- clothes racks

- big upright lamp

- a mirror

- bedside drawer set

Daytripping Brisneyland

Has It Been That Long?

Crickey, last night I realised that I had been back in Brisbane for a month to the day. Time has flown by, and I am still suffering from a Hampi hangover. Well, my work is suffering as I have only just got back into the right frame of mind for that sort of carry-on. I went travelling for more than two months, which I reckon is the sweet spot where you relax completely, so I wasn't ready for the day-to-day of work.

I still miss the crew from Goan Corner, and I am now reduced to living vicariously through videos and photos that they post on Flickr, Facebook and Youtube (more about that below!)

India is Fully Sick

One thing did get me excited just before I left India. I hadn't been sick, except for a few very minor tummy upsets, for my entire Indian holiday. It is common knowlege that it isn't possible to go to India without getting crook, particularly for me with my weak stomach. But I found myself thinking that I was going to get away with seven weeks of fine health. Silly boy.

My last two nights were in the Southern capital city of Trivandurum, and I shouted myself a fairly plush hotel room ($20 a night!) I woke up covered in insect bites on the first morning. I figured that it was mosquitos, but when I woke with even more bites on the second morning I had a terrible feeling that... it might just be... bedbugs. I have never seen bedbugs, but I had a good look inside the bed and saw lots of very well fed little bastards crawling around.

I had to get on a flight first thing that morning, so I spent the entire trip home itching like mad, and had to spend my first day cleaning and boiling everything to kill the critters instead of sleeping. After that it was just a matter of waiting the four or five days that it takes for the sores to stop itching.

But one of the little bites got infected, right on the back of my thigh. In the space of three hours the whole back of my leg wet red, swollen and hard, and I was in a lot of pain. I had to go to hospital where I was put on strong antibiotics and told to report back every second day. Long story short, I developed a doozy of an abscess on the back of my leg that the doctor had a lot of fun squeezing (most painful thing I can remember), and I am still going to the doctor to get it checked every other day.

Good old India, she is a cruel mistress.

Animated Memories

I had lots of fun taking videos on my new camera, and got lots of really good climbers doing some crazy stuff. I have finally finished making a montage of some of the highlights. Actually, I finished a while ago, but there have been various "technical problems" in getting said videos onto YouTube in their HD glory. At least I learnt how to compile codecs by hand and spoon feed them to feed YouTube what it wants (it would seem that I can't help but turn the simplest of activities into technical challenges)

All of my videos will end up on my YouTube channel (subscribe or keep checking back because I will keep adding videos of climbs, explosions, yak jumping and Indian cooking). The movie I made of Hampi was too big, so I have split it into two halves

Part 1:



Part 2:

And, for those who own iPods and iPhones, I have made versions of the videos that will play on them, so you can keep some Hampi highlights in your pocket. Right click and save the following links (they are around 50MB each)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/233337/hampiIPOD1.mp4
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/233337/hampiIPOD2.mp4

If you there are any videos that you remember me shooting that you would like, let me know and I will see what I can do to share them with you.

Heading Home

As I lay in a very cramped bed on a sleeper bus hurtling (at a maximum speed of 40 km/hr) down the "highway" from Hospet to Goa last night I wondered how it had come to this. You see, I don't do night buses, particularly those which negotiate roads with speed bumps so large that hitting them at 10 km/hr throws you out of bed. Instead of falling asleep I carefully went through all my long distance bus rides in my mind, and realised that I haven't taken a night bus since Palenque-Mexico City ten years ago.

But I found myself on a night bus because there were no tickets available for the train to Goa where I have a train leaving this evening for Trivandrum - the final destination before I fly home on Tuesday. I was feeling pretty low after having to leave Hampi, and all the great friends that I have made. It was hard knowing that it would be a long time before I saw them again, if ever.

Mind you, having a common interest in climbing make it easier to catch up. Conrad and I are making vague plans to go sport climbing in China this time next year, and Pete, Conrad and I have locked in plans for returning to Hampi in two year's time. Both trips will involve fireworks. Shitloads of fireworks. We have pledged to save our spare change over the next couple of years to fund an enormous fireworks war chest.

So, I am now at the beach in Colava, which is about five km down the road from the transport hub of Madgaon. I have to wait until 11pm for my train to Trivandrum. From there I have a flight home on Tuesday, though I think that when I arrive on Wednesday I will be spending all day sleeping... I will see the folk back home on Thursday.

A Hampi Day

On my third-last day in Hampi I woke up at a quarter to seven, which was good because we were meant to meet up at 6:30 to go to Sector E (with so many boulder fields, some of them are bound to get lame names). Pete (he puts the pump in Pete Pump) was looking a bit rough around the edges after a few too many beers with Duncan the night before, but he was there, leading the way with his brush stick (bamboo pole with brushes attached for cleaning hard-to-reach holds). Also in the group were Joana and Camilla from Switzerland and Norway respectively and Dean from Canada. Conrad is soft (don't let his 6'4", 200 pound frame fool you, his mother obviously hugged him too much as a child) so he rode is motorbike. We grabbed idli (steamed rice cakes) and chai for breakfast as we walked.

The first thing that you see at Sector E is the ninety degree arette, a 5 metre high 7a/v6 climb on the intersection of two flat, vertical faces that were formed when a large boulder was split for stone blocks. The climb is up the almost-square edge where the two faces meet, with a few crystals and small crimps on the faces being the only other holds. I had already visited the area twice to try and climb it, and this was my last chance before I left. I spent an hour trying with little success, before a group of Spaniards turned up and showed different approach to climbing it. By then I was tired so I took half an hour off to watch people climb some other things before returning to try the new approach.

On my first attempt I got very close to the top, past the hardest part, when my foot slipped and I fell quite a long way (apparently I made a very funny noise). I had a couple of holes in two fingers that had to hold a sharp hold each time I tried the climb, so I taped them up and finally pulled it together to climb my first 7a... which was a pretty big deal for me because I had been aiming to climb 6a when I arrived in Hampi. In the mean time Conrad had sent Kundalini Rising, v8, with a big flap of skin missing of his finger (I take it back big fella, you are far from soft). Camilla was suitably impressed, because she dropped us and got a ride home on the back of Conrad's bike.

To celebrate I had beer and baked beans for breakfast, and was seen wandering off to have a nap while muttering about sore fingers. When I woke I wandered over to "the lounge" (the hammocks between Conrad's hut and the girls' hut), where we watched a climbing movie (such things exist and would make no sense to anyone who doesn't climb).

Some Australian friends, Alistair and Katherine, who we met in Nepal had arrived in Hampi and were staying at the Goan Corner. So, for the afternoon I went out for some fun and easy climbing with them and Joana. We returned as things were getting dark, which made the crossing of the rice paddies a little treacherous. It was time for a shower then dinner and an early bed time (made earlier for me by a couple of extra celebratory beers), ready for the next day of climbing.

Hampi

I seem to start half the posts in this blog with comments about the length of time since the last post... and this one is no different. I have been in Hampi, in the southern state of Karnataka, for three weeks. Hampi is a place where the outside world gets forgotten quite easily, and things like writing blog posts don't seem so important. So I hope that people reading this will appreciate the monumental effort that I had to go to to write the post!

Heading South

The trip from Varanasi to Hampi was a long ride. The first leg was a thirty-hour train ride to Hyderabad, which started with the usual confusion over exactly when and from which platform the train would leave. Once on the train I had to argue with the family from the next compartment who had stashed all of their luggage under the seat where my luggage belonged. Then I had to politely refuse the requests from a man who wanted me to swap seats with me; I had the top bunk, which is easily the best spot in a sleeper carriage.

After that I could relax and enjoy the ride. Well, as well as you can relax when every Indian bloke within earshot is using the loudspeaker in his phone to play the latest Bollywood hits. Indian pop music is fun for the first half an hour of your trip, but it tires very quickly when it is coming out of all manner of bad speakers.

I arrived in Hyderabad at 10pm, and had to walk around some very dodgy streets before I found a half-decent hotel room. I had a train leaving at 9 the next evening, so I decided to see a bit of Hyderabad during the day. The guidebook promised impressive Muslim sights, but the reality was poorly maintained sites covered in graffiti. By far more Indian tourists than foreigners visit the historic sites in India , and it would seem that half of them want to carve their name in the walls. The other half try to get involved with photo opportunities with any Western tourists in the area. There are a few photos out there of me with my arm around smiling Indian blokes at Charminar in Hyderabad.

The sites might have been over-hyped, but at least the famous spicy Andaran food lived up to its reputation. I had a perfect chicken Biryani (spicy rice dish) from a eatery that sold only that dish for less than a dollar.

Hampi

Another ten-hour ride on the train, a short rickshaw ride, half an hour on a bus, a short boat trip over a river and a walk through the rice paddies bought got me to the Goan Corner in Hampi. I stayed here for three weeks three years ago. Then I was going to stay for a week, but I met a lot of people who were here for the rock climbing and started to climb. The area was made famous amongst climbers by a climbing movie called Pilgrimage that came out about six years ago. Each year more climbers visit, and it now has a very vibrant scene.

The rock is very similar to the granite boulder fields in Girraween, so it all feels very familiar. Nearly all of the climbing is a style called bouldering, which involves climbing relatively low routes without any ropes. Protection from falls is provided by crash pads (easily carried mattresses designed for the purpose) and people below (called spotters) who make sure that you land on the pads when you fall. Most of the problems are only 3 or 4 meters high and the spotters are not needed much, but some of the routes can be up to 8-10 metres high which requires a good spotter to (a) save your neck if you fall (b) yell encouragement and threats to motivate you to not fall.

By far the biggest cause of injuries is not falls, it is the rock itself. The granite is very rough and sharp, and it wears my skin down very quickly. lots of care has to be taken to file any rough patches of skin down so that they don't catch and open up on the rock, and one becomes an expert at the use of tape to protect very sore finger tips and remove strain from stressed-out tendons. It doesn't help that most of the climbs here involve a lot of crimping (very thin holds that have to be held with finger tips locked into them) and overhanging starts. Most people get a bit freaked out by the difficulty and roughness of the rock when they first arrive.

But, after you have adjusted the climbing here is a lot of fun. There are boulder fields in every direction, far more than could be explored in a lifetime. I am starting to climb fairly well, and am starting to finish some of the problems that were impossible when I first arrived. The feeling of finishing a very high and hard problem a bunch of friends cheering at the bottom is great. And it has a distinctly Indian feel, given by ganja man and cake man, who walk around the rocks selling their wares to climbers.

Hampi also attracts some of the best climbers from all around the world, who are great to climb with and just watch climb. Generally speaking the climbing crowd are very good company, as they are outdoor types who are here for a purpose. The people staying at the Goan Corner are nearly exclusively climbers who are staying here for an extended period of time. So it is possible to make good friends, and have a fun activity to do every day. We generally climb twice a day, with early morning and late afternoon sessions when it is cooler. When the rock heats up you start to sweat and no amount of chalk will stop the holds from becoming greasy.

And on the days when the skin is too thin and climbing is not possible there is a lake to go swimming in. The lake also has vendors who walk around selling snacks and drinks to swimmers. When we went there a few days ago we purchased some chips off one vendor in exchange for getting to watch him jump off an 18 metre high rock into the water. We also learnt not to visit the lake on Sunday, when the area is crawling with Indian men trying to take photos of Western women swimming. They will shamelessly stand in a group of 20, a couple of metres from their victim and snap away, ignoring any pleas to respect the modesty of the girl (they get quite angry when reminded that they would not want to see their sister treated that way). But, though there are some of the usual annoyances such as lecherous men and corrupt cops (the police here are a particularly detestable lot), but here they are not overbearing and only a minor inconvenience.

Badami Run

There is an important historic city called Badami about five hours from Hampi. It is famous for its temples that were caved out of solid stone in cliff faces. It is also starting to become famous amongst climbers for its large sandstone cliffs and boulder fields. A large group of us, sixteen in total, made a short three day trip there between Christmas and the New Year. We had been told that accommodation was plentiful there, but we didn't factor in the Indian School holidays over the festive season. So, we were unable to find a single room in the whole city when we arrived at seven in the evening. Things were looking desperate until we found a hotel manager who was happy for us to sleep on the floor of the conference room for an exorbitant fee.

Badami is particluarly dirty and unpleasant place, with countless pigs on the streets are very persistent children. The children were a bit of a menace, with the low point when a bunch of them throwing stones at us after we had refused their requests for (1) school pens, (2) chocolate, (3) 10 rupees, (4) "one coin our country". Of course, some of the kids were very friendly, and they followed us around from climb to climb. A couple were keen to borrow our gear and try some easy climbs, which was both fun and stressful.

Given that Badami is a hole, it is fortunate that the climbing is so good there. All types of climbing are possible there, with many trad (where climbers place their own protection in cracks), sport climbing (where bolts in the rock are available to clip the rope into), as well as a big selection of boulders. Badami was meant to be a rest for the fingers from the hard rock in Hampi, however we climbed so much that our fingers came back as bad as ever.

New Year With A Bang

I came up with the idea of putting on a fireworks display in a boulder field with Pete, and English climber. Then when Conrad from Idaho hear of our plans his face lit up with childish glee, so he was included along with an Australian guy named Chico who grew up in Bombay as our technical consultant (growing up in India teaches you a lot about fireworks).

We passed the hat around the Goan Corner, and got 8000 rupees ($200) for a fireworks fund. We set off to Hospet, the nearest big town. There we were directed to one of many fireworks shops in town. Fireworks are a big deal in India, and they are nearly completely unregulated (and any regulations can be bypassed with some baksheesh), and are a very Indian way to celebrate an special occasion.

Our fund went a long way. A very long way. We filled up an enormous box full of pyrotechnic goodness that would cost thousands of dollars to put on in Australia, if you were allowed. We had over twenty mortars (the big ones that go really high) as well as rockets, whistlers, fountains, and the very scary bombs that have very short fuses and make a deafening roar when the explode. Conrad is a firefighter from Idaho, and is a big guy. But for the 24 hours leading up to New Year's eve he was a grinning kid.

On the 30th we went up to the rocks to let off a small mortar, just for testing purposes! It went off with a roar, and sent a trail of sparks high into the sky that exploded into a brilliant firework. That made us more excited, because we wanted to know how the big ones would go. On New Years all four of us stayed sober for the show. We were very nervous about the amount of explosives that we were dealing with, as well as with the safety of our drunk audience.

We had carefully choreographed the show, so we spent more time running around and climbing to launching stations than looking up at the show, but I know had the most fun. I now realise that I missed out by not playing with fireworks when I was a child. After it was over, we sat on the rock, drinking beer and watching an eclipse of the full moon (and a blue moon too, all on New Years).

I hope that everyone had a good festive season, and are looking at a good new year!

Varanasi

A few years ago I found a photo of my parents in India before I was born. It shows them sitting in a boat, with a distinctly Indian city on the shore behind them. For Christmas I framed it for them, and Dad told me that it was from an early-morning boat road that they took on the Ganges at Varanasi. This morning Jamie took a photo of me in a boat, with a similar backdrop (I even have a mustache like Dad did in the shot).

The hassle that Jamie and I had to go through with touts to get the boat is probably more than they had to deal with, but the city has probably changed very little. Indeed, the city has had a continuous history as the city at the centre of Hinduism since at least 600BC, and it has achieved that in part by changing very little, and not getting involved with greater politics.

The city is stretched along the western bank of the Ganges with an endless string of ghats (bathing steps) along the shore. The other bank is completely bare, without a single building or sign of human intervention. While tourists are conspicuous, along with hostels, bakeries and stores advertising to them, the city really has a life of its own and it is very easy to step aside and just watch the city do its thing.

Jamie and I have had a blast the last few days here, though I suppose we haven't actually done much. We have just been wandering around the fiendishly complex network of alleyways behind the ghats, sampling food and watching the rituals of daily life. The food has been a big hilight for us. Street food in Nepal was not too interesting or varied, but in Varanasi there are many little stalls serving all sorts of vegetarian delights to Pilgrims at high speed, so the food is always very fresh and hot.

We have found a very good little place where the guys stand in front of big pots of fresh food, serving it out as fast as physically possible. We also have a very friendly chai man whose chai sells for less than 10 cents a hit, with lots of sugar and a hint of cardamom. And this morning I got a great video of a pro making chapati at a little stall that only serves a three types of curry with chapati. It matters that they get their chapati right! It is great to see the chapati rolled out, then placed on a hot plate for a minute, then put straight on a bed of hot coals where it puffs up instantly, then removed and patted down to make it flat.

On the first day, just after checking in in our hotel after the long and tiring 24 hour bus-rickshaw-jeep-train-rickshaw journey from Pokhara, I went for a wander and found a lassi shop called Blue Lassi. Lassis are made from creamy yogurt that is worked in with sugar until it becomes smooth. Good ones are served with thick lumps of cream and a dash of rosewater infused with saffron on top. Jamie and I have made them a two-a-day ritual, and at 30 cents a pop we can afford to.

The lassi shop is on a narrow lane that leads down to the main ghat where the dead are cremated on wooden pires. Every five minutes a group of men chanting a simple mantra will walk past carrying a body wrapped in a shroud and covered in marigolds towards the ghats. After a while you end up chanting the mantra to yourself while waiting for your lassi (now rated as my "best in world", replacing the Lassi Wallah in Jaipur).

I am getting along a lot better with Indians in general this time, which is probably because I knew what to expect and I have a slightly higher budget! It is nice to not worry so much about getting ripped off, and letting the hotel make rail bookings and such for you instead of having to sort it out myself. There have still been a few exasperated moments, but nothing that a head wobble and patience can't solve.

I have booked my train tickets to Hyderabad tomorrow, and from there I will getting another train and bus to Hampi, where my fingers will hopefully be in good form on the rocks. So the next post should see me very happy and relaxed in Southern India. Of course, this is India, so I am not taking anything for granted!

Water

Bad Manners

Kirk and I got a local bus from Sundurijal to Kathmandu at the end of our hike. Kirk was lucky enough to have a young lad "practice English" with him. The kid had some strong opinions, particularly on the offence caused to the Nepali people by foreigners who don't learn to speak Nepali and refuse to drink water out of the tap: "Nepalese water is fine, very clean. You are being rude by drinking bottled water instead of tap water."

We had just walked past a village with open sewers that flowed into small streams that then fed a small reservoir that supplied water to Kathmandu. This occurs everwhere, with all sewage flowing directly into water courses, which closes the loop very nicely for guardia. It would seem that a large portion of the population must have the disease; it is certainly very cheap to buy tinedazol, the drug for treating the disease.

Nepalese people do not travel well on buses. The tout has to run back and forward distributing plastic bags for people who are going to be ill, and you have to be careful that vomit from someone throwing up out a window at the front doesn't come back through your window toward the rear (speaking from experience). After taking a bus ride while recovering from a case of gardia and struggling to hold onto my lunch, Kirk and I came up with a new theory that upset stomachs might be behind much of the bus illness problems.

Getting Crook, Spotting Critters

All three of us got gardia around the same time. Kirk and I think we got it from water used to wash our cups and plates the appalling accomodation that we were forced to accept on the last night of our trek. We took the appropriate tablets in Kathmandu, then got a bus to Royal Chitwan National Park the next day. The bus ride got quite hairy towards the end, as the road followed the side of a river in a steep valley. There were many breakdowns, crashes and nutty drivers. One truck loaded up with bamboo had rolled over and was balanced on the cliff beside the road, with two shaken drivers sitting next to it.

No sooner had we made ourselves comfortable in the Tiger Safari Lodge (not to be confused with the inferior accomodation offered by the Safari Tiger Lodge and the Tiger Lodge), than Dave turned up on a noisy Royal Enfield motorbike (India's Harley Davidson). Dave is a loud, hilarious Enlishman (Torquay) who could talk the legs off a chair . We met on the Langtang walk and have bumped into him at each stop of our trip.

When you meet Dave drink. You don't have any option. We have bumped into him three times, and the consequences have always been both hilarious and terrible. Unluckily the timing of our beer and red wine session in Chitwan didn't agree with our stomachs, and Kirk and I spent an uncomfortable night being violently ill (Kirk had it worse).

The next day Jamie and I played with the elephants during washing time at the river. We would climb on the elephant who would stand up and try to throw us in the water, which it always managed to do in the end. That afternoon we went for an elephant ride on a magnificent big elephant with huge tusks. Chitwan has lots of animals, with the biggest drawcard being its population of 400-500 one-horned Asian rhinos.

We spotted lots of deer, and a hilarious monkey that threatened to make my day by almost falling out of it's tree (regular readers in the past will be aware that I don't like monkeys). Unfortunately footprints and dung piles were all that we saw of the rhinos.

The next day Kirk had recovered enough to join us for a half day hike and half day jeep safari in the park. It took us less than half an hour to find a rhino, which we had to view by climbing a tree. It is quite dangerous walking around with such large and unpredictable animals lurking in the long grass. Another walking group who had been in the same canoe as us got chased 80 metres by an angry male rhino, with one of their group lucky to be uninjured after the rhino threw him in the air.

We got a far better view of a rhino during out jeep safari, when a big male walked out onto the road about 10 metres behind our jeep. He had a good look at us, before deciding that we weren't worth the effort of chasing, and wandered off into the bush. Up close such animals look very large, and just a bit intimidating.

Lakeside Living

We are now in Pokhara, a town beside a peaceful lake with great views of the Annarpurna range. We got here a couple of days ago, though one of those days was a bit of a write off because we bumped into Dave and had to put the day towards nursing hangovers.

It is very close to the end of our time in Nepal. Jamie and I are going to take the long trip to the Indian border and onto Varanarsi tomorrow, and we just saw Kirk ride off on a rented motorbike. He is going to attempt to ride along the recently completed Annapurna road to the village of Muktinath where Julian and I once nearly got run out of town (see "This Town Isn't Big Enough" here).

I hope everyone back home is well. The next post will have details of the craziness and culture shock of India. As such it promises to be funnier and more entertaining than these pleasant Nepalese posts.

On The Road Again

This is the first post for a long time. And, like the first post in this blog, it is being written in Kathmandu. This time around I am travelling with my brother Kirk, and my friend of too-many years/partner in crime Jamie. We are in Nepal for a month to do some trekking, then Jamie and I will be going to India where I plan to do lots of climbing in Hampi and eat a lot of curry (two of my favorite things.)

We flew out of Brisbane on the first at midnight. More often than not, flights involve some sort of cock-up for me, and this one was no different. At least in wasn't my fault. Kirk and I had adjacent seats because we have the same last name, but Jamie was down the front of the plane. When we got off for our stop over in Singapore he wasn't waiting at the gate. We waited half an hour, checked the sick bays and had him paged, because we had to be sure he was OK. It turned out that he had just wandered off to do some shopping without touching base as would be reasonably expected. We didn't see him until just before boarding of our flight four hours later.

You couldn't pick two more different international airports than Singapore and Kathmandu. One has automated everything (there are multicoloured LEDs above each urinal in Singapore that alert the user as the the status of the loo), the other has a chalk boards above the luggage carousels that are meant to have the appropriate flight number for the luggage written on them (the luggage seems to come out at random, with a head wobble the most detailed information that the staff can give you.)

We did quite well getting out of the airport and into a reasonably-priced taxi with a minimum of fuss. We got railroaded into a hotel run by some an annoying bunch of gentlemen by the smooth co-driver of the the tourist taxi. They turned each transaction, such as filling out the check-in forms, into a tag team operation to try and sell us tours, get us trekking permits or ask if we had ever heard of Nepalese "chocolate". But it was a clean room that took no effort to find.

Getting Ready

The next day we left the hotel with a minimum of fuss, and located The Hotel Red Planet which I remembered from my last stay. This was no mean feat, given that Thamel - the travellers' district in Kathmandu - is a rat's nest of twisting lanes, buildings on buildings, and every type of transport jostling and trying to sell you Nepalese chocolate.

Once installed in our more pleasant digs we spent a day organising our trekking permits, which has become slightly more complex than last time I was here. Which is to say, it took a lot of vigorous debate and research just to to determine exactly where we had to go to get the permits. We guessed correctly and got the permits after trekking across town and filling out a bunch of forms and dealing with a few grinning, head-wobbling clerks.

The next challenge was to determine which bus station our bus left from the next morning. Once that was done we celebrated with lots of Everest beer, which gave us hang-overs from hell. They put something in the beer over here, and it isn't healthy.

The bus ride from Kathmandu to Siabhru Besi was long and painful, and took all day. Things started well, with the first part of the 70 kilometre journey going smoothly, but the distance covered started to resemble some logarithmic curve from hell as the road surface deteriorated and the number of treacherous switch backs increased. With an hour left on the eight-hour journey, a young lady lost her curry lunch all over Kirk's pants, which made everyone except us laugh.

A Short Walk In The Langtang Valley

The first of two treks that we were planning was the so-called Langtang walk that starts at the bottom of the Langtang valley which is steep, narrow and formed by a river, and follows the valley up to the top where it is wide and flat-bottomed because it was formed by a glacier.

The first couple of days were walking through thick sub-tropical forests in the lower part of the valley, and as we climbed higher the vegetation started to thin out. None of us were very fit, so the constant uphill gradient combined with thinning air as we gained altitude had us working fairly hard. It was considerably harder for Jamie, because he got very bad blisters on his heels that deteriorated each day. By the time we were in Kyangin Gompa at the head of the valley he had been reduced to Teevas.

There were plenty of great views, and friendly people along the way, but the highlight for me was when Kirk accepted my idle dare to jump the largest Yak in Langtang Village (that is yak with a capital Y). Watch this space for video evidence on Youtube.

While Jamie was resting his feet, Kirk and I made a couple of day trips. The first was to walk right up to the end of the valley for a great view from the base of the mountains that extended into Tibet. The second was to climb the 5000 metre high peak of Tserko Ri (well, actually 4984m, but you always round these things up) for a great view of the tops of the same mountains.

We had planned to return back to Syabhru Besi where we started the walk, and then head to the Annapurna region to to the Annapurna Base Camp walk, however we figured that would be pushed for time. Instead, we decided to extend our Langtang walk by crossing the high passes at the holy lake (for Hindus) of Gosankund into the Helambu region.

Jamie's feet were not getting any better, so he finished the walk at Syabhru Besi, and Kirk and I headed for Gosankund. We got laid-up by bad weather in the village Syabhru, which is balanced along a steep ridge. We saw the snow line drop by 1000 metres over the coarse of an hour while we ate our lunch - the clouds descended to cover the tops of the hills, and they left snow behind when they lifted.

The walk up to Gosankund was much easier after our earlier acclimatisation walks, with a beautiful day spent climbing 1700 metres through rhododendron then alpine forests to the high, windy ridge of Laurabina. From there we had uninterrupted views of the Himalaya from the length of the Annapurnas, the Himal Ganesh, into Tibet and to the Langtang peaks.

From Lauribina we had a short climb to the first 4100 metre pass. After the pass the trail was very narrow, carved into a steep slope, with snow on the trail and views over the first lakes below us. Just as we got to the snow line proper, we saw the lake of Gosankund. Hindu mythology holds that the body of Siva can be seen as some stones sticking out of the water where he threw himself for relief after drinking poison. The water was very cold, which would explain why pilgrims come here for ceremonial bathing in the middle of summer. I decided that to wash my face and make a small coin donation to the lake was as far as I was prepared to go.

To get to Helambu we had to cross a second pass of 4600 metres in the snow, which we did in our shorts with big grins after two days of fantastic walking. From there it was a tiring and long descent to Gopte where we were kept awake by a Dutch lady who was a prodigious snorer (thankfully she wasn't as bad as "Our Latvian Friend"). We finished the walk through Helambu to Sundarijal on the outskirts of Kathmandu in a couple of days, with some wonderful views of the Himalaya from the east to the west and changing landscape as high-mountain slopes gave way to well-tended terraces around villages.

We are now back in Kathmandu. We had planned to go to Royal Chitwan National Park for some wildlife spotting, but have postponed that for a day while Jamie recovers from a tummy upset (for once I am not the first to fall!) The bakeries of Kathmand keep us well fed and we import beer for more tolerable hangovers. Life is good.

Cadiz

Camping

Last week I packed my camping gear and took the four-hour bus ride to Tarifa, on the southern tipof Spain at the mouth of the Mediteranian. I stocked up on supplies in the supermercado (Eroski, my fave cheapo European supermarket), and started walking north along the beach.

There is a long ten kilometer stretch of beach before one gets to the headland at Punta Pampàloma, from there another four kilometers around the coast is El Chorrito, the beach where I spent the summer camping.

This time it was almost deserted, with a small group of people I didn´t know camping near the beach. I had the pick of the camping spots, and plenty of firewood. I chose a well hidden site high above the beach where the police would never find me. There might not have been many people around, but they still had a helicopter going back and forward along the coast, just to make people nervous.

I got to thinking about the summer that I spent on El Chorrito, and remembered that there were lots of stories from that time that I never wrote about in the blog...

Football

One lazy afternoon everybody was lying on the beach, enjoying the cooling of the air as the sun got lower. Bored. Probably stoned. Wondering what to do. Maybe something would come along?

A bright, round object was spotted floating out at sea.
¨probably a buoy¨
¨or a skin diver¨ (they have a bright floater attatched to them so that boats can see where they are and not run over them)

The object got closer, and closer...
¨coño, it´s a football!¨

While one hippy ran hollering into the surf to fetch the prize everybody else scrambled to sort out a pitch on the beach. Sticks marked the goals, and two teams were organised. The result was a no-holds-barred five-aside game of nude football.

Everybody turned out to be quite handy, which isn´t such a surprise in Europe. The girls watched as teams comprised of idle, stoned hippies, backpackers, criminals and musicians enthusiastically threw themselves into the game. It was a sight to see Carlos, a live-and-let-live hippy type sprint ten meters to shove somebody off the ball, then fight tooth and nail to retain it.

In the end everybody jumped into the sea to clean up, and set about cooking dinner.

Close Shave

I had spotted two police cars at the end of the road after the military checkpoint. It was unusual to see them in the area in the afternoon - they always came to raid us at sunup so that they could catch us while we slept. It is very unpleasant being woken by a scowling policeman (advice - pretend not to speak Spanish and act really stupid).

I dashed to the campsites to warn everybody that there might be some trouble on the way. But there was no sign of the police, and after an hour it was assumed that they were in the carpark for some other reason.

Everyone relaxed, and went back to their sites. I put on my pack and walked over to Fred´s site, a little ledge on top of the cliff overlooking the beach. I had my eyes on my feet and my head in dreamland as I wandered along, and I didn´t see the Policewoman talking to Fred until I looked up about ten meters from his site. She was standing side-on to me, and I thought that she would certainly see me out of the corner of her eye. Fred certainly saw me.

After a couple of seconds I started to back away slowly, I turned and walked quickly. I was waiting for the call, but it didn´t come and I ran to the little clearing where most of us were staying. There were eight guys sitting around the fire, with all of their possesions in various stages of unpacked. It took ten seconds after I said ¨Policia! Muy circa!¨, for everything to be packed and for us to be madly scrambling up the slope into the scrub where the police couldn´t find us.

Fred got a fine in the post, but he was asked to sign for it. He refused to sign, so he was never given the ticket, so he never had to pay.

A Surprise

Autostop

Last time I was leaving San Pedro I got a lift to Campohermoso with a German guy. From Campohermoso I somehow got a ride all the way to Granada, a two-hour ride that saved me many hours mucking around with buses and waiting in Spanish bars. The fog was so thick we could only see ten meters as we climbed from sea level to Granada which lies at around 700 meters altutitude. Then we drove out of the wall of cloud and to our left was the wonderful sight of the snow-capped Sierra to our left, and the cave-town of Guadix up ahead.

Campofeo

Campohermoso is the nearest main-road town to San Pedro, and it is a hell of a misnomer. Campohermoso means beautiful field in Spanish. Nothing could be further from the truth. The area is semi-arid, and may well have once been a beautiful stark landscape had the locals not struck tomato gold. A few years ago somebody realised that tomatoes could be grown all year round under plastic in large, ugly greenhouses that stretch as far as the eye can see.

The dusty mainstreet has a few Mercedes belonging to farmers who suddenly became very rich when they could see their tomatoes at three euros a kilo in Germany during winter. And there are the ugly "marble houses" built with such funds. Apparently in this part of the world many people keep an immaculate living room that nobody is able to use, it was purely for show. Now that some have a lot more money this idea has been scaled up to an entire marble house, with the family living in the garage.

Killing Time

Now I am just whittling time away, waiting for March the 13th when I have a flight from Valencia to England. I am waiting on a refund of my Irish tax money, without which I am not able to go too crazy in the last couple of weeks here.

But at least I will have to tax money for when I get home, though it does feel a little bit wrong to return from a long journey and not be broke. From Valencia I am flying to Stanstead near London, then I will be getting a train to Heathrow (well, actually, a couple of trains). Then on to Singapore, Melbourne and Brisbane. I am not looking forward to the journey, it always tires me out... but I am looking forward to getting home!

I was just going to turn up and surprise everybody, but that was going to be a little tricky to organise -- I can imagine getting home and finding that everybody was off camping, washing their hair or baking. So instead I have put it in my blog, and we will see how long it takes people to find out. Krys reckons 5.6 hours, I think more like three days. First reply gets a jelly frog when I get home.

Update : Jelly frog goes to Briana, my darling sister. My parents had also guessed by reading my mail. My flight QF610 arrives in Brisbane on March 15 at 10:10am. And Cully also gets a frog.

San Pedro

Waiting For The Bus

We had one of those days the other day. One of those days where you misstime your arrival so that you have to wait the maximum amount of time before catching the next bus.

The objective of the day´s travel was to get from San Pedro to Granada. The walk from San Pedro to Las Negras took about an hour, and we took no time at all to hitch-hike from Las Negras (Litterally ¨The Black Women¨, a fishing village so named after most of the men from the village died at sea sometime around 1900 and all the women in town wore black in mourning) to Campo Hermoso.

From there it all went wrong. A three hour wait for the hour-long bus ride to Almeria. Then it was another two hour wait for a bus to Granada. We then had to waste an hour waiting for the bus to Monachil where Fred lives. In all we were travelling for 11 hours, and I was a bit grumpy by the time that we got home.

Paridise Without Shade

It was all worth it for the four nights that we spent in San Pedro, an abandoned fishing village on the desert coast of Cabo De Gata (Cape Cat). The decline of the village began with the aforementioned boat disaster, when the majority of the population moved to the village of Las Negras which had just been given road access.

By the 1950s the only inhabitants in town were the Garda Civil, Franco´s right-hand police. When the Garda Civil left hippies slowly started to move into town to have a go at building their own little paradise(Garda Civil and hippies are not compatable, not by a long shot).

The coast of Cabo De Gata is the driest place in Europe, and one of the hottest. The village exists due to two fresh water springs that pop up in a little valley the ends in a small beach. They flow all year around, and provide a little oasis in the middle of the dry rolling hills with nothing taller than your hips growing on them.

It was hot enough when we were there, and that was the middle of winter. In summer it must be very difficult to get through some of the days. There is a little bit of shade, but not much. Certainly staying in one´s tent would be impossible any time after sunrise. In fact, I didn´t sleep in the tent, preferring to roll my sleeping mat out on the ground so that I could enjoy the perfect startscape in the desert.

Where Is The Community?

Of course a bunch of hippies building a little town basically translates into a bunch of folk doing their own things with a minimal amount of coordination or communication. One thing I have learnt from living in such places, it is that community can be a euphimism. More like squatter´s rights, and a great place for prison leavers, mental patients and drug addicts to hide from the greater world.

That said, there is always a core group of interesting folk who have a different take on life. Unlike El Chorrito where I spent a month during the summer, the police have very little interest in what goes on in San Pedro. In El Chorrito the police came by every couple of days to kick out anybody who was camping in the forest above the beach. This made it impossible to set up even any semi-permentant dwellings.

In San Pedro people are left to create whatever structures they please, and they also have the skeletons of the original town buildings to work with. As a result there is all manner of dwellings, and also a panaderia (bread shop), and bars serving cold beer (solar panels and generators provide the power).

The most impressive place that I saw was by far the cave house built by a German guy named Tilo. He had lived in San Pedro eight years, and had spent the last two years constructing his cave. It was a three minute scrample up a very steep rocky slope halfway up a cliff overlooking the bay. If the rock face he had carved out a cave using a chisel. He had built terraces, and steps chiseled into the rock lead from one level to another. The crowing touch was a stone BBQ that had probably the best view from a kitchen anywhere in the world. To top it off the house was completely invisible from below and one would only know about it if they were invited up.

Another character named Rubin, had recently left jail, where he had spent the last eight years. He was twenty eight, but he told me when I met him that in fact he was twenty years old as far as he was concerned. Krys and I enjoyed many a cup of coffee in his little hut, and grew to be good friends. Krys is a tattooist by trade, and has an impressive collection of tattoos on herself. Rubin revealed that he was a tattooist in jail, and told us how he made his own tattoo machines from pens and walkman batteries.

Characters like Rubin and Tilo are a highlite of places like San Pedro. But there are also people who keep you on your toes (I have met some jail-leavers and the like in such places that I would run a mile to avoid). Whoever you meet, it is bound to be interesting and educational.