Mark and Sylvia's Adventures

Bits of my weekend in Singapore

2011-09-27T01:13:00.002+13:00

I was determined to go and get some exercise after a sedentary week (and a cold) so headed up to Macritchie Reservoir. It's a great nature reserve, and again it was busy but not as bad as you might have expected in a city of 5 million!

View from the Treetop Walk

The first part of my run was in the muggy jungle and I have never been so sweaty in my life, not even close. Luckily I had brought my camelbak with me but even so I was glad to emerge next to the reservoir where there was a bit of air movement.

The asian guy is not me - I'm still a pakeha.

1.5 m-long monitior lizard hanging out in the reservoir. The reservoir is a major part of the water supply of Singapore and contains 5-10% treated wastewater. Yummy!

Marina Sands Resort Hotel, home of the famous Infinity Pool.

Beach on Sentosa Island where I spent a few hours on Sunday.

Merlion!

Singapore - Bukit Timah

2011-09-18T20:31:00.003+12:00

My workmate Gary and I visited Bukit Timah nature reserve today, after first exploring out local surrounds and nutting out the public transport system.

It was really busy there but great to see so many people out walking, running and mountain biking. It was a bit weird seeing lots of Chinese walking backwards down a steep path as a form of exercise and we had to work quite hard to avoid them as we walked up. Once we got to the top of the hill via the main track it was easy to take a quieter path and ditch the crowds.

The trees here are cool - most of them have long straight trunks with an explosion of leaves at the top. Some of them have got more leafy biomass in parasites than on the tree itself.

No monkey photos unfortunately but there were heaps of them there!

Ngauruhoe and New Plymouth

2011-08-20T07:24:00.008+12:00

Last weekend I headed up Mt Ngauruhoe with a bunch of people who had been my students on an introductory alpine course a couple of weeks earlier. We successfully met at the car park at the appointed time in light drizzle and clag but with high hopes that it would clear...

Not much to see so far.

Ngauruhoe teases us with a brief glimpse before disappearing again

Climbing up through the cloud

Dan perfects his "staunch pose", an outstanding matter from the course previously

Nearly there

It was really good to be on top of a mountain again!

A steaming fumarole at the summit. Great for melting snow in your water bottle. Eat that, South Islanders. Unfortunately the warm rocks near the summit meant the snow had been hollowed out from underneath and we fell into a lot of holes.

There were heaps of ice feathers and cool sastrugi

Ngauruhoe has interesting terrain on top - it has three summits (one of them is the crater) so we made sure to bag all of them.

Evidence of a fast and fun descent

I then drove to Taranaki to see Kyle and Betty and hopefully to climb Mt Taranaki. Unfortunately the route that looked the most direct on my (large-scale) map was apparently the worst road I could have taken. It was State Highway 43 from Taumaranui to Stratford and is known as "The Forgotten World Highway". I think this is because:

They forgot to put any people in there. Sometimes I would drive for 1/2 hour without seeing the lights of farm houses and I saw five other cars in 150 km.
They forgot to clear fallen trees and rocks off the road, luckily I was able to squeeze through
They forgot to seal 20 km in the middle of it.

I didn't take any photos but I saw lots of these:

Apparently it's an amazing drive during the day (and when you're not in a hurry) so I'll have to go back sometime.

That night driving to New Plymouth, Mt Taranaki looked strikingly beautiful, standing above the plain in the crisp, clear moonlight. However the forecast wasn't great and sure enough, it was shrouded in cloud and showers the next day and I never saw it again. Instead, Kyle and I went mountain biking on some local tracks. The mountain biking was hardcore extreme so I didn't take any photos (actually I forgot my camera). We also visited a multi award-winning footbridge that is one of the nicest I've seen, it cleverly frames the mountain. Obviously I stole this photo off the web since you can see Mt Taranaki:

After lunch with Kyle and Betty (they look great but sorry no photos) I had the long drive back to Wellington - with the added interest of driving head-on into the Great Storm of 2011 on the way and having to wait at Pukerua Bay due to snow on the road to Porirua!

Easter in Turangi

2011-05-23T06:51:00.006+12:00

Well hello - sorry it's been a while. It's been a few weeks since Easter so I'll make this a brief post. At Easter a bunch of us (11 people) headed up to Turangi, at the south end of Lake Taupo to hang out at a bach (holiday house).

Lots of hanging out was successfully done.

The weather wasn't amazing but occasionally the sun broke through and it didn't rain too much. We had a big group so we split up and did various things, but they mostly involved walking/running on various alpine and bush tracks in the area. The highlight for me was probably running the Tongariro Crossing with Neil and Frances - Neil and I ran in from the Ketatahi end to enable a car swap with the walkers coming from the other direction. Fortunately we didn't miss Frances in the mist at the top and the three of us descended through gradually-increasing views to the Mangatepopo car park. I was glad I'd been there before to see the views! I would have felt a bit ripped off if I was one of the hundreds of first-time walkers that day.

These photos are from Sylvia and Paula's run to the Tama Lakes nearby.

The next day a group visited the historic Waihohonu hut.

On Sunday we decided that group activities were in order to celebrate Easter. Of course we had the traditional egg hunt...

And the not-so-traditional lemon and spoon race.

We then went for a leisurely stroll on the Tongariro River walk above Turangi.

Holiday Tramping

2011-01-18T19:35:00.005+13:00

Between Christmas and New Year, Sylvia and I went tramping for four days with Neil and Frances. Due to continuing strong westerlies we decided to go tramping as far eastwards as possible - which turned out to be the Seaward Kaikouras.

It's not an area many people go, and certainly not somewhere we'd have planned to go if we hadn't been scouring the guidebooks for ideas. Our tramp was in an area called the Clarence Reserve and is a mix of farmland, retired farmland and alpine tops/river valleys.

Quite a bit of the tramping was on gravel road or 4WD track. We thought it might have had the potential to be a bit lame but it worked out just fine. It was also more social because we could all bunch together and natter away!

We didn't start walking until after 4 pm on the first day and didn't get to the hut until 9.30. Late dinner then bed. It was quite a flash, modern hut and seems to get quite a bit of use by a variety of users - trampers, horse riders, MTB, 4WD and quad bikers.

We didn't see a lot of native bush on this trip, but there were other items of scenic interest, such as interesting geology, to keep us entertained. Definitely some scrambling possibilities.

There were also several historic huts. The route we followed for the first two days was a historic stock droving route from the Clarence Valley to Kaikoura.

On the third day we ditched the 4WD track and headed up the nearly dry Gore Stream...

...then the much more scenic Alfred Stream. Swimming stop compulsory.

The lovely but seldom-visited Alfred Hut (a standard NZFS 4-bunker in good condition). On the 29th December we were the second party to visit in 2010! Or at least the second party to write in the hut book. We didn't spend the night here since we arrived at 2.30 pm, but we did have dinner and wait for the day to cool down a bit before heading up a ridge to our evening's camp.

Speaking of which - a slight breeze to begin with but we awoke to a beautiful calm day and views of the Seaward and Inland Kaikoura Mountains.

The last day involved some slightly arduous scrambling and a short but dodgy loose descent before things got a bit easier. We finished with a bit of a water shortage and a 4WD and pasture walk back to the cars.

A Great Week in the Mountains

2010-12-24T16:32:00.008+13:00

About a month ago, Dan, James and I headed into the Southern Alps to climb some stuff. The main objective on this trip was Mt Cook, but we were happy to just have a crack at climbing whatever we could. The weather was amazingly good, too good in fact, with cracking sunny days for over a week and a freezing level that never fell lower than 3,500 m. This meant that we had to look at higher peaks and cross our fingers for a decent overnight freeze.

We did some multi-pitch rock climbing at Sebastopol Bluffs on the Saturday afternoon as a bit of a warm-up for three-person, two-rope climbing techniques (though it was a lot of fun in itself). On Sunday evening we flew in to Plateau Hut at 2,200 m and went to bed hoping for a freeze.

We actually got one and at 3 am we got up to climb Mt Dixon.

Mt Dixon - South Ridge on the left, East Ridge on the right

The conditions up at Cook were actually very bare for the end of November, probably more like typical late December conditions due to the lack of snowfall this winter and the warm weather since. The glaciers are all opening up and the bergshrunds ("schrunds" - big crevasse-type things at the top of snowslopes) have opened up too. Also a lot of stuff had fallen off.

We climbed the slightly harder South Ridge because there was no way onto the East Ridge due to the large shrund at its base, except for traversing the crumbly ridge from Glacier Dome which by all accounts is awful. However, the East Ridge was a suitable descent route because we could just abseil over the shrund.

Working our way through the glacier to the start of our climb actually turned out to be more intricate than we'd expected

On the South Ridge

We did 3 pitches up a snow/ice gully with rock steps onto the crest of the ridge, and a further short ice gully pitch at a step just below the summit. Apart from the strong winds on top (which meant we had to crab our way along, or at best walk very hunched over) the rest was reasonably straightforward and the descent of the East Ridge was quite quick in soft snow.

After a rest day (when there wasn't a decent freeze anyway) we got up at midnight to climb Cook via the Linda Glacier. We didn't get a lot of sleep the night before - due to nervousness, and the fact that we were only in bed for 2 1/2 hours!

Sunrise on the summit rocks

The start of the summit rocks

Past the summit rocks, just the icecap to go. I started to feel the altitude at this point (3,500 m)

Nearly there!

Boys on top. L-R Dan, me, Jim

Just have to get back down now!

Apart from an ice gully at the start, we soloed the summit rocks because they were so dry. This helped a lot with our speed because we were still quite slow pitching as a party of three. We had two ropes for the descent but only did full-length abseils for the last couple of pitches due to the nature of the terrain.

It was so warm that day that I got through at least three litres of water and probably could have drunk twice that. I was sweating a lot but particularly when I was puffing at the higher altitudes. It was completely still on top and I think I could have been quite comfortable in a t-shirt and shorts!

Teichelmann's Corner in the Linda Glacier. It was so soft coming down that I frequently sunk up to my groin and sometimes had to dig my foot out. The only way you could tell if you'd fallen into a hidden crevasse was to look for a bottomless hole where your foot had been once you'd pulled it out.

Fallen into a crevasse or just sunk into deep snow? He probably doesn't know either.

All up it took us 16.5 hours, not bad considering the soft conditions on the way back.

After a day of rest we headed out via Cinerama Col. Another early start was required to make the most of what freeze there was.

4 am and we're on the move

Traversing below the Anzac Peaks

Get our harnesses and warm clothes off for the last time - it's too hot now that it's 7 am and the sun's up!

Tararuas Day Trip - Mt Hector

2010-10-04T21:09:00.006+13:00

We had our first venture into the Tararuas at the weekend. We thought we'd do a fairly vigorous day trip to start the training buildup for the World Rogaine Champs in November.

So is the weather always this good in the Tararuas?

A minor hiccup at the start which meant we had to walk an extra 1/2 hr at each end

Butterfly Creek Nighttime Madness

2010-08-18T10:40:00.010+12:00

Several months ago Mark and I entered the Butterfly Creek Nighttime Madness cross-country race. It seemed like a good idea. At the race start after dark on a Saturday night in the middle of August, our sanity certainly seemed in question.

The race is done in pairs. For me, this basically meant that Mark was going to have a cruisy race while I was the one pushing myself to the limits. This wasn't helped by the fact I had a cold. I was tempted to pull out but the lack of girls willing to take my place (why is that?) meant I decided just to man up.

The race was 9.75 km and 400 m climb. It started in Eastbourne, winding along through a little native bush track over the ridge, down the creek, over the ridge again and back along the waterfront.

We did really well with a placing of 8th in a time of 1:19:15. I think this was (mainly?) due to our awesome gear. We had our Inov8 'Mudclaws' and my super-duper bright Silva headtorch that my lovely parents bought me for my birthday. With traction and illumination we were able to steam past everyone else slithering into unseen tree roots. I expect they were also intimidated by my impressively loud wheezing.

Don't mess with the mud claws

There was a cut-off point about 4 km from the end that if you didn't make it an hour you'd have to go back the short way. It is a little annoying that this isn't represented in the results, so potentially some of the people above us and lots of the people after us did a much shorter race. Perhaps something they could fix next time!

Queen's Birthday Weekend Tramp to Swamp Swamp

2010-07-19T19:49:00.004+12:00

It was a while ago now, but at Queen's Birthday weekend Sylvia and I headed up north to the 'Naki to go tramping and check out a part of the country we hadn't really spent any time in before.

For those of you in the UK, we get a holiday for the Queen's Birthday and you don't. Naff eh!

The weather forecast wasn't too flash but we decided to go anyway because it had been weeks since we got out of Wellington.

We drove north for a few hours on Friday night, strategically timing our departure until after dinner so we avoided the crowds of people leaving Wellington on the long weekend. We ended up sleeping in the back of the car somewhere north of Wanganui.

On Saturday morning we continued our drive to North Egmont visitor centre and didn't actually start tramping until around midday. Our plan was to head along the Pouakai Range (a range of peaks just to the north of Mt Taranaki), spend the night in a hut, then return to the car park the next day via a track around the flank of the mountain.

There were lots of boardwalks and ladders

Including some natural ones

Unfortunately the weather wasn't that good and we didn't get great views of the mountain.

I was lucky enough to snap this shot through a gap in the clouds though.

This is a huge swamp that lies between the Pouakai Range, where we are standing, and Mt Taranaki on the left. We ended our day at Holly Hut which is just to the left of the lava dome behind the swamp.

During the night and the next day it rained with a vengeance (200 mm in 24 hours). It was quite spectacular - I had never before seen water running off, constantly, from every square meter of soil and flowing overland everywhere. Unfortunately it meant that heading back to the car wasn't an option since there were several streams that would be uncrossable.

Our extra day in the hut was an opportunity to get to know our hutmates. Most of them were a group of old boys (and girls) of the Vic Uni Tramping Club and it didn't take long to establish that we had all sorts of mutual friends and acquaintances, and some of us had actually met before. They were kind enough to share their dinner and feminist revisionist poetry with us, as otherwise we would have had to subsist on dried peaches, muesli bars and the normal old misogynistic poetry we usually take tramping.

To ward off cabin fever, we took a walk to the nearby (and normally placid) Bell's Falls. They were really raging and it was quite hard to hear each other speak.

Piers and Jenny, you may notice that Ben is wearing an Oringi parka. He obviously likes it because he is smiling.

When we got out, we were a day late so we went straight to DOC and told them we were out safely. The lady said "oh, they've already started searching for you, I'll go and call them to let them know they can stop looking". We thought it was a bit odd they'd started looking for us, given the weather conditions and that we were only a day late - it turned out that they were actually looking for another couple, but we'd been at the hut with them and could report that they were on their way out and not far behind us. Excitement all round!

From Fish to Water

2010-06-26T14:39:00.003+12:00

All good things come to an end, and all too soon my 5-month contract at the Ministry of Fisheries is over and I'm moving onto new pastures (or more likely waterways - I'll now be a water scientist at SKM). I've had a brilliant time, learnt a lot about fish, and amused a lot of people with my @fish.govt.nz email address (what is so funny about that, anyway?).

Everyone knows the time-old tradition of blaming the person who has left for everything that goes wrong so I thought a little bit of culinary bribery would go a long way to offsetting this. I decided on an Orange Roughy cake:

Everyone was impressed, although there were a few comments that they looked a little undersized, and perhaps we should have established a quota system to determine who got the biggest slice.

Also, I cleverly timed my last day with the infamous MFish quiz. With a brilliant team of spatial and data analysts (and an team name I'm too embarrassed to print) we managed to overcome 15-odd teams to end with a very impressive second place, equal with the previous year's champions, the Silo Busters.

SCUBA Diving

2010-06-12T08:50:00.003+12:00

Bridget has got into SCUBA diving in a big way, and invited us along to a pool in Petone one Wednesday night to try it out. It was heaps of fun (anything with so many gadgets has to be) and we both had a great time. Once I got over the initial weirdness of breathing through the regulator I was away...although I never did get the hang of keeping my buoyancy right. If you take in a big breath of air you start floating up, let it all out and you hit the bottom!

We both got a bit nauseous after a while, it may have been due to breathing air out of a can, but probably had more to do with the rollie pollies and handstands we were doing on the bottom of the pool!

People just look odd in SCUBA gear:

Southeast Coast

2010-05-10T20:08:00.006+12:00

We were going to go to the Tararuas at the weekend, but on Friday night Penny and Jamie rang up to see if we wanted to go to the south-east coast for the weekend instead. Caspar and Nadine are going overseas and this was a sort-of farewell for them (even though they're only going for six weeks).

Caspar and Penny hatched a last-minute plan to hire a bach for a night at Ngawi, near Cape Palliser. [For the overseas readers, a bach is a holiday house]

Would you hire your bach to this guy?

On the way to Ngawi we visited Lake Ferry and the Putangirua Pinnacles. The pinnacles are funky (though a little unstable).

That night we stayed in Kupe's Retreat (actually just a standard bach with a fancy name) and played an epic boys vs girls game of Cranium. Unfortunately I couldn't find my camera so there is no photographic evidence that the girls won. How many people know how to spell "isosceles"?

I also don't have any photos of Caspar, Nadine, Ramesh or Jo! Sorry guys.

The lighthouse at Cape Palliser is probably the most famous thing in this part of the world. It has 250 steps. Boys' stair challenge results: Caspar 0:57, Mark 1:00, Jamie 1:03 (though he didn't haul with his arms).

The landscape was very similar to the southwest coast of the South Island - quite bare, windswept and wild. With lots of seals.

Camping is OK, probably pimping too, but definitely not both at once.

How many seals can you see? We generally smelt them long before we saw them.

Jamie led us up this cool gorge and we found a couple of ropes already attached. We didn't get far but will have to come back with our own ropes and do it in reverse.

I managed to get a bit dirty.

Cakie goodness

2010-04-24T12:59:00.008+12:00

Just for something different: a post entirely devoted to food. Not really surprising as Mark and I spent a fair whack of our time in the kitchen making various concoctions. I'm sure many of you have been subjected to our culinary attempts, and given that most of you lived to tell the tale they can't have been that bad.

We don't usually take photos of our creations, but over the past couple of months I've gathered a little collection of some; here is three of the tastiest or most interesting looking cakes:

This is a whole orange cake & almond cake with a white chocolate palisade that I made for Neil Kane's birthday. The title doesn't lie: it involves boiling a whole orange in a pot for an hour before blending it to a fine mush to add to the cake. Can't beat orange and white chocolate!

This was one of my cupcakes for Rosa's cupcake bake0ff (you can see the rest of the entries here: http://culinaryexplorationsnz.blogspot.com/2010/04/first-wellington-bake-off-cupcakes.html). It was entitled cupcakes squared, as it's a cake in a cup in a cake in a cup. Everything apart from the big cup is edible. I'm sure my grandma would be 'tickled' to see her coffee cup set used for such a purpose!

This is another set of cupcakes I made for Charles & Sally's flatwarming. They are banana & chocolate, topped with chocolate buttercream and either a rose, peace lily or daisy. Fair to say I spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon playing at moulding sugar paste...

Gutbuster

2010-03-16T20:24:00.003+13:00

In a fit of apparent self-hatred about a month ago, I entered the Gutbuster race. It is a cross-country run around the Karori Sanctuary in Wellington, which as any local would know, is very hilly. It is 11.8km and 400m climb, which might not sound like much to you fitness bunnies out there, but was a reasonable challenge for me.

I did some appropriate preparation, including running the route a couple of weeks beforehand to ensure I wasn't going to collapse halfway in a wobbly pile of unfit jelly. I set myself a goal time of 45 minutes to the Meridian wind turbine and 1hr30 to finish. There was a prize for making the turbine in 35 minutes but prizes are for losers. Or rather, winners, but that's not very motivating. Besides, it was a hat and I don't need a hat.

Here's me at the start of the race:

Note how I'm speculatively looking off to the side to see if there's any way I can sneakily escape without anyone noticing.

From there on it was pretty hard work as my natural competitiveness argued with my lungs over whether I should run faster or slow down. Here's me about 20m from the finishing line:

I appear to be smiling. This was nothing to do with my state of enjoyment, but rather because I've just seen Mark, who came along to support me.

I made it to the wind turbine in 44:10 and finished in 1:20:54, with a (commendable, I think) placing of 28 out of 63 tough-as-nails ladies. And who knows, maybe next year I'll try for a free hat (but if I don't get one remember I said I didn't want one anyway).

2010-03-11T21:34:00.003+13:00

The other weekend we headed north with Chris and his family to do the Tongariro Crossing. Unfortunately I didn't take very many good people shots, so you'll have to be content with scenery!

The Emerald Lakes

The scenery was spectacular and I can see why so many people do this walk. And lot of people do it - there were between 1000 and 1500 people on the day we walked. Although we started walking at 7 am, we were still in crowds most of the time. Sometimes there were big holdups on the track, other times you'd stop to take a photo but would feel rushed because of all the people behind you.

The Blue Lake

There are several craters on the crossing; some with visible steam or a whiff of sulphur, others with gorgeous lakes in them. There were signs warning of what to do in the case of an eruption and there was evidence of lava flows about the place that were younger than most of the people walking the track.

The Red Crater (one of the sulphurous ones)

We stayed at a local motel/cabin/campground complex. Difficult tent peg terrain because the soils are so rocky in these parts! There were interesting hummocks all around, and we were informed by a member of the group that these are all from the debris piled up at the front of lahars. Very cool.

This is one of the residents of the campground. It was a bit grumpy on the Saturday night (and fun to wind up), but much more chilled on Sunday to the point of being a nuisance and getting into everything. It was quite happy to be handled and even started talking to us after a while. I was its best buddy after I turned over a few rocks to expose the critters underneath.

Sylv and I went for a run on Sunday. The first part was the hardest running, across a rock field and lava flows on the flanks of Mt Ruapehu.

The track settled down after a bit and we soon found ourselves running through tussockland and bush. This is Mt Ngauruhoe in the distance - the Tongariro Crossing goes through the low point you can see in the middle of the range. Apparently Mt Tongariro (to the left of Ngauruhoe) used to be bigger until it blew its top!

Our house is a very very very fine house

2010-03-04T20:48:00.004+13:00

Last weekend we walked the Tongariro Crossing with Chris and others. But first, we thought it was high time we bombarded you with some mundane details of our lives in Wellington.

This is our flat (the white one with the grey roof). We have the top flat. As you can see, it's nearly surrounded by bush and sits above a fairly steep little gully. This means we get lots of tui and bellbirds shitting on our car. We've also had kaka overflying our house and squawking away, pretty cool! It gets sun most of the day, which is unusual in Wellington.

Things were a bit grim for a week or two when we first moved in. We even borrowed the mattress that you can see! Fortunately now we have a few more comforts, though we still need a vacuum cleaner. Guests, don't look too closely at the carpet.

All the drawers that you can see are representative of the rest of the house, ie. storage capacity bordering on ridiculous! But quite handy. You should see our toy cupboard...

The view from our street. I get a full view of the harbour from the top of our street as I begin my bike ride to work, very nice. Sylv doesn't get this, but does get a nice walk past the Botanic Gardens after she's slithered her way down the Military Track (down the aforementioned gully) past Julia's house.

This is the view from our bedroom window. Look at those suckers in the shade! Can you spot the ludicrously long cable car access lift?

For those who haven't caught up on our news, I've been working at CPG Ltd (an engineering consultancy) for about six weeks now, as a drainage engineer. Basically, dealing with a lot of poos and wees! Fun :-) Quite complex and tricky jobs now (though not so much from a design sense) and I've been thrown in at the deep end a bit with people leaving.

Sylv is working in the Research Data and Reporting team at the Ministry of Fisheries. She is a Senior Business Analyst, didn't you know! She's still finding out exactly what that means but is enjoying it so far. We'll see how much she enjoys it on Monday after doing a running race called the Gutbuster on Sunday.

A Month in Summer

2010-01-09T12:31:00.009+13:00

Hello loyal readers. If you thought we'd been up to nothing since we got back to New Zealand, this post should put you right. Sylvia and I have had a most excellent month and here it is in summary. I apologise that it's still quite a long summary but I hope you enjoy the pictures!

Nearly a month ago, I left Chch with my Dad to head over to our family bach (pronounced "batch", a Kiwi word meaning holiday house) for some much-needed repair work. It should be noted that it always need repairs (it's 80 or 90 years old in a wet environment) so this is not unusual.

This time it needed a new section of pitched roof on the front side of the house. Taking bits of roof or cladding off the bach is always an adventure because you never know what you'll find underneath. (Well actually, you know that you'll always find rot, you just don't know how much or where). Over a couple of days we managed to replace the entire front section of roof, replace or bridge rotten purlins and barge boards and even get a coat of paint on the whole thing in between rain showers and the power company disconnecting/shifting/reconnecting our power supply since it was actually bolted to the roof (very illegal apparently).

Dad doing the actual work while I take photos

Sylvia came and joined us for a night, then Sylv and I headed up north to Little Wanganui (just south of Karamea) to walk in to "Moonsilver", her parents' place in the back of Golden Bay. We walked the Wangapeka-Karamea-Leslie tracks, then crossed the Tablelands to the Old Upper Takaka track which leads directly to their place! Kinda handy.

"Little" Wanganui River

Unfortunately it pissed down on the day we'd intended starting. We only got about an hour down the track before reaching a side creek that we couldn't safely cross. After sitting around scowling for a while, we retreated to a fortuitously-located backpackers and spent the night there.

Yep, that's Sylvia standing on the track. Give us a smile, love!

After the first day's setback, things improved over the next couple of days until we were tramping in bright sunshine on pleasant tracks by the Karamea (in constrast to the less pleasant tracks of the Wangapeka and Taipo).

Venus Hut - nearby are Apollo, Mars, and Mercury Creeks, and Thor Hut

Obligatory swing bridge photo (Karamea River)

It was nice walking down the Karamea River over a couple of days as it grew from a stream to a massive flow. It is a beautiful and remote river, and I can understand why people go to the trouble of flying in to the head of it for rafting and kayaking. In fact, we saw Clare McLennan's name in one of the hut books!

Sylvia and Teresa

We met an English girl, Teresa, at Venus hut. We'd already done a pretty good job of stalking her via boot prints and entries in hut books and had put together a surprisingly accurate profile of her (age, height, hair colour and length, personality and pack colour) before we met her. Since we were arriving quite late at the hut, we weren't sure how much this solo tramper would appreciate our company but it turned out she was glad to see us and we enjoyed tramping with her for the next two days.

Karamea Bend Hut - "Strike a pose, honey". We were soon driven inside by the sandflies.

We hadn't got a good look at the scenery in the Little Wanganui and Taipo Rivers, but as we climbed up the Leslie River from its confluence with the Karamea, we were treated to some stunning valley and tops views (as well as this sunset).

Splugeons Rock Shelter

I was surprised to find the Splugeons Rock Shelter wasn't a rock shelter at all, but a shelter built on top of Splugeons Rock. It had the most character of all the shelters we visited, including a fabric feature wall and a tribute to Sir Edmund Hilary!

View from the head of the Leslie River back towards West Coast

Emerging onto the Tablelands

Tramping across the Tablelands

Dry Rock Shelter

We bid farewell to Teresa at Salisbury Lodge on the Tablelands (it was a bit full for our liking) and continued another 1/2 hr to Dry Rock Shelter. It was neat to sleep on the wooden platform built under an overhanging rock, and we had the place to ourselves.

From there we walked the remaining 6 hours or so to Moonsilver the next day, arriving one day late on Christmas Eve! Once it became clear that our two days worth of emergency snack food rations would only need to last one day, we managed to eat them in half a day. Funny how that happens.

Unfortunately we didn't take any Christmas photos but here follow some random photos from Moonsilver over the next few days. First my parents arrived on Boxing Day to stay two days, then a trickle of friends arrived over the next two days to spend New Years up there. Lots of the photos were in caves, because the property is riddled with them.

Culvert Cavern

A morepork! (Small native owl)

Dad in the main Silverlode cave

Clockwise from L: Sylvia, Piers, Jana, Julian, Jenny, Sue and Chris

Moonsilver Golf was another popular pastime. It is played with hockey sticks and has some interesting rules.

Steve and I shot a couple of goats. Mmm, barbecued goat.

All my New Years Eve photos are blurry or grainy. Sparkler photos are easy though.

View over Westhaven Inlet from Knuckle Hill on the Kaituna Track

After New Years, we all headed our separate ways. A few people came and went from Takaka and we managed to do a bit of climbing, walking and a run along the 18 km, rough but beautiful Kaituna Track.

Now Sylvia and I are back in Christchurch, managing to find time to socialise and have fun as well as doing the many things that must be done before we move north in a week or so. Our next blog post will probably be from Wellington!

Happy New Year everyone.

Biking

2009-11-29T21:43:00.003+13:00

On Tuesday we cycled from Christchurch to Akaroa to visit Sylvia's uncle Tim. Sylv's bike was equipped with slicks, and my town bike was specially pimped for the occasion.

We didn't leave until quite late because Sylv had a phone interview at quite short notice! We took the 22 km Little River Rail Trail - not because it was easy riding (it wasn't - it's quite a rough surface) but because it was off-road.

As usual, our cycle touring had an exploratory dimension. Damn maps.

Yay!

It's an 80 km ride overall. Once you get to Hilltop, it's only 12 kms to go...but in those 12 kms there are some nasty, steep little climbs out of the various bays you go around in Akaroa Harbour. We were pretty tired by the time we got to Tim's cottage.

Tim kindly shouted us to dinner when we got there, just the kind of pampering a couple of tired tourists need. The bath at Tim's place also felt pretty good :-)

Breakfast at Nicky's place

We stayed the night at Nicky's place on the road to the Kaik. She has a beautiful piece of land sloping down to the harbour, with an amazing house and garden.

L-R: Frances, Tim, Sylvia, Nicky

We felt pretty lazy catching the bus back the next day. However, after Little River the NW headwind picked up and we saw a bunch of roadies struggling into it and felt some satisfaction in a decision well made.

We've also done some random mountainbiking since we've been back. Here are a few photos from the newish tracks at Mcleans Forest, part of the Waimakariri River Regional Park.

Sylvia

Looking sexy in lycra?

Kylie

Dubai

2009-11-21T09:05:00.004+13:00

Whew - the last of our travel blogs (for a while at least). Right at the end of our trip we had a 3-night stopover in Dubai to stay with Jeff & Greer. Dubai is one of those places we'd heard so much about, so we wanted to confirm / destroy our prejudices. I think the photo below captures the spirit of Dubai: a series of dichotomies. There's immense wealth + poverty, luxious water features + desert, multinational tourists + strict islamic regime.

All-in-all a rather interesting place to explore and ponder upon.

We went on one of these little boats across the river. Cheap and fun touristing - our favourite.

This is the only camel we saw (in case you can't tell, it's stuffed). We didn't have time / money / inclination to head off into the desert on a safari, but went to the Dubai museum instead. The heat was quite oppressive and walking anywhere difficult and rather grimy (due to the white sand that would get in everything).

We had a lot of fun hanging out with Jeff & Greer at their flat, making use of their rooftop gym and pool and playing on their Wii.

We also did the Dubai Mall thing. This is the world's largest indoor ski slope at the Mall of Emirates. We also saw the world's largest indoor-in-a-mall aquarium at the Dubai Mall. Oh, plus the world's tallest building. Do you think they are compensating for something?

Turkey Tour

2009-11-07T17:48:00.010+13:00

We did our first ever tour in Turkey. It was with Intrepid Travel (who came recommended) and was one of their "active" tours. We had a great time, and it was interesting to experience a different style of travel. Everything was organised and prepared for us, there was always someone to give us answers if we had questions, and we could just generally switch our brains off for the last part of our European adventure.

Since it was a while ago now, I won't bore you with screeds of text, here are some photos instead.

You get served tea and snacks on the buses. Bus transport was excellent in Turkey. Our overnight bus from Pammukkale to Istanbul even had entertainment systems in the back of the seats like on a plane!

Our tour group. Meals together were one of the fun points, because the two of us were running low on conversation by this point (only kidding)

We visited Gallipoli. There are lots of cemeteries scattered around the battlefields.

The remains of one of the trenches the ANZAC soldiers dug, nearly 100 years on.

Food was a highlight. This picture shows a variety of mezes (starters). It was quite feasible to just have a meal of mezes, and quite a good option if you're a vegie.

The remains of the ancient city of Ephesus. It was a Lycean city first, then a Roman port. Now it's the best-preserved Roman city in this area. Perhaps people would be living here still if the sea hadn't retreated from the harbour. Bummer for them!

Yep, that's a Roman latrine. They were quite social.

The remains of the library.

More food! This will become gozleme, a stuffed pancake. Now I wish I'd had some dinner before writing this blog post.

Rock tombs above the city of Fethiye. The Lyceans carved these out of the rock.

Mmm, pomegranate!

A simple village mosque. No minaret at this one - "we'll get around to it one day".

Lots of cards were played.

Not a bad spot for lunch! The end of our two-day trek.

Ramming speed! We sea kayaked over a sunken town, you could still see remains of walls and foundations. Apparently there was an earthquake, the land subsided by 2 metres, and it was enough to submerge the town. Bummer for them.

MTB.

It was long enough by now.

The travertine terraces of Pammukkale.

Pammukkale was the site of a well-preserved Roman settlement (they did like their hot spas). There is a large necropolis with lots of pre-Roman, Roman and Byzantine tombs. These ones are being slowly overtaken by the travertine deposits.

After Pammukkale, it was the overnight bus (yuk) back to Istanbul and a day with Simon, Julian and Jana. Then onwards to the delights of Dubai!

Istanbul

2009-10-22T15:02:00.006+13:00

We're now home in New Zealand, but just a couple of short weeks ago we were in Turkey! It still seems strange to us.

After the cock-ups listed in the previous post, we caught an overnight bus to Istanbul. There are worse places to do an overnight bus trip than Turkey - Turkish buses are actually really good.

We stayed a couple of nights in Istanbul with Simon until our tour started, then another night with him after our tour ended. Simon has lived in Istanbul for a while now and he was a great tour guide. He was also a great host!

You see the Turkish flag a lot here. Good thing that it's probably our favourite flag!

The roof of the Blue Mosque (up inside the domes)

The Blue Mosque. Behind it is the Hagia Sofia, which was the biggest Byzantine church prior to the conquest of Istanbul by the Ottomans. They converted it to a mosque.

Byzantine Christian frescoes inside Hagia Sofia, painstakingly uncovered from beneath plaster.

Us with Simon and Tash, another friend of Simon's who was also staying at his flat.

The Basilica Cistern, an enormous Roman water reservoir constructed beneath the old part of Istanbul. It was only rediscovered relatively recently, when city authorities noticed that people were getting water out of a hole in the street by lowering buckets!

Ladies have to cover up in mosques.

Inside the Spice Bazaar. Sylvia haggled herself a great deal on a blue pashmina (see previous photo)

We were lucky that Julian and Jana just happened to be in Istanbul on the last night we were there. They stayed with Simon as well, so we had a good old catch-up :-)

Bulgaria

2009-09-28T05:03:00.006+13:00

Ah Bulgaria - another of these countries that we knew very little about before we arrived but found to be very friendly and wished we could have stayed longer! The challenge of a new alphabet (did you know that the Bulgarians invented Cyrillic?) was fun and by the end of our time we could have a fair guess at what signs said.

We had originally planned to spend three nights at Veliko Tarnovo, a hilltop town in central Bulgaria, and three nights on the Black Sea coast at Sozopol. Unfortunately, due to uncooperative train and bus schedules (the summer season has already ended and frequencies have dropped a bit) we ended up spending one night in Ruse, two in Veliko, one in Burgas and two in nearby Sozopol. A bit more moving about than we might have liked but we did get to spend time in more places!

Ruse is pretty nice for a border town. After another of our late night border crossings we found ourselves once more on the Danube River in the morning.

Then by (mini) bus to Veliko Tarnovo. Will we ever find ourselves on a proper-sized coach again? VT is beautiful and justly deserves its reputation as the nicest hilltop city with a citadel in Bulgaria, at least based on our sample of one hilltop city with a citidel in Bulgaria.

The nationalistic "Four Kings Monument" built by the Communists

The river makes several loops through the city, through a deep gorge. Lots of rock climbing potential - including the "Executioners' Rock" at the citadel, where unfortunate souls were thrown to their deaths!

Burgas was fairly unremarkable so let's skip straight to pictures of Sozopol and our seaside relaxation.

A fairly typical Sozopol old town street showing the traditional "Black Sea" houses

Our plan had been to catch the 1200 bus from Burgas in order to be in Istanbul by 1900. Unfortunately this was to be a day of cock-ups.

#1. Tickets for the 1200 bus were sold out so we had to subject ourselves to another night bus - departure 2200, arrival 0500...yuk
#2. Went to the movie "Inglourious Basterds" - although we were told it was in English, large parts of it turned out to be in French or German with Bulgarian subtitles (actually quite funny)
#3. Decided to take a punt on a random platter for two with ingredients not translated into English. Turned out to be a massive meat platter - with the two of us not normally eating a lot of meat it gave us bursting bellies and the "meat sweats" on the bus!

Everything worked out fine in the end and we're now in Turkey. I guess our next blog will be about Istanbul or perhaps our upcoming "Active Turkey" tour.

Făgăraş Mountains and Sylvia the Love Machine

2009-09-24T06:26:00.008+12:00

Before I get too carried away with our tramping adventure, I had better tell you something about Romania that Sylvia forgot to put into her last post. It would seem that Sylvia has been something of a sensation over here. The local men have been falling for her in droves!

The first was the train conductor between Cluj and Brasov. He spoke little (no) English but told Sylvia, first in Romanian then in English, "I love you" and pointedly examined her hand for a wedding ring. Sylvia's second admirer was a drunk guy at a bus stop who told her in three different languages (English, Italian and presumably Romanian) that she was a beautiful girl :-) Of course we all knew that already and it's probably all going to her head.

OK now the tramping. We had planned to do four days tramping in the Făgăraş Mountains near Brasov, but by the time we'd got organised on the first day it only ended up being about 3.2 days. We needed to obtain a stove (thanks Raluca :-), a billy, a decent map and some advice on transport. In the end we took a bus to a nearby town called Zarnesti and then a taxi from there. The taxi saved us 24 km of hitching or (more likely given the hitching conditions) walking, and considering the condition of the "road" I think the driver earned every cent of his ~20 Euro fare!

We only ended up walking a couple of hours that night to a pleasant campsite on a spur leading up to the main ridge.

Bears can be a problem - we took such precautions as putting all our food into my pack and stringing it up a tree!

On the second day we continued climbing and traversing along the main ridge. Unfortunately the weather wasn't that great so we were glad to find a pleasant refugio to stay in instead of camping again. We'd all been a bit cold the night before.

Mmm, cosy

Water is a bit of a problem along the Făgăraş Range. We ended up carrying a lot, and topping up where we could. Fortunately this spring was marked on the map otherwise we would never have found it.

Rubbish is another problem in the Romanian mountains. We encountered a similar scene several times a day, despite there seeming to be very few people up here (we only saw one other party along the ridge)

The next day dawned windier but warmer. Unfortunately the dark clouds came in again and it got pretty cold on the ridge. We made the decision to drop off the ridge a couple of valleys earlier than we'd originally intended to. This meant we didn't get to climb the highest mountain in Romania (Moldoveanu Peak, 2544 m) but as you can see, everyone was much smilier once they were off the ridge ;-)

Before:

After:

We camped down in the valley that night.

If only she'd brought us beer

The next day we walked out down the valley then plodded the 12 km or so to the town of Victoria, only managing to hitch the last 2 km or so! But a lot better than nothing.

Once we got to Victoria, all we had to do was wait for the train, and endure a very slow train ride back to Brasov. This is a Personal type train, the oldest, slowest and most frequently stopping of all Romanian trains.

Are we there yet?

Romania

2009-09-23T00:09:00.007+12:00

Our grand mission with Cris in Romania was to go tramping in the Fagaras Mountains. However, our tramping adventures are exciting enough (yes, they are - promise!) to be the subject of a separate post. Here's some other Romanian highlights:

Friendly Romanian #1: Thomas whom we met on the long bus ride from Budapest. Here he is taking us out to the local student pub in Cluj for a drink (photo: Cris).

Our first Eastern Orthodox church. Religion is prominent throughout Romania, particularly noticeable when (even on the bus) people cross themselves if passing a church.

Transylvannia has a significant Hungarian population, who are actively campaigning for their own state. This big statue in Cluj is a general who is famous for killing lots of Hungarians (photo: Cris). It was built by a pro-Romanian mayor who also embarrassed the locals by painting all the rubbish bins in the colours of the national flag.

For the real Transylvannian experience we visited the local Cluj graveyard. It is local custom to 'baggsie' a grave before you are dead. Sometimes they even fill in the first two digits of your year of death. We heard stories of some that are still on 19-- oops! Better get that re-carved.

From Cluj we progressed on an entertaining train journey with friendly Romanian #2 (Andre) to Brasov, which is quite possibly, but maybe not, the best city in the world. They also have a huge Hollywood-style 'Brasov' sign erected on the local mountainside. I went for a run up to it after dark, which I was later told was rather dangerous as that's when the bears come down to feed. It's not just vampires that eat you here...

In Brasov we stayed in a hostel with comically named rooms. The three of us shared this room, leading to hours of ... innuendo, as you can imagine (photo: Cris). This hostel also gifted me an extremely case of bed-bug attack, whereby my whole face was a swollen red blob and I couldn't open one of my eyes. [also attracting attention from a drunk local who was either appalled or amused that I seemed to have been beating her, I'm not sure which - Mark]

Our last four days we enjoyed the hospitality of friendly Romanian #3 (Raluca), who we couch-surfed with. Here she is having cooked us a local speciality of polenta with two types of cheese.

Doorhandles and doughy tubes

2009-09-22T06:19:00.004+12:00

Here are a couple of random things about Romania that I'd like to share with you.

1. Doughy Tubes. These are not strictly Romanian (actually they're Hungarian, make sure you don't get that wrong!). They also have a proper name but doughy tube will do for you and me. They are something like doughnut dough, but in a tube, spit roasted over charcoal then coated in your choice of yummy stuff such as chocolate, cocoa, cinnamon etc. Yummy! Eating a whole one by yourself can make you feel a bit ill.

2. Doorhandles. Romanians like to take their doorhandle off then take it away with them when they leave the house. I guess it helps with security but it can lead to all sorts of problems!

Raluca, our lovely host in Brasov

Budapest

2009-09-18T03:55:00.006+12:00

What excitement! Our train from Graz was rather full so we ended up spread throughout a couple of carriages. At our change in Vienna, Cris got off at the right station but Sylvia and I accidentally stayed on the train for one station too long (my fault). By the time we got on a train returning to the correct station, we'd received a txt from Cris saying that he was on his way to meet us...somehow we eventually ended up together on a train to Budapest. Then we got down to some serious sightseeing.

Who do you reckon would win in a fight? This guy (he has spiky axles)...

...or this guy whose horses are cool, calm and collected?

Random collection of Kiwis

Traditional fatty meat snack (basically deep fried dough). That's Phill in the middle - he is a really nice guy and let three friends of friends (or friends of friends of friends) crash in his lounge. It was quite mean of Cris to steal his undies.

Do any of these treatments appeal to you?

They do thermal baths in a big way in Budapest. This is the amazing ceiling of one of them.

What a moustache.

Us with Phill

A very famous statue warning of the dangers of running with icecream on a very hot day.

Standing near the citadel in Buda, looking across the Danube at Pest. (there is also a pest in the foreground, hahahaha)

A bit harsh!

Sylvia at the National Market

Graz, Austria

2009-09-08T20:44:00.005+12:00

Although Austria was not in the original plan, the offer to stay at Marcel's pad in Graz was hard to resist, and it is on the way (sort of).

Local Austrian food, mushroom soup and a bun... no wait, soup in a bun!

The famous double spiral staircase. Messes with your mind.

The second day it rained heavily so our only real achievement were to meet Cris Lovell-Smith at the train station (he'll be travelling with us for the next few weeks so you can get both sides of the story by reading his blog too - http://cris.lovell-smith.com/trips. If he says anything bad about us, it's all lies) and checking out the awesome lab where Marcel works. We played in the 3D virtual reality simulator, which made us feel quite seasick quite quickly.

On our last day Marcel took us on an adventure to a nearby gorge, where the Austrian Alpine Club has set up a staircase of wooden ladders spanning the 800m climb. It was awesome! We then did a circut around and over a hill to find the dragon's cave. No dragons, but lots of mud and good photography opportunities.

Photo courtsey of Marcel. With two super-keen photographers about Mark and I got lazy.

Triglav National Park

2009-09-04T22:26:00.010+12:00

Before I go any further in this post, I would like to make something clear. You may have read in some other blogs of people's adventures in Triglav National Park recently. However, those people are copycats and you should not associate with them - it was SOOO our idea first ;-)

Triglav National Park is Slovenia's only national park, and contains Triglav - Slovenia's highest mountain at 2864 m. It is a beautiful place of trees, lakes, rivers and the mountains of the Julian Alps. We met our friend Marcel (who lives in Austria) and camped there for 3 days of walking and sightseeing.

One of the first things we did was to check out the local pizzeria/pasteria, where we found the biggest pizzas any of us had ever seen!

"Now I wish I hadn't got this stupid salad" (Photo: Marcel)

Marcel seemed to quite like his too.

The next day we went for a walk. We could have caught a cable car up 1000 m like everyone else but thought it would be much more fun to get lost instead.

(Photo: Marcel)

Other folks were having fun up there too. This guy hung around for a while.

Lake Bohinj - we camped right next to it.

This is how the tracks are marked in this part of the world.

Ruined mountain hut with Triglav in the background

On the second day, Sylvia decided her knees weren't quite up to another long day so we parted company. Marcel and I headed on the 7 Lakes circuit and Sylvia headed off to the Slap Mostnice. With a name like that, who could resist?

Mark, overlooking Lake no. 2 (Photo: Marcel)

Lake no. 1 (Photo: Marcel)

We even had to walk on snow! (Photo: Marcel)

When Mhairi was here, she did a day trip from Lake Bohinj to climb Triglav (far distance). It only took her 12 hours versus our 11 for a much shorter circuit! So we take out hats off to her. (Photo: Marcel)

On the way back, we visited the source of the river Sava, the biggest river in Slovenia. It's not so big where it emerges from this cave...(Photo: Marcel)

...and immediately tumbles over this waterfall. That's the viewing platform you can see, tourists pay 5 Euros to walk up the gorge below. (Photo: Marcel)

Lake Bohinj again

A cool arch that Sylvia saw on her walk.

The Slap Mostnice. No it's not a gentle form of corporal punishment but a waterfall. Sylvia managed to get lost and thereby avoid paying 2 Euros to walk up the gorge by the normal route.

On our way out of the park on the third day, we spent some time in beautiful (and very touristy) Bled. There is a great castle on a steep crag overlooking the town and lake, and a monastery on an island. It used to be the custom to paddle out to the island and ring the monastery bell. Now they've locked it up and they charge tourists to ring it! It doesn't seem to stop them, as the bell was ringing almost constantly as we walked the 6 km around the lake.

Ljubljana (aka the Capital that is Hard to Spell)

2009-09-03T21:35:00.001+12:00

Just before we went wwoofing we spent a couple of days in Ljubljana. We arrived at 5am on a bus from Croatia, so our first experiences were of a park bench near the castle. From here things steadily got better. We really enjoyed the vibrant outdoors cafes combined with a leafy peaceful streets. It was also cool enough to enjoy some hill running up and around the castle. Mark sampled the local burek and bought a compulsory 'I feel sLOVEnia' t-shirt.

The highlight was a day trip to the Skocjan Caves, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. Although I have seen a few caves in my time, these were something else. There is a compulsory guided tour, which takes about two hours. At some points you are halfway up a 145m cavern, winding around the edge on a narrow little ledge. The little lights from the other tour groups makes it feel like the Mines of Moria, an association helped by the crossing of a very deep canyon on a very small bridge (YOU SHALL NOT PASS!).

Even better, when you exit the cave you are in a ~200m deep sinkhole, which you then have to climb out of via a small limestone track. It really is one of the most beautiful and breathtaking places I have been. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take photos so you will just have to go there yourself!

Velika Štanga, Slovenia

2009-08-29T02:48:00.007+12:00

Welcome to the village of Velika Štanga (big post) in Slovenia. The village is perhaps 30 km east of the capital, Ljubljana, and is set in rolling, forested hills. We've been WWOOFing here for 8 days now out of a 10 day stay and wish we could stay longer!

This is the house. The family (Mateja, Sandi, Tim, Žan and Zala) live on the farm, along with two cats, one kitten, two dogs, a piglet, two ponies and two donkeys. They are pretty self-sufficient in food, at least in vegies.

Slovenia is >50% forested, which makes for a really nice landscape.

Chopping apples (after we first collected them from several paddocks)

The apple press (from 1957)

The finished product

Aside from tasks associated with apples, we've been weeding, dragging wood from the forest, cooking, cleaning, planting, fixing a washing machine and a bike, piglet catching (rugby tackles required) and afterwards building a piglet pen. There has also been some hoeing. We have introduced the family to the delights of apple crumble!

On our day off, we accompanied the family on an outing to a river.

Nice wee town!

Now some shots of the locals:

Piglet. Suggested name, Blue, from blue murder - the noise she makes when caught!

The family and Tara (an extra who stayed for a couple of days). We are roasting corn and cheese on the fire.

Žan with Fita

Mateja with Zala

Mmm, toasted cheese!

Croatia

2009-08-23T06:10:00.011+12:00

From Stockholm we flew to Dubrovnik for three glorious weeks of Croatian island-hopping, accompanied by the three musketeers: Andreas Baumgaetner, his girlfriend Hella, and Helen Bones. Here is our approximate route (red dots are where we camped).

Dubrovnik was (unsurprisingly) utterly beautiful. It was also mobbed by tourists and cruiseliner victims. We did the town walls walk in the cool of the evening.

Mostly though, we hung out at our campsite, which came with a pool and a beach. I even participated in an aquasize class! More giggles than exercise. We managed to swim at least once a day for our whole Croatian visit.

On Mljet we hitched across the island to the National Park, famous for its beautiful lakes (which of course we sampled). They were connected to the sea and very shallow, therefore very very salty!

We then moved to Korcula. This is a typical photo of what occupied us all and every evening: eating. The restaurants were (comparatively) cheap and by the end of the trip we had sampled the majority of the items available.

We were camping out in little campgrounds like this one. Here the beach is just 10m or so to left.

From Korcula we spent a day in Split. It is the site of Diocletian's rather large retirement palace (he was a Roman Emperor in the dying days of the Roman Empire). Since then every nook and cranny the palace has been coverted into a living space, including the walls. We found this statue of Gandalf.

We moved further north to Sibenik (opps, missed a dot on the map) and did a daytrip to the local National Park, famous for its waterfalls. The park included several kms of boardwalk over magical little streams and through forest. We got hit by a major thunderstorm which added to the excitment.

Our last stop was ugly island. Upon arrival we discovered that it was a misnomer as all the people were quite normal looking.Also, we had arrived just in time for the Assumption (no, not Mark guessing things again but the religous festival). We didn't get religi-fied but we did get to participate in a really big street party.

Here is a summary of some of the delicacies of Croatia:

Burek - Mark's new favourite lunch. Cheap and widely available, it is made from lasange-like pastry and salty cheese.

Black risotto made from squid ink.

Some more seafood. Being coastal, seafood is very popular.

Civapčiči. These are little meatball sausages with aubergine and pepper sauce.

Of course, it all has to be washed down with the local lager. This beer was advertised everywhere in English with the tagline 'difficult to tell, but tastes so well'. Hmmm tastes pretty good!

Sweden

2009-08-22T07:01:00.007+12:00

Well this update has been a while in coming. We hope to add another post about Croatia in the next few days.

Our main point in visiting Sweden was for Veronica's 30th (actually a combined 30th with her friend Aosa) on an island in the north of the country. We also managed to tack on some exploring around Stockholm.

What a spread! And this is just lunch. Spuds, bread, cheese, and more types of pickled herring than you can shake a stick at.

Some hijinks were had - thoughtfully explained to the non-Swedish speakers.

Obligatory photo with the blonde Swede

Bye!

Now we're in Stockholm. It's made of many islands and one of these, Gamla Stan, is the old town.

We happened to stumble across the massive Changing of the Guard ceremony at the palace

Then we were off sea kayaking at a place south of Stockholm that was recommended to us by Em and Chris. The Stockholm Archipelago is lots of fun to explore by kayak.

Our island! (Ant Island)

A lot of wild blueberries were picked in Sweden. We landed like vikings, raping and pillaging all the blueberries.

A lot of smiling boy caviar was also consumed (a bit much, really)

Bird shit island - where the birds have used their version of Agent Orange to defoliate the forest!

Coming in our next update, more photos of Sylvia and Mark enjoying themselves on the sunny, sandy and soporific Dalmatian Coast of Croatia!

Norway

2009-07-23T03:39:00.006+12:00

What a unique experience, actually writing a blog about a country while we're still in it! I'm writing this at the farm we're WWOOFing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) at near Trondheim.

We've been here less than a week but it feels like we've been here much longer because we've done so much.

We started out flying into Trondheim (via Stavanger and Bergen) after a train ride to Aberdeen. It was nice to arrive at Em and Chris's place at the end of a long day that included a talkative but crazy Norwegian woman at the bus stop. Cris Lovell-Smith was staying there too and we were just in time to catch Em's parents, and their dreaded highly infectious Toronto death cold.

That dude's a Viking. Must be in Norway.

Colourful Trondheim waterfront

Em and Sylv on Em and Chris's ski bridge. There are lots of cross-country ski trails leaving right from their house.

This is one such trail.

Ooh, ducklings!

Now we're WWOOFing. This is where Sylvia and I sleep.

The collection of farm buildings. The one on the right is in need of a new slate roof, fortunately the government is coming to the party with some funding because it's a historic building.

Cutting down some trees for firewood

Weeding the vegies

Getting pecked

Oh yeah, it's your birthday...

Cycle touring - western Europe

2009-07-15T00:38:00.005+12:00

We flew to Frankfurt Hahn and biked to Amsterdam through Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Here's a simplifed map of where we went:

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As you may notice, we chose the countries that are a) flat and b) well known for great cycle paths. Neither of these facts turned out to be strictly true! Therefore, add at least 50% to the distance...

After re-assembling our bikes, the first few days were cruisy (~50km/day) up the hot Mosel River valley. It's a well known wine growing area and has a brilliant cycle path, which was well frequented by wine-tasters.

Near the Germany border, at Trier, we met Claudia (one of Mark's climbing friends from Edinburgh) and Julian. We had a day off cycling to look around at old Roman ruins, including an amphitheatre, plus get caught in a thunderstorm (the first of many along the way). I was touched that the people next to us at the camping ground took in our washing when it started to rain.

Julian cycled with us through Luxembourg. While we'd got by on our limited Germany before, now it was super confusing because every person seemed to speak a different language. We now know how to say 'cycle path' in nearly every one of them.

Julian was trying to travel very lightly, and amused the other residents of camping grounds with his bivvy bag. He also had to completely dismantle his bike into his Tardis to take it onto the train.

We then progressed over the border to Belgium and entered Bastogne. This was the setting for Band of Brothers, the war drama series Mark and I watched recently. I don't see why they found keeping the Germans at bay so hard, as here I seem to be stopping this tank quite easily.

From Bastogne we headed north to La Roche, at the heart of the Ardennes. We had a day off and kayaked a 10km section of river. Here we are prepared to jump in our boats, dressed in all our safety equipment. Luckily it was about a grade 0.

The Belgians also had some pretty funny looking cycle paths compared to the cycle highways we had everywhere else. Mostly they were quiet roads, but for one ~20km section we ended up mostly pushing along a small muddy footpath along the river bank which ended at one point so we had to push up a hill and through a paddock of cows. Further along we also managed to bike through the middle of a cement factory following our 'cycle route'.

Shortly after entering the Netherlands Mark's camera card died, so we have no more photos. However, the last few days in Belgium and all the way up to Lelystad were pretty straightforward although possibly the hardest in the trip as it was 30+ degrees and we were trying to get in some serious kms. At Lelystad we were extremely grateful to be staying with our friend Mattijn, who generously showed us around and got us eating the local delicacies.

From here it was but a short hop to Amsterdam (actually Ijmuiden - just an unplanned extra 40km cycle, opps!) to catch the overnight ferry to Newcastle.

Cycle Touring - Northern Scotland

2009-06-22T06:43:00.006+12:00

Following on from our Hebridian adventures we swiftly embarked on the next leg from Ullapool around the coast to Thurso.

Here's a handy map of where we went.

The geology in the northwest was amazing, with huge slabs and volcanic plugs. Unfortunately unlike the Hebrides this means we had plenty of hills to climb!

Here's an extra-curricular one we climbed on foot. It's called Stac Pollaidh and it's a popular day-scramble. We camped at the bottom the night before. We woke up to a light but consistent pitter-patter on the tent, which we soon discovered was not rain but midges. Uggh.

I'm sure a derailer isn't supposed to look like this. Mark managed to salvage the chain and Sylvia had to limp along the last two days on a single gear.

The decommissioned Dounrae nuclear power station, which was the subject of a facinating museum. It provided (and the decommissioning process still provides) the majority of local employment. Mark was very excited by the chance to touch a real reactor core. The wind turbines in the background provide an interesting comparison.

Fencing Caithness style using flagstones. The quarrying of flagstones is also huge part of the local industry. We went to an open-air flagstone museum.

Thuso, where we ended up for the last three days. We planned to go to Orkney but instead did a little day trip out to Dunnet Head (the most northerly point in Britain).

A video case in our Thurso Hostel.

Cycle Touring - Outer Hebrides

2009-06-21T23:01:00.006+12:00

We're briefly back in Edinburgh after Phase 1 of the cycle touring - up through the Outer Hebrides and around the northwest coast of Scotland. This post only covers the Hebridean leg but there will be more to follow.

This was at our first night's campsite. Hopefully not an omen?

Peat cutting is quite widespread in the islands - people cut the peat, stack it to dry, and then use it as fuel to heat their homes during the winter.

There are beautiful white sand beaches all up the west coast of the islands. A bit cold for a swim though.

I enjoyed it more than this photo suggests! Perhaps this was on the day we biked straight into a headwind all day. We were pretty lucky with the weather. In 2 1/2 weeks we didn't get any major rainfall (a few showers) except on the last day and that was a rest day anyway. We did battle headwinds a lot though.

We had some wonderful campsites. The long daylight hours were particularly noticeable in the tent - we could be happily reading inside by daylight at 11 pm. I only saw darkness one time in the whole trip, when I woke up at 2.30 am, and even then the sunrise was beginning.

The slightly undulating, sandy "machair" pasture that tends to lie behind the dunes along the west coast

Welcome to Barra airport - you're looking at it. Apparently it's the only airport in the world with a scheduled service that varies with the tides.

There were other people cycling through the Hebrides at the same time as us. These guys were also travelling south to north at about the same pace as us so we bumped into them frequently.

We camped every night in the Hebrides, except the night we stayed in this hostel (the nearest building). It's a restored "blackhouse" (typical crofter's home until the 20th century).

Carloway Broch - well preserved stone age defensive tower

Callanish Standing Stones

Training wheels

2009-06-02T20:45:00.003+12:00

A few weeks back, Sylv and I did a "Training run" for cycle touring in Perthshire. Check out the orange sheep! We saw some of these in Ireland as well. Explanations welcome.

MTB WKND and An Teallach

2009-05-13T07:56:00.007+12:00

This week is the first 5-day week I've had in over a month. Frankly, it's Tuesday and I don't know how I'm going to cope. I think my coping strategy will include looking back fondly on good times I've had one some of my recent long weekends.

A couple of weeks back a bunch of us headed up to the Great Glen to stay in a hostel and do some mountainbiking/hillwalking. It was a great group, made of of climbing buddies, workmates and some old friends from home. We cycled at Laggan Wolftrax on the Saturday, and Nevis Range (Leanachan Forest) on the Sunday. Excellent quality Red routes all round! On the Sunday quite a few folks went hillwalking instead of riding. I don't have many photos, there are more on Facebook from other people, but hopefully these give you a flavour of the weekend.

Encouraged by the weather exceeding our expectations, Mhairi and I stayed on for the Monday to climb An Teallach, a classic scramble in Torridon (well up north).

There were interesting landscapes up there.

We soon climbed into the cloud, so never got to see much of what we were climbing. Some attention to navigation was required until we got onto the ridge proper. This is Lord Berkley's Seat.

As we began the descent, we dropped below the cloud and got some views (including being able to see what we'd climbed for the first time). The guys who took this photo were lost and only got un-lost when they heard our voices. They managed to get lost despite using a GPS, and then they lost the GPS. I don't think I would have owned up to that.

Cool rocks, aye!

What we climbed

The second wedding of Mr and Mrs Nix

2009-04-25T18:57:00.005+12:00

One wedding is enough for some people, but Jo and Bill decided to have two - one in New Zealand and one in England. We were lucky enough to be able to make it to the second one in the village of Audley where they live.

The venue, along with a couple of local wedding crashers

A path of gravestones!

The weather was absolutely beautiful that day, and has been part of a spell of quite nice weather we've enjoyed over the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately conditions on the motorway weren't as good in the vicinity of Audley and we arrived at the wedding after the bride! Oops. Luckily we weren't the only ones.

The happy couple (Jo still managing to smile for the cameras, what a trooper :-)

I can't take any responsibility for the blurriness of this photo - at this point I disappeared for an hour and was later found at the bar drinking with one of Bill's mates.

The farmhouse B&B we stayed at had all sorts of animals, including a comical pack of dogs.

Ooh, lammy lamkins! (Imagine Sylvia's voice at this point)

It's a glitch in the Matrix. It means they've changed something.

Visitors

2009-04-20T19:28:00.006+12:00

Hello again.

In the week up to and including Easter we had some friends come and stay with us. The first ones were gypsy travellers Em and Chris from New Zealand. They are currently living in Norway but were visiting Britain for an Easter orienteering event in Newcastle.

We had a nice day with them out at Glentress Forest near Edinburgh - not doing the usual touristy stuff, but instead a fun-filled activity day of mountain biking, orienteering and walking. Nice :-) Unfortunatly we didn't take any photos of that.

Kiwis galore - L-R, Mark, Chris, Steve, Em, Anitra, Abbie, Ed

Em and Chris were able to give us valuable advice on cycle touring based on their experiences. Eg. if you buy a secondhand old mountainbike, seriously overload it and then ride down really rough paths, you can expect important bits to break.

Mr and Mrs Steve George visited us at Easter. Ele and Steve live down near Wales (sounds awesome!) and came up for Tom's wedding, some hillwalking and of course to see us! A good time was had by all, doing some more traditional touristy stuff on what was actually quite a nice day for Edinburgh.

Edinburgh does get called the Rome of the north, but this piece of faux-classical architecture is actually a Victorian folly (never completed)

Standing on Calton Hill, looking out over Arthur's Seat and the Salisbury Crags

The recently renovated St Andrew's Square

This panarama came out slightly wonky! It's St Mary's Cathedral, and it's right across the road from my work. Despite biking past it twice a day, I had never actually been inside until now. I'm not sure if it's because we're spoilt for cool old buildings in Edinburgh, or because you tend to under-value the attractions of the place you live in, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it's really cool inside. It's quite a modern cathedral by UK standards (late 19th Century, similar age to the Chch cathedral I guess) so had fewer tombs, sarcophagi etc. But it did have soom cool contemporary stained glass. Thanks Ele, for making sure we went inside :-)

It was really great to catch up with some good friends we haven't seen for a while, especially since we're leaving soon and may not see them again before we go. On that note, Sylvia and I both gave our notice at work last week, to finish at the end of May. I guess our travel plans will be the topic of future blog posts/emails but the rough plan is to arrive back in NZ in early October after visiting northern Scotland, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Greece and maybe Turkey and Canada. Whew!

A week in England

2009-04-16T02:57:00.006+12:00

A couple of weeks ago we crossed the border to go visit some of our friends 'doun south'. It was a bit of a join-the-dots exercise, and we still didn't get to see everyone we would have liked to.

First up was Cambridge to visit my aunt, uncle and cousin. Mark had only met them at Christmas 2007 when he was very sick so it was great to get to catch up without him trying to cough his lungs out.

From there we swifly moved on to our next university town, Oxford, where we had the privilege of staying at Christ Church College with Helen. Here we are with the grass that you're not allowed to walk on.

She also gave us the grand tour of the city, including the Bodlean library, and a cake that looks very like the Bodlean library (but presumably tastes better).

From here we moved to the illustrious Guildford, where we stayed with Pac, Kristyn and Stuart the rabbit in their lovely flat on the South Downs Way. We borrowed their mountain bikes and went for a little ride and then a little run. We also had yummy raclette. To say thank you we left Stuart a present.

From there we made a lightning quick visit to my uncle house in Devizes, before arriving at the the highlight and purpose of our visit: Swindon. And yes, we did go round and round the magic roundabout (6 roundabouts in one). And yes, we did have a competition to see how many roundabouts it took to get home from the park (26, I won). But that actually wasn't the reason for our visit: our good friend Lindsay was turning 30 and along with a load of other folk we'd made the trek for a wonderful weekend house party to celebrate. Unfortunately we don't have any photos of the event, but be assured it was loud, fun and messy... and that was just Yana.

Deerstalker '09

2009-03-31T23:15:00.006+13:00

Well it's that time of year again - the Deerstalker! Saturday afternoon saw us driving down to Traquair House in the Scottish Borders for some running. This year Sylvia did it too, after deciding she could do it better than most of the people she saw doing it last year.

There were two events - the Deerstalker, a "5 km" (yeah right!) and the Mighty Deerstalker at "10 km". We had a few other friends doing it this year as well, including Mhairi.

If you're interested, there are more photos, our places etc at www.themightydeerstalker.com

The setting. The weather was much nicer than last year.

Doesn't she look nice! Let's see if she's still smiling at the end.

The start line for the Deerstalker. The race begins with all 500 entrants charging towards a wall of haybales. Oh, and did I mention that you're supposed to dress in tweed?

Nearly there, just the final bit of uphill finish to go! And still smiling.

The last obstacle. Now the final dash to the finish. The guy in the left of the photo doesn't look so great - do you think maybe Sylvia pulled out a cheeky Hopoate move under that net?

My turn. A head torch is required for the Mighty.

We had to run through this.

And that.

Nearly there... with an explosive exit from the net, I managed to overtake 3 people in the last 20 m.

Flatmate finishers.

Afternoon tea with Alexander McCall Smith

2009-03-08T23:20:00.003+13:00

For something different than our usual outdoors adventures we signed up for an afternoon tea with Alexander McCall Smith - the Scottish author of a number of wonderful series of books, including the latest: 'Tea Time for the Traditionally Built' (http://www.alexandermccallsmith.co.uk/Pages/events.aspx).

We weren't quite sure what to expect when we turned up at the National Library of Scotland. It turned out to be a formal sit-down afternoon tea, complete with white linen, delicate tea-cups (with both traditional and red bush tea - which appears in his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series) and cake stands with cucumber sandwiches! It was the first time they'd allowed the drinking of tea in the reading room. Alexander came over and shook hands with both of us.

On leaving, we both got a goodie bag of red bush tea products and were grabbed for a short videoed interview on the event. It was for the history department rather than BBC though so don't look out for us on the news!

Sylvia's trip home to New Zealand

2009-02-08T10:15:00.018+13:00

While Mark was enjoying le skiing, I was on four very long flights back to the land of NZ for a full month. It was an amazing whirlwind of family and friends and the best holiday I've had. It was a great combination of relaxing at my parents' house in Rangiora, outdoor activities and catching up with people.

I arrived late on Christmas Day, after joining up with Helen Bones for my last two flights from Hong Kong to Christchurch. My family kindly delayed Christmas dinner so at least I got to celebrate part of it.

I was very lucky and the weather was gorgeous and hot for pretty much the entire time of my stay. Therefore, I made the most of it, swimming at every beach, pool and river I could find. I also managed to get quite a tan.

Highlights included Ruth & Jerry's and Rebecca & Damian's weddings. I was really disappointed that Jo & Bill were to get married on the same day as the latter so I couldn't attend their ceremony but hope to get a second go in a few months here in Britain!

Another highlight was a much-anticipated Milford Track with my Mum & Dad. Although I've always thought great walks were for tourists rather than serious trampers the Milford really was amazing and I'd definitely recommend it. I was also surprised how physical it was - although I haven't carried a pack for about two years so maybe it was just me!

In saying that, clearly not energtic enough though, as right afterwards Andreas and I headed up to Picton to meet Julia and walk the Queen Charlotte Track. We did use the free pack transfers every day, which allowed us to 'carry' ridiculously heavy things.

Unfortunately part of the track was closed (due to some pigs) so we did the three longer days and came out a day early, camped out at Marfells beach and walked/ran into Sawcut Gorge instead.

I also spent a lot of time catching up with lots of my good friends in Christchurch at various cafes, for bruch, for BBQs or for dinner. I played a game of touch with my old team and went for a swim at Jelly Park Pool in the outdoor 50m pool. I organised a little gathering at the Dux as well, where I realised that a disproportionate number of my friends are redheads. Good taste, obviously.

Ski holiday

2009-01-11T09:42:00.009+13:00

Hello everyone! After our Bath, we hopped on a bus to London. We had a bit of time to kill, so we lurked around Buckingham Palace for a while before it was time to leave on our coach. The less said about the journey the better - a 21 hour bus/ferry journey is never going to be a pleasant prospect. I did get to see the white cliffs of Dover.

But then we got to Tignes! Tignes in the in Savoie Alps and is quite a high resort (we were staying at 2,100 m) so snow is guaranteed at this time of year. They actually had the best December conditions in 10 years so we were quite lucky. It snowed a couple of days before we got there so everything was nicely coated.

The Eye of the Needle

Quite an interesting mountaintop! Very cool.

The weather was pretty much perfect for our whole trip. The only significant snowfall occurred on New Years Eve (mostly overnight) and I think 5 out of 7 days were like this picture above. It was chilly though (you get that up high in winter!), -10 deg C and below was quite common. I think it only got above zero once at lower levels. Combined with a bit of wind, it got quite cold on some of the longer chairlifts!

Mark and Steve in the Buff

You can daille, or you can diebold. What a choice...

This is as high as you can get without proceeding on foot. To get to the Glacier Grand Motte, we first had to take a funicular railway, then a telepherique (or telefreak), a kind of cable car.

Aww :-)

Jo, Steve and I were in the same instruction group. Here is most of the group. Conspicuously absent are the three Irish girls. They were part of a group of six, and were a real laugh - confirming my belief that the Irish are some of the best people on the planet. And I'm not just saying that because I know Patrick reads this blog.

Mhairi and Helen were in another (expert) group, while Silke was in a higher group again. She was practically worshipped by the other members of her group because she was so good.

A highlight of the trip was the food. Lots of it, lots of variety, and all of it good. Icecream anyone?

Or maybe you'd like to try some cheese.

Our instructor, Olivia, is second from the left.

New Year's Eve. Let's get down!

I said get DOWN!

Oh dear Steve, I guess it had to happen eventually.

There is one highlight of the return journey to London that is worth mentioning, and that was the look on the bus driver's face when confronted with this idiocy:

Driver to passenger who's getting off early: "What side of the bus is your bag on?"

P: "I'm not sure, because we're driving on the other side of the road now"

Thanks guys, for an awesome trip!

Christmas in Bath

2009-01-07T09:48:00.004+13:00

I spent Christmas in Bath with Matt and his wife Jo. Steve and Jo Schaab were also there, as were Jo's mum Isabel and Matt's sister Helen. Kerstin, Lindsay and baby Yana joined us on Christmas Day so it was a full house!

On the "balcony" (scaffolding outside their flat to allow work to be done). At least it was warm enough to spend awhile outside with a beer!

Mine, all mine!

Of course, Yana was the centre of attention.

As was this wee guy!

How does the remote work?

Aha, that's got it!

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-10T08:32:00.008+13:00

We've been up to heaps of things this year. The last few weekends have been a bit slack, and it's been a while since we went away on holiday so it feels like we haven't done much lately. But when I looked back through the photos it reminded me of just how many great things we've done since we came back to Scotland in January. Here is a selection of our favourite things we've done together this year (in no particular order).

Our trip to Wales. We had a lovely (almost) week in Wales. We also had a great time at Ele and Steve's wedding but unfortunately don't have any decent photos of that!

The Edinburgh Rugby Sevens

Our only overnight "tramping" trip this year, combined with a ride on the West Highland Railway.

Going hillwalking with our workmates

Going south for Easter. We spent time with Sylv's family and got to see the Roman Baths in Bath

Our trip to Germany for Jonno and Claudia's wedding, where we caught up with lots of friends and family

As well as lots of wee things a bit closer to home.

Cycling around the Isle of Arran

2008-11-03T23:05:00.006+13:00

It started out with a bit of a public transport mission by taking our bikes on trains from Edinburgh - Glasgow - Adrossan Habour, followed by a 50 minute ferry ride. Then we were off on our bikes! We toured around the road that's in red on the map to the right, starting from Brodrick and going clockwise. With a total of 100km it only took about 2 hours cycling the first day and 3.5 the second. We also got incredible weather (including a fantastic tail wind up the west coast) and it was a fantastic trip.

We particuarly enjoyed our B&B in Blackwaterfoot, including a delicious pub meal and a beautiful sunset. We also did two walks: the first a coastal one to a cave that Robert the Bruce apparently hid in and the second to the Bronze Age standing stones on Machrie Moor. We thought these were just as impressive as Stonehedge, particularly since they are so remote and relatively unknown.

Since Mark was the only one with panniers he got to carry all our stuff. Holy Island in the background.

Beer from the Arran brewery and an Arran sunset

The highest point on the ride. We could hear (and see) stags roaring all around us as we biked up this road.

Some of the stones on Machrie Moor

Ireland

2008-10-24T09:45:00.006+13:00

It's been a while since my last post, and in fact it's been a while since I visited Ireland with my folks. For that reason (and because two of our most avid readers were on the trip with me!) I'm going to keep the writing brief and just show a few of my favourite photos.

The Giant's Causeway, of course!

Glendalough, very pretty and home to religious sites dating back to the 6th Century

The round tower and monastery remains at Glendalough

Hore Abbey, the remains of a Benedictine Abbey viewed from the Cistercian Rock of Cashel. Apparently they didn't get on very well and the Cistercian Archbishop was always trying to get rid of them!

Traditional music in Doolin.

The folks as we went for a morning stroll at Monagh Mor, a wee fishing village.

A hill

Cool (random) graffitti in Derry

One of a series of murals depicting the Troubles in Derry, painted by the Bogside Artists

Some of the coastlines were rather spectacular.

Estonian & Lativan adventures

2008-09-25T06:55:00.009+12:00

I arrived in Latvia at Riga airport late at night by myself, navigated my way to a hostel and awaited the arrival of Julian and Jana the next day. We hired a huge 9-seater van and made a bee-line straight for Estonia. We picked up a vocal Latvian hitch-hiker on the way.

The purpose of my trip was the World Rogaine Championships (http://8wrc2008.rogain.ee/) in Karula National Park, southern Estonian. For the uninitiated, this involved 24 hours of running/walking/navigating in a team of two (I was in a German team with Jana) to visit as many points as possible spread widely through Estonian bog across a 1:40,000 map. There were heaps of tracks, which mean the course was long trudges followed by brief and terrifying dives into the forest/bog to collect controls.

Jana and I were very pleased with our 70km mission throughout the 24 hours over what was for us pretty unusual conditions. Julian & Em went much further, but were still thoroughly beaten by many Eastern European teams that just seemed to excel in the terrain. Even Chris & Dennis struggled and came 2nd instead of retaining the title.

Following on from the rogaine Julian, Jana, Chris, Em and me had 10 days to explore Estonia and Latvia before I was due back in Riga. We hadn't quite predicted that it would never get above 10 degrees so we'd planned to camp, which we did for the first 5 nights before wimping out and staying in hostels or cabins from then on.

In terms of adventures, we had plenty, including my first attempt at mountain biking with clipless peddles, rowing around a lake, getting lost in Estonian bog (on a tourist track) and bush-bashing for an hour to find a road that was still 3km from our car, exploring Tartu, Tallin & Riga, going to a KGB museum, drinking Riga Balsam (the local poison) and summer bobsledding on a real bobsled track.

Above: our luxious cabin and enormous van

Right: boardwalk Estonian style

Right: Jana with a friendly local kitten

Below: Julian and Jana about to be pulled back up the hill in the bobsled Julian and I mountain biking

I was pleasantly surprised to find Estonia & Latvia are incredible modern and friendly countries. There was cellphone reception everywhere and free Wifi was available in the most obscure places. Things are still pretty cheap too - get in while it lasts!

Aonach Eagach

2008-09-02T08:33:00.006+12:00

On Saturday, we (Ben Low, Mhairi and I) headed up to Glencoe for a scramble that Mhairi and I have wanted to do for some time. A scramble is a cross between walking and rock climbing but no ropes or hardware are required if you're confident enough. Basically a good day out! The weather forecast was a bit gloomy but the day ended up being pretty good really - the photos speak for themselves.

The Aonach Eagach traverse takes in four peaks, two of which are Munros, so I have added a couple to may tally. It is claimed to be the most exposed ridge traverse in Scotland outside of the Cuillin Ridge of Skye. Certainly there are some airy bits!

Ben and I met Mhairi at Glencoe, where she had already been on some crazy biking/hiking mission. Check our her blog (the link's on the right) to see what adventures she's been up to!

Italian summer

2008-08-18T07:17:00.005+12:00

Last weekend was our girls' trip to Italy. The location was arbitary as the main purpose was to catch up with Julia van Luijk and Jo Drummond (soon to be Jo Nix). We all flew into Pisa, but unfortunately the cheap flights weren't as good to me as they were to the other two so I had an extra day at each end by myself.

I booked myself into a caravan at a campsite with a pool and as it was well over 30 degrees each day passing the time wasn't too miserable...

Julia had booked us into a great hotel in Florence and we had an amazing 4 days, especially since Julia and Jo hasn't seen each other for over a year.

We also attracted the attention of some romantically-minded Italian men (although not the one in the picture above, unfortunately), with whistles etc. Although I'm sure they do it to everyone female and under 40, it was still quite flattering and/or amusing, such as the one who clasped his chest theatrically and pretended to faint while saying oh my heart as we walked past.

One more sustained attempt was a man trying to convince me to go swimming with him. He didn't speak any English and I don't speak Italian so it was all charades and guesswork, although he said mare, mare so much I worked it out and said the sea, you mean the sea! which comically meant he thought I was agreeing (i.e. si si!). Luckily, eventually he gave up.

This is a photo of the Arno River, which runs through the centre of Florence. All the bridges but one were bombed by the Germans during the war.

On our last night we took Jo out to dinner for her birthday at a nicely authentic Italian restaurant and then as we were strolling through the sultry evening air we stumbled across this guy busking. He was doing excellent covers of Simon & Garfunkel. He had a girl singing with him too but they had an argument and she stomped off, much to the amusement of the crowd.

This is some tower I saw in Pisa. The only way to get a photo like this is to be walking to the airport at 7am in the morning before any of the lazy tourists are around. I couldn't believe I had it to myself!

Wales

2008-08-03T20:20:00.006+12:00

Sylv and I recently spent a week down in Wales. We were camping, so we were particularly happy to have a week of pretty good weather! We started iwith a couple of nights in Conwy, North Wales, then headed down to Snowdonia for a couple of nights. We then spent two nights at Newport on the North Pembrokeshire coast before heading across South Wales to Ele and Steve's wedding in Gloucestershire (subject of a later post).

I'll let the photos do most of the talking.

The mighty Welsh dragon!

Caernarvon Castle

Beaumaris Castle (on the Isle of Anglesay)

I would pour boiling oil on this guy - the gate had a mechanism for doing just that!

Conwy Castle in the distance, from the (largely intact) town walls. It was great how the castle and walls were integrated with the modern town.

Allegedly the smallest house in Britain ,build up against the outside of the town wall.

A 4000-year old copper mine that you can go inside! It's amazing what was achieved digging with bones and antlers. We really enjoyed this. Sylvia enjoyed wearing the hard hats most of all.

A beautiful setting, our camp site in a field at the foot of Snowdon.

We didn't get snowed on on Snowdon, but didn't get much of a view either.

Sylvia's works' parent company is Carillion. Here they are making a mess on the summit of Snowdon. I think it's disgraceful - if you think so too, you should email Sylvia to complain.

At a hide in a nature reserve. We saw very few birds apart from swallows, ducks and a couple of tits but the walk around the salt marsh and forest was pleasant. Good way to break a long car journey.

The North Pembrokeshire coast is spectacular. We walked a day of the 10 or 12 day Pembrokeshire Coastal Path.

Sylvia just loves hard hats! Continuing our Hard Hat Tour of Wales, we went to Big Pit, a former colliery in Blaenavon. It closed in the 80's and is now the National Mining Museum of Wales. We went down the pit on a tour guided by a former miner who was a real laugh. It's not so deep (only 100 m or so underground I think) but is called Big Pit because the main shaft is so big. There are kilometres of underground workings. There are also good exhibitions and an excellent audio-visual display. It really gave a good impression of the society based on the mines, and the culture of the miners that still exists today.

Mark's birthday party

2008-07-30T08:25:00.003+12:00

I don't usually make too much of a big deal about my birthday, but this time I decided to have a party. It was fun! Unfortunately Mhairi couldn't make it, but even without her friends we still managed to get a cozy party going with about 30 people crammed into our living room. There wasn't too much in the way of drunken frolics. I mean this literally, there wasn't too much, but of course there was some, including the most impressive wedgie I have ever seen. I can provide further details on request and I believe the ripped undies are still lurking in the rubbish bin somewhere...

Now some photos.

Sylvia made me a cake! This photo doesn't nearly do the decorating justice. Isn't she clever :-)

Mmm, yummy!

How clever are YOUR feet?

I don't know who invited these guys. I didn't, and Sylvia doesn't think she did either. At least they didn't steal anything.

Mt Blanc

2008-06-26T05:53:00.009+12:00

Ahh, Chamonix. Mountain sport Mecca. Mountain biking, walking, rock climbing, mountaineering, paragliding - or just riding in a cable car from 1000 m in the vally floor up to 3000 m + peaks!

Normally you can ride a combination of cable car and funicular railway up to about 2,200 m but both were closed when we were there so we had to walk from the car park at 1,100 m to Tette Rousse hut at 3,200 m in an afternoon. This was actually Lindsay's preferred option - he called it "doing it properly", or something like that.

Heading off

The first 1,000 m or so was wooded and we had quite nice weather too.

The Chamonix Valley. By this stage it was getting quite showery and cloudy - quite common in the Alps, and particularly in June, and particularly June 2008. Apparently no-one had climbed in the 30 or 40 days before us because the weather and conditions had been so poor. That didn't bode well.

Partly because of the weather, I didn't take any more decent photos that day. This is taken from Tette Rousse hut looking up at the Grand Couloir. Gouter hut sits at the top skyline. This section of climb was actually the most technical of the trip - at times I felt that if I had been carrying a second tool, I would have used it. The route actually crosses the couloir then goes straight up the snowy line of rocks on the right. In normal conditions it is not nearly as snowy but there is a much higher risk of rockfall - the couloir has a somewhat fearsome reputation (undeserved when we were there).

This is a piss-sicle. Hmm, I think I'll choose a different flavour thank you. Facilities at the huts were more basic than I was expecting - perhaps because of the conditions, and being early season (Gouter hut wasn't even officially open), there was no water available. Not even for washing your hands. Drinking water had to be purchased at the astonishing rate of 5 euros for a 1.5 L bottle! And we each got through a few of those. We would have brought up a stove if we'd known. The crappers at Gouter hut were simply holes that dropped shit onto the rocks and snow below (I didn't take a photo). I assumed that the fragile mountain environment was the reason why camping is not permitted but this made me wonder!

We climbed from Tette Rousse up to Gouter hut (approx 3,200 to 3,800 m) the day after we arrived. We thought we'd be a bit pooped after our efforts the previous afternoon to attempt the summit, and the weather forecast was better for the next day besides, so we just had an easy day. As it turned out the weather was quite nice though apparently quite windy further up (no-one summited that day).

The rest of the pics are a mix between that day and our aborted summit attempt the next day. We got up at 2 am but it was snowing and blowing, again at 4 am. It had cleared by about 5.30 am but was a bit late by this stage to be making a summit attempt plugging steps in fresh snow (and possibly still quite windy further up). Everyone else (all guided groups I think) headed back down but we still went up a few hundred metres for a look.

That's Dan in the foreground. His alter ego, Dave, caused all sorts of trouble.

As it turned out, we got to 4,050 m, only marginally higher than on our recce the previous day! I discovered this sneaky crevasse in our path and we decided it wasn't really safe to continue. This was actually all we could see of it (just a little dimple from a few metres away) so I guess I was lucky to spot it. We had made a tactical decision to not take a rope, instead relying on following everyone else's footprints up the mountain over the glaciated terrain. Unfortunately, as the only ones up the mountain that day, we had no footsteps to follow!

It was a little disappointing not to make it up, but not altogether surprising, and we could take some comfort from the fact that noone else made it up while we were on the mountain. Most people who are serious about climbing Mt Blanc will plan to hang out in Chamonix for a week or more waiting for good conditions and weather, and the conditions and weather were pretty pooey, even for early in the season. Oh well, perhaps another time!

I had a great trip still, and I think the others did too - cheers to Lindsay, Dan and Matthijn for a cool experience.

I'll leave you with this photo posted to me by an anonymous Swiss security camera operator, that appears to show a man leaving a women's toilet. Any ideas who this might be?

Schweiz

2008-06-20T17:38:00.004+12:00

This time last week, I was relaxing after decending 3,200 m down Mt Blanc in a day. But before we got to Mt Blanc, there was a boys' trip across Germany, Switzerland and a corner of Austria to get to Chamonix, France!

We travelled in style in Lindsay and Kerstin's Wohnmobile (campervan)

This photo was posed - actually there was complete harmony in the campervan, and definitely no finger pointing. Except, perhaps, when we supported a team other than Holland in the Euro Cup! As it turned out, taking pity on Matthijn and supporting his team turned out to be a good move as they've ended up top of their "pool of death", beating two recent champions in the process. So there you go.

I had heard that Switzerland was beautiful, but wasn't quite ready for just how green and mountainous it was in the South. Waterfalls galore!

They like to paint marks on rocks in these parts, or even directions! We climbed a mountain called Grassen, nearly 3,000 m.

Grassen is a bit further around to the left. In the saddle ahead, we met several groups, all roped (and presumably guided?) I think they were laughing at us for climbing without ropes, and in t-shirts, shorts and not the latest seasons' gear. We thought they were funny for using ropes.

The peak with the sun on it is called Titlis. It has a cable car going all the way to the top - like lots of European mountains. There is often an easy way but we always seemed to be walking...

On the way down.

We also based ourselves in Grindelwald (near the Jungfrau) for a couple of days and did two half-day walks. The scenery was stunning and we got our first close-up views of glaciers. Unfortunately we were quite early in the season and there had been lots of snowfall in the spring/early summer, so the mountain huts and routes weren't really open. This put the kibosh on our loose plans of climbing the Jungfrau.

The north face of the Eiger, a climbing route of tragedy and legend! Not really in condition when we were there.

Yes, the cows really do have bells. More amusingly, so do the sheep.

The next post will move on to France - in the mean time, Lindsay has done a post on our trip as well, check it out at this link (or by clicking on his blog on the right)

Edinburgh Rugby Sevens (a pictorial blog entry)

2008-06-11T07:55:00.004+12:00

Adventure Race!

2008-06-02T09:04:00.003+12:00

A couple of weekends ago Mark and I competed in our first adventure race down in glorious weather in the Lakes District. I was 5 hours long and set out like a rogaine: collect as many points as possible in the time. The tricks were:

- One side of the map was mountain biking, one running
- We had to collect controls from both in the time
- We could only transition once
- We didn't know how many points each control was until the start
- Some controls were worth 0

We ended up biking for 4.5 hours and then sprinting for 30 minutes to make sure we got some running controls. We thought we'd done okay, but obviously need to practise our tactics as we came 25 out of 35 teams in the mixed pairs. We made a couple of navigational errors (beacause our maps were duct-taped to our bikes rather than on fancy map boards) and I was a bit wimpy on the single-track sections. Also, Mark didn't have a bungy on his bike that I could grab on for a pull up the hill like the other mixed teams (and some of the girls had a harness for a tow in the running sections as well!).

For more details check out http://www.openadventure.com/open5/index.htm

Our results print-out

My car with our hired bikes (disc brakes!)

Hillwalking at Glen Lyon

2008-05-21T08:52:00.006+12:00

Tramping has many different names in different parts of the world - in Britain it's called hillwalking (rambling in England, perhaps where there aren't any real hills involved?), in Australia it's bushwalking, in North America hiking.

Anyway, I organised a hillwalk with a bunch of my workmates (and a few of Sylvia's) at a place called Glen Lyon. It's a seldom visited part of Scotland, but it's hardly remote, lying in the southern highlands - I think it's the long, windy road that puts people off more than the remoteness. It was certainly worth the journey though!

I won't harp on about it but here's a few pictures. Photo credits for some go to Eric.

The famous five go hillwalking! It was quite a steep descent back to the car.

Sylvia's workmate Shehu shows us how it's done in style.

Rannoch Moor and Glencoe (scene of a previous blog post) in the background.

Loch Lyon

Sylvia demonstrate how to bum slide when there's no snow. The only spaniards they have in Scotland are the two-legged variety.