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Three year old’s second bivvy

24 September 2019 / author

“Dad”, she said on a recent camping trip. “Dad, I don’t want to tent, I want to bivvy. I want to bivvy in a castle”.

Once I got over my little rush of Adventure Dad pride, I thought back to the trip she was recalling. Our last camping – I mean bivvying – trip in China at our favourite spot, a tower called Kouzilou above the mighty pass at Shixiaguan. There, in September 2018, we had a wonderful bivvy in glorious weather, and apparently set a high bar for all future Daddy-Daughter camping trips. It was official: the kid likes to bivvy.

(Not) storming Area 51

18 September 2019 / author

“I don’t have time for this right now”, she said gruffly into the phone. And she was busy – for a burger bar in a small village in the desert hundreds of miles from anywhere, this place was hopping. If it was film noir, she’d have said, “of all the burger joints in all the towns in all the world, an alien walks into mine”.

Because this wasn’t any old roadside dive. This was the Little A’le’inn in Rachel, Nevada, just about a stone’s throw from one of the most secretive locations on Planet Earth, Ground Zero for the 90s alien conspiracy folklore that fuelled the X-Files, Independence Day and Men in Black: Area 51.

Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flats

11 September 2019 / author

The Uyuni Salt Flats – largest in the world – were probably Bolivia’s premier tourist attraction when we visited in 2010 (if not today too). And it’s easy to see why. More than 10,500 square kilometers in size, and around 3,600 meters above sea level, they extend south and west from Uyuni nearly as far as Chile. Unless you have the time, money and inclination to sponsor your own expedition, you’re more or less forced to take a tour. Finding the right one is a chore, but at the end of the day, like banana pancakes in Vietnam, it’s a case of “same-same but different”. The best thing to do is just plonk down your Bolivianos, jump in the jeep, and roll out.

Wheeler Peak

4 September 2019 / author

Our preparation for the nearly 4,000 meter Wheeler Peak in Nevada was not nearly as detailed as many people, including us, do for Borneo’s Mt Kinabalu. This was mostly because Mt Kinabalu is a high volume tourist machine, and Wheeler is happily remote and undeveloped, so you’re not forced to stay at a hostel overnight and make your summit push at 2am. You just wake up and climb it. This probably explains why I was so puffed on the last push to Wheeler’s summit. That, and the 15 kg child on my shoulders.

Climbing Mt Kinabalu

28 August 2019 / author

“To be tramping under the stars toward a great mountain is always an adventure; now we were adventuring for the first time in a new mountain country which still held in store for us all its surprises and almost all its beauties.”*

George Leigh-Mallory wrote that in 1922 after his first reconnaissance of Mt Everest. He would die on its high and unforgiving peak two years later, just below the summit, to lie there frozen and unfound until the famous expedition of 1999 discovered his corpse, pale as alabaster, somewhere below 8,200 meters.

I wasn’t thinking of this as we climbed the considerably lower rock slopes of Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu – I just happened on that passage reading Leigh-Mallory’s book on the plane to Kota Kinabalu. But his words describe perfectly the feeling we had that morning, at 3,900 meters and still short of the summit, with a big moon directly overhead and the Southern Cross low on our left side. Pale clouds filled the sky below us, surrounding our little rocky island in the night sky.

Eastern Iceland

19 August 2019 / author

I don’t think we’ve ever been as wet as we were in Iceland. Or as cold. Or hungrier, more tired, or dirtier. I formed this judgement only two weeks in to a six week trip on a day it rained so hard for so long that I thought I would never be wetter than this. Late next night, as we moved our tent from a pool of water, beside a lagoon full of icebergs, I realised I was completely wrong in assuming that was the wettest as I’d ever be. No. With every new day, I was going to be wetter yet.

Even our Gore-tex wasn’t keeping the rain at bay. Would I ever be dry again?

Lunar Crater

12 August 2019 / author

Standing alone at night on the rim of a giant crater in a desert beneath the Milky Way, I had two strong feelings. First, I viscerally understood why Neil Armstrong said the lunar surface “has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States”. True enough, that night in the high desert of the United States looked to me a lot like pictures of the moon. Second, and more powerfully, I suddenly felt like all that open space was somehow crushing me, this tiny creature on the side of a cliff beneath the vastness of that black, endless, infinite sky.

Three year old’s first bivvy

27 June 2019 / author

I didn’t get a minute of sleep, not one. Even with the bare minimum of stuff I still had a huge load to carry – including a three year old and all our water – and there wasn’t room for a sleeping mat. So it was a long, hard night on the bare ground underneath a tarp flapping in very strong winds.

Once the kid was down, I lay there listening to the cacophony, counting down the moments until it rained, and waiting for dawn to break. She slept like a log under the faintly ridiculous shelter I built from a tarp, two tent pegs and her baby carrier. Not bad for her first ever bivvy.

Click through for a video and stills of our first Daddy-Daughter Bivvy.

Flying with kids under two

18 June 2019 / author

Paris 2015: transit stop from Beijing en route to Hamburg via Copenhagen. Kid aged five months.

Flying with babies, zero to two. They fly free. How hard can it be?

The first thing to remember when you board a plane with your child is this: She has Every. Right. To be there. If they let her board, she’s as legitimate as anyone on the plane. Do your best to be a considerate passenger, for sure. But talkative aunties and loudsnorers are no more entitled to anything on that plane than you and your little kid. They don’t feel guilty, and nor should you. You’re not a selfish, anti-social monster. Your kid is not the Devil’s Spawn! You’re a travelling parent. That’s perfectly normal.

Northern Iceland

12 June 2019 / author

“Eight bells and all’s well, ha-haargh…”

Dolphin watching is really cool – when you’re looking for dolphins. But when you go whale watching, you’re really after something bigger. You know, like a whale. These guys had a great guarantee – see a whale or your money back*. Being (back then, in 2005) smart lawyers, we checked the small print under that asterisk. “Whales includes dolphins”. Hmmm. Well, we’re here now, we thought. It’s the last day of the season. Maybe we’ll get lucky.