notes and images
“Can I ask a question?” he said in Spanish (that much I knew, though my traveller’s Spanish is all but gone). “Is this the path to Ojo del Albino?”
I looked at Barcelona. Barcelona looked at me. We both shrugged at the guy we would come to know as France. There were no names on this mission, no background stories. Just three guys from three places, brought together by fate for one purpose – to find the Eye of the Albino.
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^ With Ben (left) on top of the cliff at Huangyukou
Most navigation arguments have little real consequence. “You missed the exit!” “That was the exit?” “I told you to get in the right lane!” You might be late, but you won’t have to sleep outside in the cold.
But on the side of a cliff in failing light, they take on a different complexion.
November, 2016. Sunrise above Shuitoucun. Set off at three in the morning, a cold November Sunday, hike four kilometers through fog and forest to the pass, down to the Watergate and then up the long line of Great Wall. The first light rises as you breach the cloudbase, and then, southeast, to your left, the huge yellow sun bursts into the world from beyond the range.
Continue readingSometimes you want to visit places a little off the regular route. The Kelabit Highlands, for example. You can get there by road, if you’re prepared for a minimum of eight hours in a bumpy jeep bouncing over logging trails, and longer still in the wet. Or you can fly by tiny Twin Otter…
Living in Washington, DC, is not like living in Beijing, China. There are a million differences (and a few similarities to be covered another time, not least the traffic). Perhaps the most telling for me is the difference in hiking.
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I wanted to write that a glacier is like a living thing, because of the noise it makes, that jarring, creaking sound of ice grinding against ice. But living is the wrong word because any given glacier today is dying. This was only a small one, but once it was bigger, and there is no going back.
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Remember when you were a kid and someone taught you to count the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunderclap to work out how far away the storm was?
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Feel the need to trim down a bit? Try this hike. I went in weighing 74kg. Seven days later, I was 62kg. In between, I’d lugged 30 kg up and down mountains, through rivers, across snow fields and volcanic plains. I’d eaten anything I could lay my hands on, including fish served through my tent window by an Icelandic child in the middle of a downpour. We saw sun, wind, rain and snow, just on the first day. And in all that time, I only had one shower. It was three minutes long and cost about five bucks. Welcome to the Laugavegur – Iceland’s famous and awesome trek.
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Sixteen years of marriage. The ups, the downs, the really downs, the ups again, and the promise of more ups than downs to come. The constant? Love, respect, and commitment.
Our first trip as a married couple was our honeymoon in northern Viet Nam. They were the days – the days of fresh faces and film.
With love for the person who doesn’t need to read this because she’s on all the Journeys, &c.
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Sir Charles Kingsford Smith in front of the “Southern Cloud” (photo from Ed Coates collection – used with permission)
Time Magazine, April 20, 1931:
Even as Col. Lindbergh joined the staff of T.A.T. and Pan American Airways… so did Wing-Commander Charles Kingsford-Smith return home from his famed flights to become managing director of Australian National Airways Ltd. One day last month …his company’s … Southern Cloud took off from Sydney for Melbourne, over 450 mi. distant… [and] was not again heard from. As did Lindbergh when the T.A.T. plane City of San Francisco vanished in New Mexico in 1929, Commander Kingsford-Smith flew to the search. Day after day planes criss-crossed the wilderness north of Melbourne. In such territory survivors might live for many days without reaching means of communication. Last week hope for plane and occupants was abandoned.
What happened to the Southern Cloud? Since I first heard about the plane 20 years ago, I’d wanted to find out the whole story. In January 2011, I finally did…
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