Tag: mountains (Page 1 of 3)

Sunrise above Shuitoucun

8 August 2020 / author

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.

Seven Days Trekking in Iceland

15 April 2020 / author

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.

Once Upon a Time…Northern Vietnam

1 February 2020 / author

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.

Wreckage of the Southern Cloud

29 January 2020 / author

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…

Mt Jagungal and the Rolling Grounds

16 January 2020 / author

This was written in 2013. I wonder if it could be written like this in 2020. With the world changing, will it ever again be safe to hike deep in the Snowy Mountains in summer?

Summer in the Snowies. Fire risk, hot wind, horse flies the size of your fist. Perfect for a four day hike, right? Maybe not, but if you stay indoors with the air-con you also miss the alpine meadows, cool, fresh streams, snow gums and mountain huts. And above all, you’d miss the wonderful views from mighty Mount Jagungal, crows soaring in the updrafts, a glorious place on a deep blue sky day.

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?

The Last Litang Horse Festival

4 June 2019 / author

Tibetan horse traders at Litang, western China

In 2006, westerners could travel into the Tibetan regions of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces relatively freely. For one shining moment in early 2007, it looked like the group-tour-only restrictions on Tibet Autonomous Province itself would be lifted. It was a Golden Age, the time when China boosters found most evidence for their prediction that the country would continue to liberalize and ultimately democratize. The Olympics changed all that. Riots and protests brought unprecedented clampdowns in western regions. The internet was simply switched off in sensitive areas and politics nationally took a new, harder-line direction from which it’s never really diverted. Since then, troops are often on the ground in sensitive towns, and for a few years there was a spate of self-immolations. Foreigners are often thrown off buses at Kangding and other towns, long before they get anywhere near the western reaches of Tibet. Cynicism and uncertainty grows on the eastern seaboard, though you don’t notice it unless you pay attention. But out west, by most accounts, well, it’s quite, quite different to how it was when we visited.

In amongst all that, the Litang Horse Festival, a longstanding fixture on the Tibetan cultural calendar and the backpacker loop, was cancelled, and stayed that way until very recently.

On our own journey of exploration in the summer of 2006, we saw one of the last Horse Festivals before the big crackdown.

Parque Nacional Lauca in Chile

17 April 2019 / author

“Hola chicos!”

From Horiol’s very first friendly greeting as we opened the gate of his tiny hotel in equally tiny Putre, Chile, we knew we were in for a good time. This was a welcome omen, even more so once we discovered we’d been robbed in the Chilean frontier town of Arica. Boo! But it was our fault – a real beginner’s mistake. And it was just cash, and not too much, and Horiol’s big smile washed away the memory very quickly.