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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.

Twin Otters in the Borneo Highlands

31 July 2020 / author

(click to watch in high definition at vimeo)

Sometimes 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…

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.

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.

Tarfala Valley, Arctic Sweden

2 January 2019 / author

The fastest wind speed ever recorded at Tarfala was over 180 kilometers per hour. As I leaned into it, unable to move forwards, and barely able to stand, I thought it must not be too far short of that record. Strangely, there was no howl; there was nothing for the wind to hit except me, our daughter in my pack, and Yon about twenty paces behind. No howl, just a sudden horrendous flapping as the red sheet protecting my child flew loose at one corner.

“Are you scared, baby?”, I yelled. “No”, she said. “Well just a little bit”.

We were 26 kilometers into this hike; even for Arctic Sweden it was getting dark by now, nearly ten hours since we set off at noon. I was wet through, and, as Hicks and Hudson classically exchanged, either my ~~motion detector~~ GPS was reading wrong, or I was reading it wrong.

Where was the damn hut?

Gansu Province’s Incredible Great Walls and Silk Road Sites: Part II

26 November 2018 / author

I’m a mountain guy, I decided, after just a few hours in the outskirts of the Gobi desert. It was hot, and blowy, the Great Wall we were following was practically impossible to see, and the ground beneath us was parched and covered in huge salt pans. Give me a goat track, I thought. A ridge ripped by a cold wind from Siberia, and a Ming wall I can actually see. But my friend Chinoook is made of sterner stuff (though I give him a run for his money on my home turf). Out ahead, he led the way through the salt pans towards a brown smudge on the horizon. “There’s the wall”, he promised. I squinted. “Sure it is”, I thought skeptically. But he was right. Just meters off a salt pan they could have used as a set for Mordor in the Lord of the Rings, stood an enormous, multi-tiered wall – a giant layer cake two thousand years old.

All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by

10 September 2018 / author

“You’ll get your sea legs soon enough”, Pete said.

I grunted as I scrubbed the decks with a big wet mop. “This is nothing, anyway. When I was in the Navy, we used to go out in the Bay of Biscay and turn off the motors”. His regional English accent somehow made this sound worse. I don’t know which region, it didn’t matter. My brain was shutting down with the effort of not vomiting. “The ship would roll around in the sea for a few days. Everyone got it all out of their systems soon enough. One poor lad…”. His voice trailed away. The picture of a hundred royal Navy recruits throwing up for two days had pushed me over the line. And over the railing.