Mountaineering in Bolivia - Part 2

After getting back to La Paz we had a cruisy rest day where we said goodbye to poor old Steve, who´d run out of holidays and had to fly back to LA. Unfortunately for him there were quite a few protests around the country that turned into riots, with the occasional fatality, and the USA were being held partially accountable by allegedly helping the people in the lowlands fight the communist government based in La Paz. So because of that, American Airlines weren´t flying into Bolivia anymore, so Steve had to leg it out via Peru.

We then headed to Huayna Potosi, a 6,088m peak that is meant to be one of the easier 6,000m peaks you can do. Our plan was to spend 4 days there, 2 doing some training on the good glacier at the foot of the mountain, a day hiking up to high camp, and then the last day would be the attempt on the summit.

Huayna Potosi. The summit is actually the second highest bump I think.

Training day on the glacier. Here´s me attempting to lead up the glacier.

So on the first training day we headed onto the glacier and did some crampon skills, with some techniques we hadn´t encountered before like front-pointing, and the French, Canadian and American techniques of walking up steep ice. After we´d spent a while mucking around on some steep ice and adding these techniques to our arsenal, we went for a hike around the glacier looking for a big crevasse to throw ourselves down. When we found one we did some crevasse rescue stuff, refreshing in our minds how to set up a z-drag (something I haven´t done for years).

We got Dave up our Z-drag. Phew.

Day 2 of training consisted of learning how to place ice screws and other bits of protection as you cruise up a glacier. We went for some walkies and took turns leading the party and placing pro. It was kinda fun but good to learn. Then we headed down the bottom end of the glacier where there were some nice steep ice walls to climb on. We had our first crack at ice climbing! I managed to shred my brand new goretex overpants but stitched them up that night.

Jen doing some ice climbing.

Day 3 we packed up our stuff and hiked up to high camp, at around 5200m. It took about an hour to get up there, and we spent the rest of the day chilling out. We got to bed pretty early as we were getting up at 2:30am for a 3:30am start to the day.

Summit day! And it was a struggle to get going by 3:30am, but we managed it, and boy was it worth it. It took about 6 hours of hard slog to get to the summit, and the views were spectacular on the way up. For the "one of the easiest 6,000m peaks you can do" we thought it was bloody hard work. There were a few steep sections where we were glad we had our crampon experience, and very glad of Tim and Dave, our guides who did all the leading.

Summit day: one of the steeper sections.

The views were pretty cool on the way up.

Very close to the summit... perhaps 50m from the top? It clouded over just as we neared the summit which was a bit of a bugger.

Well I´d just popped the question to Jen, and she said yes, and then we looked kinda sheepish.

Mountaineering in Bolivia - Part 1

So we signed onto this 3 week mountaineering course while we were still in Hobart, through this company called Sierra Wilderness Seminars based in California, USA.

We arrived in La Paz on the 28th of August, and spent the first few days acclimatising to the 3600m altitude. On one of the days we went mountain biking with a company called "B-Side" which were kinda on the expensive side of the biking companies, but they had sweet Iron Horse freeride bikes so we couldn´t say no really.

They took us up to 4800m, the same start as the more famous "Death Road" ride, but instead of doing the Death Road we headed back into La Paz via some sweet downhill dirt roads known as the "Andean Balcony." It was fast, fun, and the views were spectacular. Here´s a photo:

Jen cruising down some fun dirt.

We got home from the Andean Balcony ride just in time to have a shower and then jump on a tour to the "Cholitas Wrestling" which was bloody hilarious. Unfortunately we forgot to bring our cameras (bloody idiots), but check out this link or this link for an idea. It was thoroughly entertaining, very much like WWF, or if you´ve seen that atrocious Jack Black film "Nacho Libre" it´s kinda like that. Very acrobatic, and very staged. They even splashed members of the crowd with coke and smashed a particularly loud-mouthed American on the head with a metal tray. He loved it.

The next day we met with our guides, Tim and Dave, and also the other punter on the course, Steve. They were all pretty cool blokes. The itinerary for the next few days was just to stay in La Paz and acclimatise. This was kinda frustrating for us, as we´d already been acclimatising for 3 days, but oh well. On one of the days we visited some ruins near La Paz called Tiwanaku, which were pretty cool. There´s a couple of photos on Facebook, at the end of Volume 26.

Then we headed into the Cordillera Real range, which involved a few hours of driving and then a 2 or 3 hour hike to base camp. Luckily we had donkeys to take our stuff, so all we had to carry were day packs.

Base Camp, Cordillera Real range. This was the snow that fell on us after our first night. Luckily the weather fined up after that.

The altitude of Base Camp was about 4300m I think, so we spent the first couple of days just doing nothing but breathing and acclimatising. On days 3 and 4 we spent doing glacier skills, which involved different crampon techniques (i.e. not slashing your pants or gaiters), rope skills, ice axe skills, crevasse rescue, and self arrest, amongst many others.

Day 5 was a rest day, and as luck would have it, the night before I decided to be sick and was going at it from both ends all night. It´s nice when vomit comes out your nose.

Day 6 I felt much better, and Jen and I hiked up Mt Austria, at 5300m. It took 2 hours up and an hour down, and since it wasn´t snow-covered, we could do it in our sneakers. A good way to spend a day. Unfortunately for our mate Steve, he had developed worsening shortness of breath, especially when lying down at night - the poor bugger had pulmonary oedema and had to bail. So he and Tim had to hike back down and catch a bus back to La Paz.

Jen on the saddle, near the summit of Mt Austria. Behind her is the beautiful Condoriri Peak (pointy mountain on the right).

With only 2 days left, we decided that on Day 7 we´d attempt to summit our first alpine peak, called Pequeño Alpamayo, at an elevation of 5370m. Jen was feeling a little crook after our Day 6 hike to Mt Austria, and that night she started vomiting her guts out. Poor bugger. As Dave and I were about to leave at 5am, she hurled 5 times... there was no way she was going to be able to try for the summit. Bitterly disappointed, she went back to bed.

The hike to the summit took about 4-5 hours, and was hard work. The scenery was stunning though.

Dave belaying me up one of the more technical sections of Pequeño Alpamayo.

The summit of Pequeño Alpamayo. We ascended the obvious ridge starting from the lower left hand side.

We got back to camp around 1pm, and spent the rest of the day relaxing. The next day, Day 8, we hiked back out and were back in La Paz for a nice hot shower.

Bolivia

Hi everyone,

we're in La Paz now... just did a week's mountaineering course and that was cool; now we're off for another 4 days of glacier training and we'll hopefully summit Huayana Potosi (>6000m) on the last day.

Will add photos and stuff after that if we've got time. We'll see how we go, political instability in Bolivia and all...

Later,
m+j

Colorado, USA

12-28th August, 2008

Colorado! What a beautiful part of the world. I could write about this place, and in particular, some of its very friendly residents, for pages and pages. But I won't, not because it's boring, but because I don't have the hours and hours and hours I'd need to do it justice.

So let's start at the beginning. The year was 2001, and the Tas Uni Climbing Club was cruising along. That was until this little upstart from Colorado named Dayna Hochevar came along, and started traditions like massage conga-lines and dessert pizza that changed the face of the club.

Dayna and I have kept in touch for the last 7 years, would you believe, and man it was good to see her again. She picked us up from Denver International Airport, which is 2 hours drive from her house in Pueblo. And that was straight after she sat an exam to get into Physician's Assistant School. So she was all tired and stuff, but still she drove all that way for us. That's how cool she is.

We stayed with her in her share house, living with her sister Tracey and their landlord (and friend) Daneya. Both were super-cool and almost as untidy as us, which made all of us feel completely at home.

So what did we get up to? Well, lots of hiking, driving around, and even some climbing. It was super cool.

The first place Dayna took us was to the Garden of the Gods, which is an amazing place with an alien sandstone and conglomerate landscape. Here's a photo.

The Garden of the Gods

Reygan, Dayna's niece, top, and Dayna at the Garden of the Gods.

We did some cool bouldering in the Garden of the Gods, and also found a little garden snake which Reygan promptly picked up and started stuffing down the backs of our shirts. What fun!

Dayna's parents, John and Dianne, lived about 10 minutes drive from Dayna's. They were really nice to us and we spent many evenings there eating delicious food, playing pool, using their internet, watching the Olympics, and planning hikes. They were our adopted parents for the time we were in Colorado, and we'll love them forever. Thanks guys!

We visited this place called Bishop's Castle, which was built single-handedly by this slightly bizarre old fella, Mr Bishop. He's been working on the castle for over 40 years. It's a litigator's nightmare, with rickety steel stairwells, a dragon's head, teetering towers, and anything you could imagine that would make parents' wills crumble as they watch their 8 year-old kids tear around the place. Entry is by donation, and you also have to sign a legal waiver before you go in. What made it more dramatic was the fact that it was misty, raining, and we were 30-40m up in the air surrounded by steel, with a thunderstorm approaching.

Atop the tower of Bishop's Castle. Scary stuff.
Clockwise from left: John (Dayna's brother), Dayna, Jen, Reygan (under stairs), my feet.

Em Willcox, a fellow medlet from Utas joined us a week after we got to Colorado. Together, the three of us went for a hike up Greenhorn Peak whilst our poor hosts were all at work. It was a 2 hour drive to the start of the hike, and when we got there, we realised we'd left all the food for the day on the bench at Dayna's place. Oops. At least we had water, and I happened to have a single muesli bar in my pocket. So it was a third of a muesli bar each for lunch in our 5 hour hike. Good work team!

Me and Em on top of Greenhorn Peak. Hungry.

One morning Dayna's father John got us out of bed at 3am so we could drive 3 hours to the foot of La Plata, one of Colorado's "Fourteeners" (i.e. peaks greater than 14,000ft). This turned out to be a fantastic hike; it took us about 5 hours to get up to the top, and 3 hours back down. Here are some photos:

Contemplating my navel on a very square boulder, on the way up to La Plata.

Jen took this great photo of these two marmots. They're cute. Very cute.

John, Dayna, Em, and Jen very happy to be at the top of La Plata.

We also did other cool things like hike up Pike's Peak (another Fourteener, and then caught the cog railway down), went to Water World (how cool!), the Colorado State Fair where we saw our first Rodeo, spent many many days lost in REI (Recreational Equipment Inc - a huge outdoor store where we spent many thousands of dollars on mountaineering and climbing gear for our mountaineering course we were about to embark upon in Bolivia), oh, and we musn't forget Walmart where you can buy everything from your groceries to potting mix, drugs, bikes, and fridges.

Thanks so much to the Dayna and the Hochevar family for letting us use and abuse you, and to Daneya and Tracey for putting up with our slobishness. It was definitely one of the highlights of our trip!

London

8-12 of August, 2008

A nice easy, non-stressful plane flight (i.e. without bikes) back to London saw us breaking into Vince and Fel's house and hanging out there while they were on holidays in Paris! Well, we saw them the day we got in, and the night before we were about to leave.

I think we did nothing but watch the Olympics all day, for the whole time pretty much. Vince and Fel have a very very large TV screen, with Sky satellite TV which meant there were about 6 different Olympic channels and you could switch between each depending on which sport you liked. It was so cool.


We did manage to catch up with a few friends; here's a pic of a Hutchins Boys reunion at some pub somewhere in London...

Will Lamprill, Me, and Adam Commane at the pub.

I don't think I'd seen Adam since I left school. What a blast from the past. It was cool to catch up with the boys anyway.

Nothing much else to report in London, apart from going for a couple of runs to keep our fitness up, and just resting up.

Turkey

1-8th August, 2008

3965km, Lisbon to Istanbul... Let's call it 4000km. The ride is over!!! Our bums are thanking us already.

Turkey is an amazing country, and we had a great time there. The bus ride was alright; coming into Istanbul we realised how bloody huge the city is, and how many mosques there were!

The bus station was a monstrosity of a creation. It was just ridiculously humongous. And traffic was unbelievable; bumper to bumper for ks and ks, 5 cars 4WDing over a traffic island in an attempt to do a U-turn; all typical third world traffic. We were knackered, and over it, so we shoved our bikes in the back of a dual cab ute-taxi (we didn't even need to take our pannier bags off) and got a rip-off ride into Sultanahmet (10km away but the trip took over an hour), the touristy old-town district of Istanbul.

The blue mosque, Istanbul.

Our first task once we got to Istanbul was to get rid of our bikes. Took us a day and a half to organise, find bike boxes, clean and pack the bastards up (an epic, especially with Australian Customs to deal with), but luckily for us the lovely lady in the window above us gave us copious quantities of tea and even lunch! She was so cool.

For the princely sum of $840 USD we got both bikes, our pannier bags, and all our riding gear sent back to Oz. Phew.

After that we could relax and see the place!

Sultanahmet at night.

We spent a couple of days checking out the city of Istanbul. We visited the Blue Mosque, which was fantastic (see our FB album "Turkey" link on the right), and also the Grand Bazaar which was huge and crazy (we didn't buy much from there, just a couple of paintings of whirling dervishes i.e. dudes dancing wearing white robes). We also checked out the Spice Market which was tres cool and bought some apple tea to give to Sam, Aarti, and Arjun, and to Simon and Rosie back in England. We didn't think we'd get it through Australian Customs :( . Apple tea is sooooo good! We drank lots of it while we were in Turkey.

One evening we went for a stroll to a big tower, but the line was massive so we didn't bother going in. It would've given us great views over Sultanahmet, but instead we went to a rooftop restaurant and had a cuppa and some biscuits up there and got a view almost as good we reckon. That's where we took that photo above. We also checked out the big mall there, which was a couple of kms long, and totally crowded with mostly locals and had the usual city mally shops there.

On the Monday we took off for a 2 day tour down to Gallipoli and Troy. This was one of the best things we did. As it was the first organised tour we'd ever been on, we were a little nervous. But when the bus picked us up in the morning, it filled up with young Aussies. There was also a lovely old Kiwi couple. We hadn't heard so many Australian accents in one place at one time for ages.

Gallipoli was amazing. You know how you learn about it at school, it seems pretty bad but it's so far away. Our guide Murat was great; he was a Turk, but had a real interest in Gallipoli and knew a lot about the place. So after watching a doco about Gallipoli on the bus on the way there, Murat took us to some of the memorials and important battle sites on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

The whole experience was quite moving. Just hearing about how many people were killed for no good reason, the countless tactical blunders made by the commanding officers there, and the unusual camaraderie and respect soldiers from both sides had for their enemies, really had an effect on both of us. At every site we were taken to, the tour group was very quiet and respectful. Seeing the trenches and how close some of them were together was spooky - some of them were only 8m apart. Apparently some grenades would change hands 4-5 times before they blew up. Insane.

Lone Pine Memorial, Gallipoli.

After our tour of Gallipoli, we stayed in a hostel in Cannakale and watched the old classic movie "Gallipoli" starring Mel Gibson. I'd seen it a few times, the last time probably in Mr Cripp's Australian Studies class in grade 9. I forgot how cool it was!

The next day we were off to Troy, scene of many epic battles and home to the Trojan Horse myth. Our tour guide, Mustafa, was awesome. He was the guru of Troy, having written two books about it and is up to date with all the current theories, excavations, and news about the area. So apparently the whole Trojan Horse story may not have happened at all; it could have been a big siege tower or something, or a battering ram... who knows? There's no evidence for there actually being a horse at all. But it makes for a good story. Mustafa showed us around the walls and the excavation areas, and was entertaining and knowledgeable.

The Trojan Horse used in the Brad Pitt movie "Troy", Cannakale, near Gallipoli and Troy.

The model of the Trojan Horse at the historic site of Troy was a bit lame though... it had been rebuilt recently and looked all shiny and crappy. You can see a photo of it in our FB album. The cooler-looking Trojan Horse was the one in the town of Cannakale; this was the actual horse used in the movie "Troy" starring Brad Pitt etc.

After the tour we were bussed back to Istanbul where we got ourselves sorted out for our flight back to London the next day.

Bulgaria

18-31st of July, 2008

Bulgaria was a place of fun and relaxation for us (not that the rest of the trip wasn't...).

After slipping down the side of the massive queue of cars at the border, much to the disgust of many hot, sweaty, frustrated motorists, we cruised down the highway towards the capital, Sofia. We thought we'd give Sofia a miss and stay in a small village on the outskirts, and then head south-east to Velingrad where there was cool mountainbiking. This small village did have a hotel, but unfortunately it had closed long ago. And the directions we got to the next town were hopeless and we ended up riding around in circles during the 40 degree heat of the day.

So that being the frustrating case, we thought we'd just ride the 30km to Sofia and stay there. Luckily it was a Sunday afternoon, so traffic wasn't too heavy. We stayed there for a couple of nights and ate at a really cool vego restaurant. Twice. Such was the lack of vegetable material in the rest of Eastern Europe.

It took us 2 days to ride to Velingrad, much of that in spectacular lightning storms. The lightning was a little too close for comfort at one point, striking the ground about 20m away from us and scaring the crap out of us with a loud crack.

We stayed in a sweet 4 star hotel in Velingrad, and watched the last few days of the Tour de France... poor Cadel, bridesmaid again.

We spent a week in Velingrad and spent the first few days resting, and then we met this cool guy called Vasil who runs a mountain biking cooperative and makes trails all around the area. Got some good track notes from him and then went off exploring!

This lovely guy gave us some local brew on one of our rides. It was potent, ouzo-esque.

Sweet singletrack, on a day ride out of Velingrad.

One of the big days we did involved 100km of fun asphalt and dirt road mix, of which we spent about 50km hopelessly lost. But we eventually found the track (the tracks were generally well marked, except for some key spots that meant we were kinda stuffed if we missed them and ended up lost for hours at a time). The finish of the ride was 20km of descent down a good asphalt road (we didn't have time for the dirt road descent, because we'd spent too long lost and it was getting close to dark).

River crossing on the 100km epic day. We weren't lost at this stage, but about 300m later we took a wrong turn and added 15km to the day. Oops.

After Velingrad, we rode 100km to Plovdiv which was a nice fast ride; we managed to average 30km/h! It started as a nice fast descent down a horrendously scary windy road filled with suicidal drivers, and then a flat as a pancake plain with a slight tailwind, and baby-bum smooth asphalt.

Carpet snakes were on the menu in Plovdiv.

Bulgarian drivers are probably the worst and scariest in the world. Forget India and South America (though we haven't seen Iran or Iraq yet...), but think about this: the road toll is typically over 1000 people per year, and with a population of 7 million people, this is just ridiculous. They try and mark the "black spot" areas on the roads, and you'll see one around a blind corner and think, "ok, fair enough," but then we saw one on the highway to Plovdiv, on a dead straight section of highway with no intersections and excellent visibility. Only in Bulgaria could they have made this a black spot area. Only in Bulgaria.

From Plovdiv we thought very hard about our lives, and very hard about the drivers in Bulgaria being incompatible with our lives, and our conclusion was to preserve our lives and catch a bus to Istanbul!