Success on Mt Vinson!

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Audio blog from Mt Vinson

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The first glimpse of Punta Arenas

is of the outlying suburbs set in a landscape of treeless dunes rolling down to the grey wind swept seas. The white horses are scattered in random isolation across the straights of Magellan. The houses are thrown up in the tin-shack style of architecture. The universal marine tin-shack style, endemic in coastal communities around the world.

The approach to Punta is a long straight road, traversing the edge of the dunes. A cross wind was blowing sand over the tarmac in a yellow ground hugging mist. I had hired a taxi to take me into town. There was something bird like about the vehicle; it was black with a bright yellow top. I guessed it must be some kind of male, but which species? The yellow and black taxi rolled with the load of our expedition bags.

I am here to meet the other members of the team. Wim, Dave and Sam arrived yesterday. Doug arrived from Oklahoma today, a day late. His first pilot at Dallas couldn´t fly for family reasons. The change pilot couldn´t fly because he was drunk. American Airlines had to cancel the flight for the day, and attempt to calm down a large number of passengers. The North Americans were not happy, the Chileans were incandescent.

We won´t have that problem, our airline is operated by ALE (Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions) who have been quite superbly organised, and very relaxed. We had our briefing meeting today, they weighed our baggage to preloaded it on the aircraft. Tomorrow, if the weather is good, we board the Ilyushin 76 for the 5 hour flight to Patriot Hills in Antarctica. If the winds are in the wrong direction at Patriot Hills we could be delayed by days.

We have been planning this trip for almost a year, and in 12 hours time we could be stepping out onto the blue ice
runway. We could actually be standing on the Antarctic continent. Patriot Hills is 80 degrees south. From there we
will fly north to 78 degrees, to the Vinson Massif. This second flight will be by Twin Otter, to Vinson basecamp.
Mount Vinson is a little under 4900m. Not much higher than Mont Blanc, but with reduced atmospheric pressure, the
summit is similar to a 6000m mountain in the Himalaya.

All that is in the future. These last couple of days we have been packing and repacking, going out to eat in a town that has bland food and terrible coffee, and wandering around the town square.

There was a festival in the square today.A bandstand had been erected, in advance of the band the organisers were playing Pink Floyd very loud. On another side of the square an imprromptu band of drummers had set up a strong latin rythm. On a third side were small children on a platform singing along to a pop song by Madonna, and directed by their teacher. If you stood in just the right place you could hear all three in wonderful raucous disharmony. Interestingly the DJ at the band-stand was unconsciously sending a message to the children and their teacher, he was playing the Wall at full volume. ¨Teacher, leave those kids alone!¨

The square has large old trees and grand old classical buildings which contrast with town´s outskirts. Just two hundred metres away, down by the docks, a concrete version of a greek temple strongly recalls the the entrance to the Customs House in Dublin, James Gandon´s 1707 masterpiece. Except here, the columns, the walls, every surface shows the marks of the shuttering, and the concrete is rough and unfinished. The columns are straight, the same diameter at the base and the capital. They have no entasis. (For entasis see www.bartleby.com/65/en/entasis.html)

Behind this remarkable and bizarre edifice, on the far side of the straights of Magellan, lies the pale purple mass of Terra del Fuego where, were we able to see them, the sand dunes would undoubtedly be randomly scattered with coastal tin-shacks. That is the direct we will fly next, over Terra del Fuego. Past Ushuaia. The end of the Americas...

If we fly out first thing tomorrow the next blog will be on return from the antarctic.

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At the beginning of November we were sipping coffee at a fine and comfortable base camp under Amadablam.

We squinted in the sunshine, sipped our coffee and enjoyed the brief respite that rest days bring. I stretched out my feet. Pasang Temba was making Dal Bhat for lunch, the team were all acclimatised and passing the day reading or re-arranging their tents.

“Have you seen this?” Mike said, as he handed me an old copy of the Guardian.

“Blimey...” (Er yes, there are still a couple of us old enough to be using that kind of language)

“...Jesus..Crikey” I said (well.. at least I didn't say “knock me down with a feather”). The Guardian reported a speech George Bush had given to a group of Palestinians. He told them that God had instructed him to invade Afganistan, then Iraq and now God was telling him sort out the Palestine problem and By God he was going to. Here is the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1587077,00.html

I was reminded of that piece of news yesterday. It has been two weeks since my last blog. On the first day of December Jo and I pushed our skis up the Kandahar piste for another pre-breakfast outing. There were now tracks everywhere, a spaghetti of criss cross lines showing the perpetrators had no sense of symmetry or style; or maybe they did, in a rebellious grunge sort of way. Perhaps they wore dreadlocks and spoke in verlen (a local slang where the syllables are pronounced in reverse order: l'envers = verl'en, popular with the kids here). In any case they were not those neat parallel tracks you see in the all the posters.

The next day Jo went ice climbing at Fionnay while I flew to Inverness where it was raining. It was that wonderful soft Scottish rain that makes the trees mossy, the ground you walk on mushy and squishy, and makes the climbers retire to the pub to get really wet.

I was there to attend the the AGM of the BMG (British Mountain Guides). It was 3 December. On the same day the SNGM (Syndicat National des Guides de Montagne) had their annual meeting. They had issued, rather stylishly I thought, invitations to arrive at particular GPS reference, where the invited would find themselves attending the annual meeting. The Alpine Club had their AGM and there was a mountain medicine conference in Plas y Brenin tall on the same day. As far as I was concerned the timing could not have been better, surely a human brain can only take one of these events a year though there were some masochists at the BMG AGM who actually complained; they wanted to attend a plurality of these functions.

A week later I find myself in San Francisco. The first thing that struck me was the bicycling armed policeman. Well to be honest, he managed to swerve in time. It was entirely my own fault, wandering around the airport in a traveler's daze; it was in fact me who nearly struck him. He smiled, he welcomed me to San Francisco and let me take his photograph. Here it is. What a happy, contented man he is. We could do with a few of those in London.

[happy contented Policeman]

Yesterday I was free for the day, and had thought of driving over to Tahoe to sample the snow and maybe bump into a couple of the other bloggers, but in the end a slight hangover and the thought of spending another seven hours traveling when traveling is all I seem to have done this last fortnight made the prospect unappealing. Moreover Adam, who I have been staying with, was not too keen because he had a hard week at work in the law firm. Here the lawyers don't seem to be required to wear suits. This makes it hard for them to be recognized, and often they look just like normal people. Adam has a copy of a climbing guide book to the bay area, which he keeps by the loo to while away the hours. Very wise. Looking at the guide book over our breakfast coffee we decided to go bouldering on those beautiful beaches under Muir wood. It was the right choice, Stinson Beach faces west and though there was a chilling sea breeze, the rocks were still warm to touch. There were other people wandering about in distant groups. A Chinese family were collecting mussels from the tidal boulders. A couple of brave souls surfing the short breaks in waist deep water.

We met another lawyer in disguise, Mark, who pointed us at some quite delightful problems. Some of the micro routes had slap finishes, some needed pulling on sea scooped pockets lined with small barnacles, there was one that was easier if you used a family of black mussels as a swift foot hook. And then we found the remains of the beached whale. It was maybe fifty feet long and had been there for a while, providing a banquet for the Western Gulls. The sun began to set. The sky turned a salmon pink, underlit by the sinking sun.

[the Whale carcass]

[hard to believe this is not Asia]

I have spent most of the last few days in the Geary Street area of the town, and at times it is hard to believe this is the USA. The shops have Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese written all over them. And the food here is extraordinary. Dim Sum, Sushi, Pilmeni, Kimchi, Burritos. Everything. You would have to be very tired of food not to want to eat your pants off here. The week was full of discoveries and surprises for me. But perhaps the the most astonishing this was the Onion. Not the vegetable, but a local newspaper.

December 7, 2005. WASHINGTON, DC—Telephone logs recorded by the National Security Agency and obtained by Congress as part of an ongoing investigation suggest that the vice president may have used the Oval Office intercom system to address President Bush at crucial moments, giving categorical directives in a voice the president believed to be that of God.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43189

As a foreigner I cannot tell whether it is to be taken seriously or whether it should be enjoyed with a very large pinch of salt; whether the story should make you roar with laughter or what. The Guardian is a serious paper, I would have to assume the Onion is not. But if it were serious, all I could say about this is ...Crikey...blimey...and well... that really does explain the Guardian article; it would be hard for me to believe that the God of the Christians could ever have given the President those particular instructions. It must have been someone else.

[bouldering on Stinson Beach]

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