I missed the Doug Scott lecture in Chamonix last week, because I was lecturing in Mumbai. There must be some kind of hypothesis about that sort of thing; any specialist conference will generate an equal and opposite second conference in a time and place inaccessible to those at the first conference.

It was two months ago that in a moment of utter weakness I had agreed to give two lectures for the Himalayan Club. (www.himalayanclub.com/ab_history.htm). It all seemed so far away at the time, but as the weeks passed by in Antarctica then in les Houches the deadline for the talks loomed larger and larger. What would the Indian audience be like? Would they be stern and serious? Would they look on un-amused? Would they be awake? What on earth was I thinking when I agreed? I must have been drinking again. I really have to look into stopping that, it is getting me into all sorts of trouble.

It was all the fault of one Harish Kapadia. Harish has been at the centre of the Indian mountaineering for decades, and probably has more first hand knowledge of the Indian Himalayas than any other living creature. He must have accumulated years of trekking and expedition travel. It is extraordinary that he finds time to fit in his other passions; cricket and eating. The HC lectures were taking place while India was playing Pakistan and even more importantly, and by the same law of physics that governs conference calendars, Bombay (PC nomenclature has not reached the cricket world yet) were losing to UP (Uttar Pradesh). The worst thing was the three best Bombay players were playing the international game. That was the trouble with being a supporter of the best cricket side in India. The national team keeps stealing your best players, then you drop down the league table. Personally I rather like that; it is a bit like a very natural handicap system. Harish doesn't agree.

Harish took me to lunch between lectures in the very civilized Indian Cricket Club stadium where, bizarrely, Holland were playing an Indian third (fourth?) eleven. I looked long and hard, but none of the players appeared to look very Dutch. Harish explained "that is because they are all Indian immigrants." I picked at my yellow Biriani, sipped at the Kingfisher beer, and nodded.

My second lecture was meant to be the Siesta Slot; the after lunch re-starter; the lecture slot where you look down on the front row slumped back in their chairs, snoring in concert. Harish Kapadia said the main job of the Siesta Slot speaker is not to be too loud or produce any sudden noise. It can affect the digestion.

Early the next morning we had yoga. From the apartment balcony I watched the thin milky light of dawn flooded the bay of Bombay. A flock of urban crows wheeled in the sky. A fishing boat bobbed in the water, its motor stuttering into life. The rising tide of traffic began to fill the streets of the city.

The streets of Mumbai are scattered with colonial mansions, gently decaying, their broken entrance gates and balconies hanging loose. They are waiting to be bulldozed and replaced by apartment blocks. The last British influence, falling under the new Indian self confidence. This is the worlds second fastest growing economy.

After the conference there was rock climbing in the Western Ghats, where the village farmers are poor and water is carried home on head pots. Even there, the cell phones worked. The road side stalls sold sweet tea and Batata Wara (literally a "potato round-thing"). I had expected to find huge loose cliffs in the Ghats, and there were some of those too, but Pampiya and Kai took me to a basalt pinnacle called Dukes Nose, which had a five pitch bolted climb which I would grade at French 6b. And then down to the "Plus" valley where there were a collection of short bolted climbs up to 7a. I was surprised to say the least. It was just like home. The rock feels like natural high friction limestone. It is in fact basalt: the Ghats mark the edge of the Deccan Plateau; continental lava traps laid down 65 million years ago (perhaps) causing the mass extinction which terminated the cretaceous period. Deccan comes from the Sanscrit word for South, and even in January you have to climb on the shaded north faces.

The next day I left India at 2 am local time. By 2 pm CET I was back on the skis in les Houches. The day finished in my local cafe with a small but powerful expresso and a quick call to my bank in London. I was answered by a pleasant voice from the Mumbai call centre. There is something going on here that I just cannot put my finger on; maybe it because I am just too old. There are times when I just do not understand how our world works..

Posted by Victor Saunders at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (204) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week was one of those rather interesting weeks.

The snow was good, old creamy powder in the trees and north facing slopes, almost transformed on the south. The best snow was lying below 3000m, higher up it had been blown by strong winds. Meanwhile the weather was nearly perfect, cold and crisp every morning.

Great streaks of ice had appeared in some places, while the long cold spell had prevented the usual cascades forming elsewhere. We climbed two of the best long easy ice routes in the region, skied off piste at le Tour, climbed up to the Breche du Berarde for a wonderful descent to le Buet in knee deep powder, and finished up the week with a traverse from the Aigille du Midi to Helbronner on skis to dine in Italy before descending the Vallee Blanche under moonlight.

There were three of us, Mark, Jim and myself. Jim, a sometime design design student who is a now, well.... a kind of chicken farmer; see wwww.omlet.co.uk and prepare to be pleasantly surprised. Mark is a London based medic, planning to finish up in oncology. By one of those wierd coincidences which make the world seem so very small, Mark had climbed with Wim (see Vinson)on the Petite Verte.

The VB was a bit more delicate than normal, with big open crevasses in the region of the Requin. We had been joined for the descent by the usual suspects; one each from Argentina, Sweden, Spain, USA, and England. Sharing a celebratory beer in the crowded Chambre Neuf, James demonstrated his magic tricks. These are a collection of ludicrous mimes with a distinct nod in the direction of Tommy Cooper. The Anglo-Scottish audience was creased up with laughter, the Americans and continentals looked on blankly. Eventually someone said “English humour” as a way of explaining the strange exhibition. All in all, a good week.

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It was three days before we could fly into Patriot Hills.

The wait was excruciating, the Ilyushin had been loaded up and was waiting on the strip. Three times a day, sometimes four, we returned to our pad, the Hotel Condor del Plata, named after a famous Patagonian biplane. The hotel was decorated with photos of the pilots in jodhpurs, riding boots and leather flying jackets. Ominously for us, there were also pictures of the heroic last flight into a Patagonian fjord, the wingtips poking out of the water. The Hotel is owned by Nicholas Alvares, a happy and jovial lawyer whose English wife considers the Patagonian climate gentler than that at home. There really is no pleasing some people. On our first night here my old friend David Hamilton returned from a successful trip to Vinson, having suffered a twelve day delay in getting in and five day storm while there. He was almost a month late returning home. By comparison our trip was exceedingly smooth.

After all the waiting, things had suddenly began to happen without time to think. We were given half-an-hour´s notice to dress in Polar clothing before being shuttled off to the airport and onto our waiting transport.

The inside of the beautifully sculpted Ilyushin was just a cargo hold, with a large kitchen clock at one end set, confusingly, to Dubai time. The flight engineer was also the attendant, or at least I guess he was because when the engines started up, and we could no longer hear, he began to wave his arms about and point to the one exit door, then held up something a bit like an oxygen mask and life vest. Either he was doing the emergency exit thing or a Fat Boy Slim impression. With the noise it was not obvious which. Talking to the man I discovered he was from Archangel and the pilot from Moscow (as was the plane I suppose). But the clock did not refer to the Russian time zones. Nor did it refer to Zulu (Greenwhich) Time. Punta and Patriot both operated on Chile time. In fact, no amount of interrogation ever revealed why the aircraft flew on the time zone of a small middle eastern kingdom.

The flight to Patriot Hills was just over four hours, at three and a half hours we were flying past latitude 78 degrees, and could see the Vinson Massif on our right horizon. At Patriot, the runway really was just blue ice, as if a large lake had frozen over. I could hardly imagine the bravery of the first pilot to risk landing a jet here.

When we eventually slowed to a halt, the rear loading doors opened to let in a blinding flood of white light. When our eyes had adjusted, we gingerly stepped out onto the sheet ice. The first person I met shook me by the hand and hugged me, which was a bit of a shock at first first, and even more of a shock on realization it was my old house mate, Steve Jones. We had not seen each other for fifteen years. ALE (see previous blog) fed us in a polar hut, we set up our tents for the a few hours and waited for the weather at Vinson basecamp to become right for the Twin Otters.

ALE not only organizes the flight to Vinson and the Pole, but also seeks to minimize our impact on the environment. All solid waste, including feces is removed from Antarctica and flown back to South America. At Vinson base camp and at Patriot Hills ALE provide toilet facilities for this, while on the mountain we all carried so called ¨wag bags¨ which flew home with us (gently thawing) on the return flight.

The next day (remembering that in the polar summer there is no night) the Twin Otters flew the expedition teams out to Vinson base camp. There was a Russian team, a German team, and American, a small team with ALE, a pair of Belgians and us. About 28 people in all. By Christmas Eve all the teams had established and occupied Camp One. In previous years the strategy on Vinson had been to use three camps above base. Now the pattern seems to be two. Boxing day was spent ferrying food and fuel to the high camp between Mount Shin and Vinson. This gave us the opportunity to acclimatize, and also served as a useful reminder that when the wind blows the arctic can be truly vicious. All the goggles froze over, and fingers inside down mitts chilled dangerously.

The next day we woke at midday (recall once more, there was no night) cached our sleds tying them down against the wind, filled the rucksacks then strapped on tents, marker wands, shovels and snow saws, and very slowly made our way up the head wall below the high camp. On arrival we dug out tent platforms and built snow walls to the shed the wind.

The next day was used as a rest day by half the expedition teams but we chose to seize the period of good weather for a two-hour excursion. After the two hours had elapsed it became clear the weather was not as bad on the mountain as it appeared to be in the high camp. We pushed on. The total distance from the camp to the summit is around eleven and a half kilometers, the height gain some twelve hundred metres. It was to take us seven hours to reach the top, in patches of good vizibility with an icy wind blowing from the east. We had not had a rest day, the team was tired. The two medics, Doug and Dave repeated a strange little mantra ¨Pain is just weakness leaving the body¨ while Wim, our project managing Belgian countered with ¨The only problem is that the weakness just grows right back¨. Samantha maintained a wise silence.

The summit ridge of Vinson is what turns it from a walk (in wild surroundings) into a climb. This is what makes the outing enjoyable; passing little snow pyramids and rock outcrops of a peculiar texture. The rocks have the same rippled pattern waves leave on sandy beaches. We reached the summit at 18:00hrs on 28 December 2005.

It took just three hours to stagger down to the high camp, and five hours the next day to return to Vinson base, pulling our sleds and looking forward to the Salmon burgers we had cached there.

By 08:00hrs on 30 December we were back in Punta Arenas in time to catch our rest day before the fireworks and celebrations as the new year rolled across the lines of longitude.

Posted by Victor Saunders at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)