Before my premature bailout from the GDMBR, Bev had booked flights to Loreto, in the southern Baja, so that we could spend Christmas and New Year together. I would need to book flights, too, now that I wouldn’t be riding down the Baja California peninsula. I wasn’t ready to commit to dates so soon after …
I left Nicolas in Tonsai and took a minibus down into Malaysia, to Penang, for a flight back to Bangkok. The reason for this rather roundabout route was to get a 30 day entry visa for Thailand, automatically available to arrivals on international flights; this would give me a visa that expired about the same …
After Nicolas had applied for a new passport at the Canadian embassy in Bangkok (which, in all fairness, was a relatively painless procedure), and faced with a wait of up to fifteen working days (the German embassy – in Laos! – issued passports to their nationals as soon as details of the last passport were …
All photos in this post are courtesy of Anton Ponomarenko. Thanks, Anton Climbed in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve, more or less resigned (comfortable even) that I wasn’t going to maintain my string of climbing 5.11 or equivalent every year since 1975. Too bad, but it had to end some time and the year …
Judging by the bus ride, the roads in Thailand are pretty good. And the driving is more restrained than that provided by Indian bus drivers. Gentle lane changes, rare horn usage. Thai buses, or at least the VIP class I was travelling in, are quite luxurious but the seats are upstairs and the bus seems …
Back on Stanage after too many years away. Beautiful weather, too. It’s magnificent to be back on my favourite crags and introducing Andrea and Nicolas to the (sometimes masochistic) pleasures of ‘God’s Rock.’ The crags are surprisingly quiet (during the week, anyways) and look pristine: nice trails, very green grass and bracken, purple heather, bleating …
… there are precious few them but today was a great example. The day started wet and windy, and we set off to look at a crag (Bosigran), to show the kids where their old man climbed way back when, before heading to tourist stuff at Land’s End. Still windy, but dry, when we parked …