For pictures from Mendoza, click here. Quick final post. I´ve got 20 minutes to wrap up this blog, pick up my laundry at the Bubbles Lavados up the street, and meet the group for supper, and a briefing on tomorrow´s activities. We arrived early in the morning to this beautiful city. Jody and I opted out of any city tours or any responsibilities. Instead, I got some laundry together, and explored the city on my own. Local busses, trolleys, and just plain locals in general. I´m really enjoying practicing communicating down here. I ended up getting a private tour of the city hall by a security guard, who took me to the roof of the building for some very impressive views and chit-chat, even though we were both out of our language comfort zones. It was quite cool. I then went to a very large park honoring San Martin, the man largely responsible for liberating Argentina. There is a mountain-top monument to this, the greatest of National heros. The location is known as Cerro Saint Gloria. It was a nice view, and nice moment. Then, local busses back here, and now I´m writing you. It was a bit funny, because a lot of the tour group opted to take a bus tour of the city, paying a bit of coin for it. My personal city tour, using local busses and my own two feet, was almost the same thing, but cost me 3.5 pesos, instead of 25+ pesos paid by the rest of the group. Of course, I didn’t go quite as far, but I still saw most of the main sights, and even crossed paths with them twice! Well, gotta go. Just realized it´s October 31st. Hope everyone´s having a spooky night, and I guess we´ll see you in less than a week now. Till then, enjoy the week!
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Hello dear friends from around the world. When you last checked in with ActiveSteve, I had managed to successfully avoid creating a full-fledged international incident, but only barely. I can happily report that the next few posts will likely not contain anything quite as nail-biting, but will nonetheless be interesting posts about my activities over the last several days of our time in Saudi Arabia. The next chapter of our travels includes continuing our progress westward towards the ocean port of Jeddah , which also happens to be the city nearest to Mecca, that mysterious, mystical place completely forbidden to visitation by non-Muslims. No worries, I didn’t use my rapidly-growing beard as a disguise to penetrate the security there, as that would be sheer madness. The flight from Al-Ula was quick, efficient, and non-eventful. It was a pretty small plane, and surprisingly, we didn’t even get served a meal, which was quite a surprise to Patrick, who was of the belief that regardless of the flight duration in Saudi, you always ate ;-). Anywho, before reading on, check out the pictures from Jeddah that we took, then immerse yourself in my thoughts on this big seaside city.
27/01/08
Good day to you all! Although I’m pretty bagged at the moment, I think I’ll try to throw together my blog post right away, as I don’t think I’ll be any more awake tomorrow after a long day in the saddle with some big climbs to tackle. Today was a nice change for me. I spent the entire day paddling a kayak in the Abel Tasman National Park. And I do mean all day. I was up at 6am, and didn’t get back here until 7pm, just in time to go buy some delicious Chinese food for supper, and get to work on preparations for leaving Nelson after spending 3 nights here! I was blessed with yet another great day of weather here, although I fear that will soon grind to a halt by the look of both the sky and the forecast I just saw on the TV in the lounge here. Sounds like only light rain here though, not full-on showers as I was worried about. Anyway, read on for my post, and check out my map. The stats on it are just from the paddling and hiking, not the bus trip there and back.
Hello again friends. As promised, I’ve split summit day into the climb to the top and the climb back down in the interests of making each post manageable. There was still far too much to relate about my New Year’s eve after the summit, that you are now faced with needing to read a second post in one sitting (depending on your addiction to all things ActiveSteve :-). Of course, the map and pictures are the same as last time, so no need to review those unless you want to. This part of the story now takes you from the summit at Uhuru peak (way up there at 5,896m) down to Horombo Camp, situated faaaarrrr below at 3,700m. Yup, that’s right we’d be descending over 2.1km in one hike! Read on to learn more about that.
16/02/08 to 18/02/08
Wow! Well, I’m back from another great weekend of tramping in the wilds of New Zealand. This time, I was tackling the Rees-Dart Track, as well as tacking on a full-day hike to the Cascade Saddle and back. Normally, they rate this as a 4-5 day tramp, but I was doing the whole thing including the Saddle side trip in 3 days. Perhaps that’ll give you an idea of why I took a day off when I got back. The third day was definitely killer, and took me 9 grueling hours of hiking to finish off. However, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, and I’m aiming to fill you all in on at least some of the details of those three glorious days. Read on for the details, and check out the maps (day 1, day 2, day 3) and the pictures (day 1, day 2, day 3). The day 3 map is highly abbreviated, as the batteries were dead fairly early that day. Oh well.




