Night Ride

I had a really busy day at work today, started work at 7:00 and finished at 19:30. With travel time included, 15 hours in total. I was fairly disappointed to have missed my weekly indoor rock climbing session at Hardrock.

Instead of watching TV as planned, I arrived home at 20:30 and decided to put on my helmet, brought out the camera and tripod and went for a night ride around home. I have discovered that riding at night is very different from doing it in the day. There's hardly anyone around on the bike trails except for one or two people walking their dogs. Yet, because of the darkness, it is impossible to ride fast as visibility is nowhere as good as it is during the day. Every corner and every stretch of path without street lights require the most careful and delicate manoeuvring. On the other hand, the other senses are greatly heightened: I can smell the freshly mowed lawn (and what my friendly neighbours are having for dinner!), hear the water running down the tiny streams and feel the most gentle of breeze in the air.

I took the above photograph on the Belford Street Bridge over the Eastern Freeway. 6s exposure.

Cycling - Making it Interesting

It has been nearly two months since I started cycling regularly to improve my fitness. Lately, I haven't been able to do much hiking due to the bushfires, the extreme temperatures in Victoria and just too many things to ponder. In fact, I haven't hiked since my trip to New Zealand late last year.

So cycling has become the next activity on the list. I've set myself a very modest target of roughly 50-60km a week which I have been able to meet and exceed every week. I still don't understand how my friends can ride 210km in one day around the Bay! I keep my riding interesting by listening to classical music, taking rest stops and doing photography as well as geocaching. I personally think there's nothing more relaxing than riding with the breeze, taking in the different fragrances of the surrounding gardens, saying hello to the fellow users of the bike trails (4 legged ones included!) and listening to my favourite tunes. Reminds me of the tragically beautiful scene in the movie City of Angels when Meg Ryan's character was riding her bike, eyes closed, hands off the handlebars... (and no, I don't intend to repeat the next bit in the movie!) If you regularly use the exercise bike in a gym, you don't know what you're missing!

The dream of Alpamayo is still alive. Someday, someday when I'm ready.

Dangerous Dogs

I have been working in a construction site away from Head Office in Melbourne CBD for the last few days. It's located in a very isolated place in the industrial Western suburbs of Melbourne. The site compound has a number of site huts which are basically container styled temporary offices. The first thing I noticed after arriving here was that the compound is supposed to be guarded by this "dangerous dog" at night. During the day, this poor lonely, aging dog stays in his kennel, bored and nobody to play with being locked up in a small wired enclosure. I tried to get him to come out of its kennel and come towards me at the fence a few times. Every time I walked past to visit the toilets, kitchen or out for lunch, I would go near his kennel ,say hello to him and practise my canine language with him behind the fence. Conversation (only one way!) revolved around food, the weather, politics, etc. Ever so slowly, each time he came out closer and closer towards me, wondering what this strange human was crapping on about before turning back and hiding. He must have figured lunatics don't have intentions on stealing anything! Yesterday I threw a ball over the fence but he wasn't interested either. I guess he must have been a swimmer in its younger days!



But today, after three more visits, he finally came all the way to where I was standing behind the fence. One of my colleagues held her breath and looked in sheer horror as I reached through the wire fence and pat him on the head. She was convinced that I won't be typing next week with one of my hands missing. I'm not sure why but I felt like I've achieved something today. I waved goodbye to him before I left and hoped that he will enjoy his evening walks with the guard...

I reckon it was a good training exercise to help deal with dogs on my future trip overseas. *chuckle* I remember before departing for Nepal in 2006, the doctor gave me vaccinations for polio, Hepatitis A&B, typhoid and tetanus. I asked him for rabies vaccination as well which but he simply said, "Do yourself a favour: Stay well away from dogs and monkeys and save yourself $200."

I forgot everything he said once I got there. They were a lot of dogs (some strays ) in Kathmandu and on the trail. They weren't your purebred, clean, well looked after dogs back home. Rather, most of the ones I encountered were filthy, flea infested, smelly and wild. But for me, it is simply too hard not to pat every single dog I come across. It would be like walking past a friend without saying hello. So I was the only silly trekker running around patting dogs after all the western tourists gave them all a wide berth. I was also silly enough to pat monkeys, cats, ponies and yaks! LOL!! Hopefully the first dog that gets me won't be from my beloved Dobermann breed...

0.5km/h short

Today' s 50km training ride was a long-ish trip by my crappy standards. Unlike my friends who can easily ride 100km within the same time, this is probably the furthest I can manage at this stage. The ride was from Kew to Ringwood (return) along the Eastern Freeway and Eastlink Bike Trails.














The max speed recorded for today's training session summarised my only disappointment. I've missed 50km/h by just 0.5km/h!!!! I was sprinting downhill on high gear, peddling as quickly as I could while keeping a constant watch for the path in front of me. 30, 40, 45, 46, 48, 49....just a bit more..... Crap! Oh well, maybe next time. :)
Looking at the bike trails on Google Earth, the next target will be from Melbourne CBD to Frankston (one way) via the Yarra, Eastern Freeway and Eastlink Trails. Not fit enough to do it yet but hopefully will be able to do it in a month.

Lindt Dark Chocolate with 85% cocoa and half strength Gatorade are the essential fuel for my long bike rides or difficult hiking trips. I don't normally eat chocolate (not really a dessert person) except when I need to "re-fuel" on hikes or rides. It's the fastest and most concentrated form of energy that I know of. Most of my friends hate the bitter taste of 85% but I like it because it's not too sweet. I still can't find the 99% version though.... Let me know if you know where to get it.

10-Day Mountaineering Course in New Zealand

In December 2008, I joined a commercial mountaineering instruction course in New Zealand, organised by a Wanaka based adventure company. (and Yes – without doing advertising for them, it is the one that lead the ill-fated 1996 Everest Expedition featured in the best selling book – “Into Thin Air”) Let me start by saying I have got absolutely no ambition to climb Everest or the like. However, my goal is to do a few much easier peaks with a guide or a group of friends experienced in mountaineering once I acquired the necessary skills. I enjoy landscape photography and I hope one day I can get on top of a 5000-6000m peak, taking panoramic photos of snow-capped mountains above the clouds as the morning sun slowly rises above the horizon.

We had five students and two guides on the course, all students are from Australia. I have prepared the shortened form of my trip diary to give you a taste of what it was like. You can find more photos taken on the trip on my pbase gallery here.

Day 1 and 2: Rain Rain Rain!

We spent two days in the tiny town of Fox Glacier while waiting for the notorious weather in the West Coast to clear up. The area gets 7 metres of rain per year and by the end of Day 2 I was wondering if we should just build a pipe from Melbourne to Fox Glacier instead of the Desalination Plant in Wonthaggi. More reliable, less impact on the environment and possibly cheaper! We learned a bit of theory, different knots, rope-work and even did some Prusik-ing up a rope indoors in the community hall! It felt strange trying to imagine the roof of the community hall were the lip of this huge crevasse I desperately need to get to…

Day 3: Lift Off



The weather window finally opened early in the morning. It was a truly amazing experience sitting in a chopper for the first time, flying over the majestic Fox Glacier, catching glimpses of Mt Cook and Mt Tasman, before landing on a tiny icy ledge just above Centennial Hut. Moved all provisions inside and learned how to build different snow anchors for the rest of the day. It was a lot of fun learning the different ways of self-arresting. (Using an ice axe to halt a slide down an icy slope) The hardest technique to master was to dive head first, face up, down a steep icy slope and try to self-arrest to halt the slide. It was hard to concentrate on where to plant the axe when I all I could see was the sky above as I was zooming down the hill at high speed on my back. Practised a number of times but the best I could manage was to slow the fall, not arresting it. Well, hopefully I won’t be falling face up, head down first during any stage of this course!

We had to melt snow/ice for dinner as the water tank was broken by a climber last week who decided the easiest way to loosen the ice in the tank was to kick the tank with his crampons on… Sigh…

Day 4: Trapped indoors



The wind speed exceeded 100km/h and it rained/hailed/snowed heavily for 24 hours non-stop. If you want to know how bad this was: consider these two facts: (1) Nobody got out of the hut to the toilet hut which was a mere 5 metres away for fear of being ripped off the mountain by the ferocious storm. We used the super high-tech Bucket Method™ instead. (2) I felt the wall of the hut moving during the night, the steel frame gently swaying with the wind.

Just after I convinced myself there was nothing to worry about, the guides informed me another hut nearby was blown away a few years ago in a similar storm, along with all 4 or 5 occupants down the sheer cliff …

Day 5: Fantastic day of sunshine



Learned crevasse rescue, more anchoring and rope-work. The views were absolutely stunning, well worth the price of the course alone. I kept re-applying sun-screen every hour to combat the blazing sun reflected off all the snow around me. Believe me, I felt just as warm during the 43° heat-wave in Melbourne as the kind of heat/sun I experienced in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Unfortunately I only brought along 2L of water for the outing and I paid dearly for it near the end of the exercise as I was very dehydrated and slightly dizzy by the time I returned back to Centennial Hut. The worst thing was having to wait for the snow to melt to get a drink!

Day 6: The Walk-out/Fly-Out day


With the weather window closing on Day 7, we had to get back down to the village in order to avoid being trapped for days up the mountain. Quite often, there are people who get stuck high up in the mountain huts for more than a week because they missed their opportunity to get out while the weather window was open. We walked along Fox Glacier to get to Chancellor Hut for our chopper ride, making full use of our newly learned glacier travel technique. We climbed our first New Zealand Peak - Von Barlow after making a couple of pitches under supervision. We even practised our summit poses on top!

It was another blazing hot day in the Southern Alps. The snow was softening at an alarming rate, making glacier travel more dangerous as the snow bridges got weaker and weaker. Near the end of the day, I punched straight through a severely weakened snow-bridge across a crevasse. There is nothing more terrifying than seeing the snow crumpled and a bottomless crevasse appear right in front of my eyes! I must have done something right as the chest harness I tied in the morning held! Understandably, my guide didn’t want me to practise my Prusik-ing skills to get out while he was on the other end of the rope attached to a novice climber dangling above a crevasse. I was dragged out instead…

We got to see the beautiful Fox Glacier one more time as we flew back on a helicopter from Chancellor Hut.

Day 7: Franz Josef Glacier



We visited the nearby Franz Josef Glacier to learn ice-climbing. Once the ropes were set up, we were like the circus monkeys performing tricks for the hundreds of tourists visiting the Glacier as they stopped, watched and photographed us playing around. I must say the ice-climbing session was one of the highlights of the trip.

Day 8: Another rainy day in South Island

Travel Day from West Coast back to base in Wanaka. Boring apart from travelling on all those one-lane bridges on the 100km/h highway, wondering if the NZ traffic engineers got all the sight distances correctly worked out for vehicles coming from the other end…

Day 9 & 10 Rock Climbing

We practised our outdoor rock climbing skills, which included setting up rock anchors and trying to climb on rock wearing rigid mountaineering boots. We learned a bit of abseiling as well near the end. All the students got issued with certificates on the last day. A couple of them climbed Mt Cook a week later with the guides!

After the course - Coming to terms with the dangers of mountaineering

Around the time I was in New Zealand, four people died in three separate accidents visiting similar places I went to during the course. Even though I won’t be doing anything extreme like climbing Mt Cook without a guide, these events really highlighted the dangers that are associated with the sport.

When we were staying at Centennial Hut, two Japanese climbers were attempting the nearby Mt Cook. On the day we were trapped in the hut by the 100km/h+ raging wind, they were struggling to survive in their snow cave on Mt Cook. Details of what happened are still sketchy and might never be known. Their snow cave was hastily excavated with a ball point pen as hell descended fast upon them. Rescuers could not get to them for days due to the appalling weather. Somehow the rescuers managed to drop a pack of supplies & radio 2m away from their tent and yet the climbers could not hear or see the pack in the ferocious weather. The Japanese guide died a couple of days later due to prolonged exposure. The client was rescued relatively unharmed, suffering hypothermia. It was a real shock when we got out and read it on the newspaper.

Three other Australians died in Mt Cook and Fox Glacier within a couple of weeks later.

Cycling Training Saturday 31 Jan 09

The welcoming cool change finally came on Saturday after three successive days of over 40 degrees in Melbourne. It was a milder 24 degrees at 6pm so I decided to ride on the Eastern Freeway Bike Trail from Chandler Highway all the way to Springvale Road. The trip there took 65 minutes and I had a small break at Springvale Road. The GPS was telling me the sun will be setting soon so I raced all the way back home, shaving 5 minutes off the trip! The total distance for the day was 40km, top speed 48.5km/h. I felt a lot stronger than last week doing the same trip. Hopefully this is a sign that I'm improving my fitness!