Like he's riding on a motorbike...

...in the strongest winds.

So, I'm back from a pretty awesome weekend at the motogp on Phillip Island, during which I took almost a thousand photos, some of them even have bikes in them! I might post a few of them if we ever get the internet back at home, but for now, back to the trek.

The first one is the porters running past us with their 25 kilo packs.

The first camp site, Klaire looking for the dunnies. The porters would carry all the tents and stuff and have them set up by the time we got there. As well as the yellow bucket with beer and soft drink. No fridge – luckily it was so bloody cold the beer didn’t need one.

A shot of a mountain which loomed over us all day as we climbed “Dead Woman’s Pass. On the third day we started at an altitude of about 3000m. Over the next six hours we climbed up to 4200m. Tougher than I expected. Coca leaves worked a treat.

Looking back as we ascended. I can’t remember the name of the mountain.

Note Klaire, sans pack and bedroll, and sans sunny disposition, and lucky that was too. Not much oxygen, and it was cold so our heads were freezing making us dizzy.


Somewhere up there is the top.

And, just because I like mountains, a gratuitous photo of the mountain behind us again.

And we’re there. This was our group. We went with a company that is pretty small (Peru Treks) and they pay more/ treat their porters better. Our group had 16 people – some of the others had up to 40. Most were English (3 Londoners – all law students so they had a lot to chat to Klaire about – 2 from York, and 2 blokes from Northern England who talked like the Pikies from Snatch – when they’d had a few drinks I could understand less than I could Spanish). No Americans, which was good. There were other groups around, handing out little ribbons to the first one up, and woohooing like morons. One of the nicer Yanks I met turned out to be Canadian.


This was the highest point on the trek at 4,215m, and the wind came through the pass like freight train – actually, that’s a stupid analogy, freight trains are slow – more like a shinkansen. There was some scrambling of taking packs off and digging around for some warm clothes – it hadn’t felt that cold on the way up because we were stuffed – I think my sweaty shirt froze. We didn’t hang around that long as it was ridiculously cold.

That’s it, I had better do some work now.

More to come.

Chao.