Where in the world is John Henzell?

Where am I? Well, it depends when you ask.

I’ve now finished working at The National in Abu Dhabi — which proved to be a story in itself — and I’m in the midst of a trip through the ’stans, starting in Kazakhstan and going through Kyrgyzstan to Tajikistan and even Afghanistan. I was then going to go to Iran to climb the highest peak in the Middle East, a 5600m volcano, but, well, you can read about what happened to that plan here and why I ended up in Jordan instead.

Then after a few days back in the Dhabs, I flew to New York to hike the Continental Divide Trail, following the Rockies from Canada to Mexico. I’ll be updating my progress on that through this trail journal here rather than through this blog.

Or you can read about my latest trip into the mountains…

“Despite our best efforts at denial, we had to accept that the aircon season had finally arrived in Abu Dhabi.

But that just meant it was the right time to head to the mountains, so a group that eventually numbered 17 people headed to Oman for a canyoning and via ferrata weekend. Read more

Or you can read about my sea to summit series…

“Sea to summit… Nice and simple concept, isn’t it? So I thought when I decided to climb Mont Blanc from the Mediterranean back in 1995 as my final fling in the European Alps before moving to the smaller but wilder hills of New Zealand.  The theory was it would be a one-off soft trip but it didn’t feel all that soft when I reached the summit in the middle of a storm after 29 days and 28,000m of cumulative ascent.

It wasn’t a one-off either because climbing mountains from the sea became the dominant theme for my excursions into the hills for more than the next decade as I tackled Aconcagua, Aoraki-Mount Cook, Kosciuszko, the three peaks of Britain, Shag Rock in Christchurch, Observation Hill in Antarctica and Fuji in Japan.

Then it morphed into something different when I climbed seven of the highest or most significant peaks of the Pyrenees on the way from hiking from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Then I thru-hiked from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail, completed a human-powered crossing of New Zealand’s South Island, and became a pilgrim on the Shikoku henro trail in Japan, following in the footsteps of the monk who introduced esoteric Buddhism in the 8th Century.” Read more.

Or view some of my dabbling in photography

“In Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds in Antarctica, after Sir Ed had railed against Britain’s failure to pull its weight to save the huts of the heroic age, I swapped my notebook for my camera to take a photo of him sitting in the light of a window. But when I raised my camera on that bleak January afternoon, his eyes met mine and suddenly narrowed, his jaw firmed and any frailty that had previously been apparent disappeared in an instant. The Hillary mana was palpably present. The frail old man from the jet seemed to have nothing in common with the man now sitting in front of me.” Read more

Or you can just read about the wittering and pontificating that passes for a career in journalism

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 5:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.