Where in the world is John Henzell?

You can read my blog about life in Abu Dhabi…

Snake Canyon via ferrata, Oman
Nothing quite brings home just how flat Abu Dhabi is than finding yourself on the Snake Canyon via ferrata in Oman.

Just a few hours after leaving the unrelenting pancakedness on UAE capital on the Arabian Gulf, you can be hanging from a thin wire cable 100m up a vertical canyon wall.

What this means in practice is that while the left side of your brain is following its traditionally analytical and rational role by assessing that the cable is overengineered and has been tested by hundreds of previous adventurers, the intuitive and emotional right side of the brain is screaming OHMYGODIAMABOUTTODIE. Read more.

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

“See this!” the English woman said, turning to show where the back of her shorts bore a muddy and obviously simian handprint. “We got attacked by the monkeys.”

It’s not every day that a complete stranger shows me their rear end, but reaching the summit of Emei Shan in southern China meant we had all run the gauntlet of marauding monkeys and it seemed familiarity grew from experiencing this fellowship of primate aggression. 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.