And where in the world is John Henzell?
I’m now back in the Sandpit after an 18 month break which involved a 4500km hike down the Rockies, a quick tour through New Zealand and then a long stay in user-unfriendly Australia, interspersed with breaks to Britain for the wedding of Charlie and Nina, Colorado to ski, Borneo to climb, the Philippines to dive, Laos to chill, Cambodia to sweat and Vietnam to eat.
Or you can read about my latest trip into the mountains…
“We’re not hiking today,” Kombucha said “We have a short stroll into town for breakfast and then we have an even shorter stroll down the road to the border.”
And it’s true. Four and a half months and about 4500km since leaving Canada, the Mexican border is about five miles away as the crow flies. Or, I suppose, as the illegal immigrant runs. We have a dog-leg route via Columbus which adds a couple of miles onto that but by any calculation, we’re going to be done before lunch.
Done. Say if often enough and eventually it’ll become real… 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