Here’s some pictures of us doing jumps with the Matterhorn in the background.  Sorry about the annoying Fotofast © watermark.  We couldn’t get the pictures digitally and so they had to be scraped from a website.

Izzy first showing us all how to do it right.

Hannah

Trish

Ewan

The food was um germanic.  Erhardt is certainly a “master of german cuisine” (with all the baggage that comes with that title).  The wines were generally good and certainly copious.  The desert wine was not good but by that point we were so busy laughing that we really didn’t care.  Erhardt redeemed himself by bringing his “Fennel Tea”.  This was rocket fuel.  We found out later that it’s Bacardi 151 with some fennel seeds in it.  For those of you who don’t know, Bacardi 151 is 75% proof alcohol and it’s also the only drink that the manufacturer fits a “flame retarder” to  the bottle. 

Finally we retired outside so I could have a cigarette.   No one else was smoking.  Just me.  We put a dent in a bottle of Glenmorangie which I had been carrying around and drank and laughed under the stars.  How fun it was.

The following morning was a bit less fun.  You’d think that a group of successful, intelligent men who had combined experience of over 200 years on this planet could work out that truly excessive drinking and energetic sports don’t really mix.  We’d started out with the intention of doing the Mt Washington part of the route.  This involved a fair bit of climbing and a fair bit of apprehension from the team.  I got a bit confused since we were actually going up Mt Everett to get to Mount Washington which isn’t actually a mountain but is a little tiny town.  Mt Everett is the highest mountain in the Taconic Mountains.  Or something.  However, it’s a long and gruelling climb especially with a head ache and (in my case) a rather sore knee.  We made it and then did the nice descent to the Bash Bish Falls.  There’s a great view over the falls into Connecticut.   It was also an opportunity for us to laugh at JJ’s sunglasses.  They’re Oakley "Thump glasses.  Sunglasses with an MP3 player built in.  Sunglasses with an USB port.  Sunglasses so stupid that they’re already being offered at half price on eBay.  The sound quality is reasonable but as Samuel Johnson said about women preaching “it’s like a dog walking on its hind legs. It’s not done well but one is surprised to discover it done at all.”. 

Then we did a few long rolling roads and a quite a long way on the train tracks which have been converted into bike paths.  It’s a great idea.  Trains can’t do very steep hills so the grades are easy and there’s no traffic.  However, there are some other cyclists which one has to be careful about.  JJ ran a 6 year old cyclist off the road but it was only fair because he wasn’t going very fast and his bike didn’t have a carbon frame.  I mean, what does the kid expect?

Ultimately we ended up in Kent which is a small CT town with a great Pizza place where we ate Pizza and drank beer and reviewed the day.

Now I’m in the Virgin Lounge at JFK thinking back over the trip.  There are lots of observations I guess:  cycling in the US (or at least where we were) is good.  The roads are generally quiet and the drivers are generally very careful passing cyclists.  Most of the roads we cycled on were well paved and well signed.  People in general are very friendly as usual.  The foliage at this time of the year is stunningly beautiful.   The food portions are huge and it’s impossible to go into a calorie deficit no matter how much exercise you do.

Surprises?  Apart from the overwhelming saltiness of Erhardt’s sausage stuffed veal for me anyway (and maybe for JJ) it was just how amazingly rural the US can be.  We were no more than 2 hours from New York or Boston at any time but there were huge tracts of primary forest.  Remote hamlets, houses on their own.  Very low population density I guess.  As a consequence of the low population density, the mobile phone coverage is absolutely crap.  Just nothing.

Finally, a huge thanks from me to Lee, Terry and JJ.  Lee for arranging all the logistics.  Hotels, restaurants and, of course the fabulous Carlos who drove the car were all down to Lee and it worked perfectly.  Terry for doing the routes which is about the most important thing in a bike trip.  The routes were judged perfectly and allowed us to really enjoy the days.  JJ for flying all the way from the UK to even up the numbers between the UK and the US contingent and also for sharing his deep knowledge of the life and times of W H Auden with us on a number of occasions. 

But of course the main thanks just goes to all of them for making the trip so much fun.  I honestly don’t think I’ve laughed as much for a long time.  To spend four days with three  smart, quick witted, informed, funny and rude guys was a real joy.  Thanks.

Photo Album as usual.

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On Sunday, we met Paul, Jen and the beautiful Jill at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge and walked to Brooklyn.  Boy, it’s busy on a Sunday.  Bikes, people, strollers.  However it was a fantastic day and we got great views.  Here’s the two of us at the middle of the bridge  with Jen and Jill on the left.  Statue of Liberty in the background.  The classic Brooklyn Bridge shot.

Sunday the 4th was the Atlantic Antic 2009 on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.  They shut down maybe 20 or 30 blocks of Atlantic Ave and it’s just one huge street fair.  Food, shops, drink, everything there is outdoors for the day.  A really great New Yorky experience.  We drank beer, we ate food, we went to the old fashioned bus exhibition (!).  Jill was very keen on going on the bus.

Then we ate bacon at a place which smoked its own bacon.  Mmmm pork products.

We said goodbye to Jen and Jill and Paul and headed back over to Chinatown where we had dinner for about 25p and it was the largest amount of food I’ve ever seen.  Since we were playing at being tourists, we just had to go to Times Square and look at the lights and take pictures and so we have the classic “thumbs up in Times Square” picture below.

A selection of the rest of the pictures are in this Windows Live photoalbum.  I guess it isn’t as good as Flickr or whatever but seems to work for me.

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We’ve uploaded a photograph album of all the photos that Trish took.

Rumphi is in northern Malawi.   Here’s a satellite picture.

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And here is the dune that we actually climbed from space…

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The ballooning is good.  It’s not all “silently gliding through the sky” since there’s a huge gas burner about 2 feet above your head which roars every two minutes and in some way it’s much more scary than being in a plane.  There’s something about the open basket and the relative immobility that makes it a lot like standing at the edge of a big cliff.  However, that being said, it was an outstanding experience which is impossible to describe.  So here are some pictures.  We took hundreds to try and capture how magical it all was.  The big advantage of being up with two other balloons is that you’ve got something to take a picture of…

Enough of the balloon photos.  We got an extra long ride in the balloon because they couldn’t find a good place to land but when we finally got close to the ground, Willem the pilot landed the balloon right on the back of the truck.  Pretty impressive.  We then had the slightly surreal experience of sitting down to breakfast in the middle of the velt with 24 amazingly loud (and happy) Italians.  August is the “Italians in Namibia” season and many of the tour guides speak Italian because it’s so popular.  They certainly enjoyed their balloon trips and there was a lot of wild gestures and…well…italiany things going on.  We breakfasted on Willem’s special croissants, bread, Ostrich pate and home made smoked Zebra.  It was wonderful.

We had a trip in the most rattly old jeep in Africa to get back to the lodge.  I honestly could have jogged at about the same speed.  When we got back, Trish and I decided we needed some exercise to work off the breakfast and went for a 3 mile walk out to the Conical Hill.  It is the conical thing you can see in the right hand side of this picture.  It doesn’t look far but it is and it doesn’t look high but it is when you get there.  It’s a long hot walk at noon when the sun is overhead and Trish was doubting my wisdom in even attempting it.  It’s a very obvious landmark in the area and it is formed by a tiny cap of incredibly hard black limestone about 4m thick and about the size of a tennis court.  This cap of rock has slowed the erosion of the softer rocks underneath which gives it the conical shape.  Once the cap of limestone disappears, the whole thing will erode away pretty quickly.   We saw a very rare Red Rock Rabbit on the way up the slope.  They’re so rare that naturalists don’t even know how long they live and the thing just jumped out of a hole in the ground in front of us.  It wasWe didn’t linger long on the top since it was so hot that the band around my hat was melting.

In the afternoon, Trish and Hannah went out on another drive and Isabelle and I decided to go quad biking again.  This time we were a lot faster and the guide took us up into the dunes.  It was amazingly and awesomely cool…err maybe I’m turning into a teenager.   The quad bikes can go just about anywhere although Ronney the guide was very careful to make sure that we only went on the sandy parts of the dunes and never went across vegetation since the vegetation is the only thing that holds the dunes together.  We had a very pleasant sundowner as well.  Since Isabelle is flouting so many laws by riding a quad bike under 16, I thought I could probably risk a gin and tonic and still ride the bike. 

This is our last night in Sossusvlei mountain lodge and actually the last night of our trip.  Tomorrow we fly from here to Windhoek in another tiny plane and then from Windhoek to Johannesburg and then Johannesburg home.   24 hours after leaving here, we should be getting into Cambridge.  Travel is a wonderful thing.

Today we got up at five (uuurrrghhhhh) for a car journey to Sossusvlei, which isn’t actually a dune but a dried up lakey thing at the end of a dried up river. We took a covered car (phew – an open top jeep like the ones we usually go in would be exceptionally freezing at five in the morning) to the entrance to the national park where all the dunes are. I forget the name…Namib Naukluft Mum says.  Then, after getting a permit ahead of lots of old people in an open jeep (‘they’re only going somewhere to die anyway’) we started towards Sossusvlei.

It was very windy. By very windy, I mean VERY VERY WINDY ARGH OH NO WIND.

After taking a lot of pictures, we stopped at Sossusvlei and decided to climb Dune 21, which didn’t look too monstrous at about 94.341 metres high (since dunes are dynamic it’s very hard to get an exact measurement). We started off, and by halfway we were being blown horizontal by the wind and we had sand in every place it is possible to get sand. I was cleaning sand out of my ears. I’m still cleaning sand out of my ears. It was incredibly tiring, since every step you take you slide half a step back, but we managed to get to the top.

Looking at the little notes Dad found necessary to put at the bottom of my typing (in case my teenage brain can’t remember what happened yesterday), he wants me to mention the Dead Vlei… I personally think it was just a lot of dead plants, trees, etc, but maybe that’s what it was and Dad just has a fascination with the cardiovascularily challenged.

After another brilliant lunch we split up. Dad and I went quad biking and Mum and Hannah went on a scenic drive. More from Hannah about the drive later…

Quad biking was ‘the bizzo’ as Dad would say. We went with a woman from Hull and her husband. The quad bikes are semi automatic and have a sign on them saying STRICTLY NO UNDER SIXTEENS. RIDING THIS BIKE WHEN YOU ARE UNDER SIXTEEN INCREASES THE CHANCES OF INJURY OR DEATH but we chose to ignore that, along with the ALWAYS WEAR PROTECTIVE GEAR AND A HELMET sign. Whoops. Unfortunately we got the bikes behind woman and her husband, who were slow, and on the very very jarring rutted bits it’s not fun being stuck behind someone… After a slightly wobbly start Dad and I got more confident, zooming along (as much as we could) and even waiting for the other people to get a bit further ahead so we could get up to gear five (the fastest speed). I think we have a fascination for fast machines. Dad broke down (leaving me to talk to everybody else) but Dad managed to fix the quad bike. When we were back at the shed where they keep the bikes, we realised Johannes (one of the two guides) had broken down. Since we were driving in very tight circles at that point, Dad and I were ready to play the heroes and we immediately leapt into action, racing along the road ’til we found Johannes and helped him fix his bike. All’s well that ends well. 

Dad also spotted a couple of bat eared foxes. Unlike the ‘bat eared fox/Nyala’ which he ’saw’ in Phinda, these were actually real. Mum and Hannah doubt this.

Hannah’s Bit:

Meanwhile Mum and I had gone on a scenic drive to the petrified dunes.  They weren’t just scared they were totally petrified…aeeeeeee.  Whilst puzzling over over the many possibilities for the fairy circles we didn’t realise that by going to the petrified dunes we were going to end up <in a movie voice> in our doom!  Neste our driver was driving over a huge dune when we got stuck!  Everybody had to get out of the truck and Mum and I had to try and dig the truck out of the sand.  We were pushing and pulling it.  Eventually I sat down and drew some sand pictures.  It took about an hour by which time most of the dunes were littered with sand pictures.  Finally the truck was pushed out of the sand and after a few meters it got stuck again.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Once again it took a long time to get the truck out of the sand and by then it was nearly dark.  The guide did some really crazy driving up and down dunes when we saw at the bottom that the jack wouldn’t fit on the van.  Coincidence, I think not.  Then we drove home in the dark and…we saw an Aardwolf (rather dazed by the light).

Dion said that there wasn’t much to see until we got near the end of the one hour flight but the view from 3000 ft was fascinating all the way.  Namibia is empty.  Really really empty.   We flew about 150 miles and saw a couple of very remote farms and a few dirt tracks.  The landscape is barren scrub, deep gorges and canyons and forbidding mountains in the distance.

As we flew over the dirt airstrip, we noticed that the whole of the landscape is covered in spots.  They are completely barren circular areas between 2m and 10m across devoid of even the desiccated grass that covers the rest of the plains.  It turns out that they’re a bit of a mystery.  Nobody really knows how they form.  There are a number of theories ranging from radioactivity or UFOs to the remnants of a Euphorbia forest which poisoned the ground.  The current most likely theory is that they’re related to underground termite activity.  The termites secrete a chemical which inhibits the plant growth and so when it rains (once or twice a year) more rain gets to them…or maybe it’s aliens. 

The Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge is another C C Africa place and is probably the most beautiful place we’ve been on this trip.  The picture on the left is the view that you get sitting on the toilet!  There are 10 stone built cabins with glass windows on the side that faces the velt.  There’s a waterhole about 50m in front of the main lodge and you sit on the terrace looking out over the Namib desert.  The mountain lodge is part of a 110,000 hectare game reserve which joins the Namib Naukluft national park which is one of the largest in Africa. It’s a stretch of land about 150km deep running from Angola down into South Africa and is one of the driest places on earth.  At the coast they receive less than 5mm of rain a year and even here more than 120km inland, they only get 80mm of rain a year.  It’s really dry here.  Most of the land around here used to be sheep farms before it was turned into a conservation area.  It is difficult to imagine how the sheep survived in the desert.   The dune fields which we will be seeing tomorrow are also huge.  Bigger than Belgium! 

There will be more about the desert and the dunes in tomorrows blog when we go to see the famous Sossusvlei dunes (some of which are more than 300m high).  Trish and I went for a very hot walk up one of the steep hills and we did a game drive with Ronney our guide.  There are fewer things to see (obviously) given that the landscape is so harsh but with a bit of practice, we spotted Gemsbok, Springbok, Ostrich and two types of Zebra.  The landscape is very deceiving.  From a distance, it looks like huge plains of corn but of course, it’s all just a very scrubby rocky land with a few clumps of desiccated grass.  When it rains seemingly the whole place turns green although it’s hard to believe looking at it at the moment.  However, the guide pointed out that what we see as a very arid environment is actually more grass than they have had in years.  There was a lot of rain last year and so the plains are relatively full of grass. 

The Namib mountains are incredible.  Huge lumps of pre-cambrian red granite which rise out of the yellow plains.  The colours particularly at sunset are stunning. 

The sky in Namibia is incredibly clear.  No moisture and no light scatter makes for very good star gazing and the Mountain Lodge has a small observatory attached to it and a resident astronomer.  They have a nice 12 inch reflector telescope that isl GPS and computer enabled so it finds the stars for you.  The southern sky is quite different from the northern sky and as I don’t really know my way around very well it was good to have the astronomer to show us the various things.  Alpha Centauri (clearly visible as a triple) and a wonderful little open cluster called the Jewel Box with many multi coloured stars in it.  We also saw Omega Centauri which looks like a faint smudge to the naked eye but is in fact a huge globular cluster of more than 1,000,000 stars.  Finally, we looked at Jupiter with the four Galilean moons strung out around it and, of course, our own moon.  With the magnification and power of a 12 inch telescope, you need a filter to stop the moon being too bright.  At the terminator line between the dark side and the lit side, we could see the shadows that the mountains cast over the craters.

Up at 5am tomorrow for the trip to the edge of the Namib desert…

One of the flights was ours to Windhoek in Namibia.  Landing at Windhoek was an surreal experience because you fly over completely featureless scrub with absolutely no sign of human habitation or even roads.  You get closer and closer to the scrub until…bing, there’s the runway and you land.  The airport is about the size of, say, Inverness airport.   It’s also strange that it’s about 45km from the city.  Why put your airport that far away from the city when there’s 45km of featureless scrub which is closer to the city?  Maybe the Windhoek town planners are planning for a massive expansion of Windhoek into the Tokyo of Africa…

We’re at the Olive Grove Guest House which is a rather trendy place on City Hill.  Windhoek isn’t large but the really strange thing about it is that almost all of it that we’ve seen looks like southern California.  Fabulous houses behind high walls topped by electrified fences.  All the hills that surround Windhoek seem to be covered in these mansions.  Who owns them?  No idea.  There’s a lot of money here for reasons which aren’t obvious.  According to the excellent Wikipedia article on Namibia (gosh I love the Wikipedia) Namibia has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world.  Looks like all the wealth is in Windhoek and there are a lot of very very poor people everywhere else. Namibia only became independent from South Africa in 1990 and one presumes that there was some influence of the South African government on the development of the country.  English, Afrikaans and German are the three languages that you see on every sign:  a remnant of the German occupation in in the 19th century.
We walked into the center of town along streets called things like Promenadeweg, Johannes Strasse and Robert Mugabe Avenue:  it’s a weird mix.  Once again, it just felt like a very prosperous suburb of L.A.  The center of Windhoek is also very prosperous and compared to Cape Town, the majority of people buying things in the fancy shops are black. 

Kudu on the menu tonight and then we’re flying into the bush to Sossusvlei.  Very unlikely to have Internet connection there so the postcards won’t arrive until we stop over for a couple of hours in Johannesburg.