Onwards to South Rock.

So after a brief spell at home in Ireland we decided it was uninhabitable.
Luckily Jess had already bought us flights for Sydney and Auckland so we migrated south for the worst of the winter.
On arrival in Sydney early on Friday 4th December we proceeded to do a few of the touristy things to pass away the jetlag. After the Opera houses and the Harbour Bridge we went to see a collection of Australias largely deadly flora and fauna at Sydney Wildlife World down on Darling Harbour.





On Saturday we proceeded to catch up with a guy I used to work with back In the early days at Google. Jason appears to be living the quiet life these days with his lovely wife Marie. Glad you've taken to Sydney life Canberra man!
Can't believe i didn't take any photos of Jason and Marie to immortalise them on the Internet...

Sunday was spent on more touristy activities: a walk down the coast from Bondi Beach. Didn't see any sharks but lots of beer and barbies. Ahh, the cliches.



Monday and Tuesday took us out of the city into the Blue Mountains. Awesome scenery and nature stuff. Managed to persuade Jess to come caving, albeit on a nice organised tour.



Wednesday was an early flight to Auckland for more gentle touristy activities: walking, eating and hoping volcanoes remain extinct...
But more on New Zealand in the next exciting installment...

Long overdue!

So we have been very bad bloggers over the last couple of months. This is going to be a brief summary post on what we've been up to and we promise to try to be a little better on the updates.

We left Carcassone and headed south to Spain. First stop was Sella, a friendly limestone sports crag about 1.5 h from Alicante. We had been here before about 6 years ago and had really enjoyed it. It lived up to the memory. Lots of high quality climbs from 5 up with some really excellent 6bs. We parked the van up in the forest around the crag and just had to stumble over to the climbs each morning.

Unfortunately while we were here our poor van got a little sick. It developed a leak in the hydraulics that run the clutch and we couldn't reliably change gear so it was off to the mechanics with it. The closest garage that could do the job was in Benidorm (gasps of shocked horror!). The van went in for the operation on Monday and it was Friday before we could pick it up. We had to decamp to a hotel in Benidorm which we have to admit was not as terrible as expected. It was nice to spend a few days in a larger space and to be able to leave our stuff lying around. That said we were happy campers when it was time to reoccupy the van and get back on the rock.

Dunk's Mum and Dad were due to visit us on 4/Nov for a while and we had decided to base ourselves in Barcelona for that time so a couple of days beforehand we headed North to suss out a campsite and take in a little climbing on the way. We hit La Mussara (close to Suirana) which was littered with high class 6s. After a day's climbing we continued on to Barcelona and found a campsite in the town of El Masnou which was 15 km north of the city and right on the train line in.

We met Dunk's parents and moved them into the guest annex (tent). The first day with them we caught up with Ali B, a family friend who lives in Barcelona, and wandered all over El Masnou wondering where it was hiding all its restaurants.

The next day our paths diverged. I headed home for a few days to check out how pregnant my sister Kate had gotten, to catch up with friends and to see at least one episode of this year's Strictly Come Dancing!! Dunk and his parents pottered around Carcassone, Girona, Barcelona etc but I'll leave it to Dunk to write a few words on that cos I wasn't there!

While I was back in Ireland I had one very important mission - to book flights to the southern hemisphere. We had great fun in the campervan over the summer but after the hour went back at the end of November, the days had gotten really short and the weather was turning colder. We had decided to migrate south and do our best to avoid the winter. I managed to find us flights giving us a week in Sydney, 6 weeks in New Zealand and 2 weeks in Thailand/Laos on the way home so we would miss December and January and the worst of the Irish winter.

When I got back to Spain, Dunk had missed me so much that he lost the run of himself and asked me to marry him. Of course I said yes cos he's too cute to let him get away! So the flights were booked for the 2/Dec and all that was left to do was to drop the van home, do about 20 loads of washing and pack again. We hopped on the ferry from Santander in the north of Spain to Plymouth in the south of England. It was a 24 h crossing and the notorious Bay of Biscay was its usual self. Poor Dunk was a little green around the gills but survived the trip.

On our way to pick up the ferry from Fishguard to Rosslare, we stopped in to visit Dunk's sister, Al and her kids, Islay and Ewan, for a few days and also to pick out a lovely sparkly ring! I kicked Ewan's ass at Wii so I'm guessing he's practicing hard now for the inevitable rematch.

Back in Ireland, we stopped into visit my parents and tell them the good news and then headed on for Dublin to unpack the campervan, catch up with family and friends and get ourselves ready for the the next leg.

Dear John.....

Its been 33 days since the last blog post as John Cotter pointed out to me so this one's for you John!

Since leaving Arco we've returned to France. First stop was Orpierre for more bolt clipping. Orpierre is a small medieval town in Provence. The little town is surrounded by limestone walls with lots of sports routes less than 10 minutes from the campsite. We spent about a week climbing there until my elbow couldn't hack the punishment anymore. Luckily we were headed for Nice at that stage to pick up my parents who were visiting for a few days.




After touring many closed campsites in the Nice area we eventually settled down in Menton, a small town about 30 mins from Nice city. Unfortunately for my exercise-phobic mother, the campsite was at the top of 300 steps. On seeing this she decided the guest annex (tent) was not for her and promptly checked into a hotel in town. We did see her again once in the campsite when Duncan's crepes tempted her. She arrived on a chauffeur driven (Dad) moped so managed to avoid the steps. We spent a few days sight seeing in various towns in the area - Nice, Monaco, Ventamiglia etc and spent the nights eating and drinking some nice French wines. Duncan got to see his favourite fish at the Monaco aquarium - a cuttlefish! It was all very civilized until the night we hooked up with Roger the alcoholic recovering heroin addict and Saeed the non-english speaking Berber. It was a late one. The next day was spent in recovery (for me at least).




We dropped my parents back to the airport and headed north again to the Verdon. The Verdon gorge is the biggest canyon in Europe and is absolutely stunning. The walls are limestone and the climbs are up to 250 m long, a mixture of sport and trad, single and multipitch. We spent about a week again doing a mixture of climbs. The climbs were good but unfortunately we had left the Verdon a little late. The weather was cooling down and the ground was covered in frost every morning. After so many months in the sun, we found this traumatic and so are currently in the process of migrating south to Espana! I'm reliably informed that the weather is always "scorchio" in Spain.




We're currently pitstopped in Carcassone in the south of Franc close to the Spanish border. It really is a fairytale town. Its a medieval fortified town from the 12th century surrounded by walls and towers topped with witches hat like roofs. There's not particulary much to do but really cool to wander round for a couple of hours. Tomorrow we'll hit Spain home of tapas and cava. Stay tuned John!

Arco (not Arklow).

From Munchen we set off for Arco in the north of Italy. There was some more climbing to do there.
Arco is on the north shore of Lake Garda amongst spectacular limestone outcrops. There are probably more Germans than Italians here at this time of year.

There is a mixture of short sport pitches and long all day multipitch routes in the Arco area but we decided to concentrate on the short sports routes to try and get nice and strong.



We are staying in Camping Zoo which appears to be a fairly normal campsite but has the added peculiarity of being next door to some noisy geese, chickens, parrots and a few fat pigs. Of particular interest are the 5 cockrels that have a little campsite waking competition nice and early every morning.

After a few days climbing we were worn out and the weather forecast was bad so we decided to take a brief trip to Venice. On the drive there we were escorted our own personal thunder storm which dumped rain pretty much constantly.

We spent a few hours blindly following Tomasina, our satnav, to non-existent campsites. At one point she had us take a round trip on the Lido ferry for no apparent reason at a cost of 66 euros! Silly satnav. Thankfully the following morning was bright and clear.
Venice is beautiful and not the museum city i thought it would be but rather a living place (admittedly with a lot of tourists in it).


A few days later on our next rest day we went to Verona. While nothing in comparison to Venice it was a fun place to poke around, visit a colluseum (no lions eating christians) and have some nice lunch.



The general plan is to spent another few days here in Arco revisiting the climbs that tormented us before hitting the road and heading for France and the Verdon Gorge.

The Requin hut and beyond.

Once little Ellie had hoped on the plane back to rainy Ireland, we got ready to take a trip to the Requin hut, situated above the Mer de Glace at about 2500 m. We jammed our little 30 L packs full with rock and ice gear, lunches and a change of clothes and set off across the Mer de Glace. It was a slow plod. Duncan lost his crampons somewhere in the moraine on the trek but we managed to make it to the hut without incident. The hut is run by a french woman, sometimes assisted by her husband, a mountain guide.



The loss of crampons severely restricted our choice of routes for the remainder of our visit as there is a lot of permanent ice that high up the mountain.
We settled on Congo Star, a 10 pitch (300 metre) bolted route on perfect granite at mostly 6a with a few harder bits along the way. This route is a fantastic outing with enough bolts to protect the hard moves but little to ease the nerves elsewhere. Probably the most adventurous part of the day was crossing a meltwater river on the way back to the hut in the late afternoon. After a day's sunshine on the higher ice the steep stream had become a raging torrent (Jess's description). After a few dunkings and a little cursing as Jess was safeley belayed across (unfortunately cameras were all safely wrapped in plastic for the affair) we got back to the hut just in time for dinner by the always enthusiastic Mme Hut Gardien.




Feeling quite tired and without our 2nd pair of crampons we decided to leave it at that and head back down hill the next day. After a late start (to let the glacier ice melt a little so it was not to slippy without crampons) we decended the Mer de Glace in the lifting fog. Thankfully visibility had improved enough to make routfinding easy so the only thing that slowed us down were the steep crevasses halfway.



Back in the valley, we spent a few days cragging and recuperating. Unfortunately,the weather began to deteriorate so we decided on a change of scene after 5 weeks in Chamonix. We decided to head for Arco close to Lake Garda in the north of Italy and headed there via Munich to visit Britta. Britta has moved on from phd life to become a respectable professional working for Roche in the south of Germany. We arrived just in time to meet her parents who were leaving after a visit. We stayed with her in her lovely new apartment in Penzburg. We sampled some of the German beers and bavarian food and took a stroll round Munich. We also visited some cute Bavarian villages and saw many pairs of lederhosen and drindls! It was really good to catch up with Britta before hitting the road for Arco.