BIG SHINY MOUNTAINS!

Morning,

First post from actually on the road! After an absolutely lovely week in Cambridge, I flew out to Kathmandu via Singapore and Kuala Lumpur - bit of a tortuous route, but it was the cheapest way to do it. Spent an evening in Singapore, took a bus to the city centre as it was already getting late. I missed the stop at the Singapore Flyer (like the London Eye, just bigger) so I got off at a random mall and wandered around it. It was fun being the tallest person in sight by some way, and eventually I found a food court and had a ridiculously spicy/peppery fish soup of some sort which got me excited for Asian food adventures. The night ended on stunning Changi Airport's floor (although I later broke into a Japanese restaurant which had comfy-looking benches...). 

Kathmandu itself is amazing (as is the flight in - so scenic!) - really bustling and restless, but it doesn't feel crowded despite the utter chaos and absence of any traffic rules or control. Cars and motorbikes rush by in a constant stream about 2 inches from you, but what would seem an insane near-miss in London is just normal here as they weave among the pedestrians. The hawkers and touts are less omnipresent than in places like Marrakech, and MUCH less annoying - after a try or two they leave you alone, so it's really pleasant just wandering the streets and trying to make sense of the utter haphazardness of it all. 

Steve and I have had to do a LOT of gear rental and purchases - but we're finally ready to fly out to Lukla tomorrow morning and head off into the mountains! Besides lots of layers and sleeping bags, we got crampons, ice axes and jumars and huge double-plastic boots - all for the one day when we summit Island Peak. The rest of our group are more experienced and are using Island Peak as acclimatisation - they'll be heading to Ama Dablam (6856m) afterwards to climb that; Steve and I will then be wandering around more mountains (and Everest Base Camp) with a Sherpa, and the small-group feeling should be really pleasant (and instructive!). 

Ama Dablam and the camps used to get to the summit

We may well get some chances to run around on some of the huge glaciers around here, not least the Khumbu which flows down from Everest - most of these are debris-covered so will be familiar from my dissertation fieldwork.

 Khumbu Glacier's lower reaches - looks almost surreal!

I will do my best to supply photos asap - I've been a muppet and left the camera cable at home, so will have to try to find one here before we fly out!

The beginning is nigh

As of today, I have 10 days remaining in Europe, 7 of them in Cambridge. And because I dread the moment when I have to actually put the rapidly growing pile of stuff in the middle of my room into my backpack, a little bit of procrastination seemed absolutely necessary. 

So, I thought, why not try to express what I'm about to do in some numbers? Because numbers are fun...





...right?


8: number of countries visited (10, if you count flight transfers)

23: total number of flights taken

31: minimum number of postcards to be sent

64: SD-card storage capacity, in GB

77: Target weight upon return, in kg...

217: number of days on the road

6187: highest altitude reached on foot, in m (20298 ft) - if all goes well, at least...

19031: greatest distance from London attained, in km (11825 miles). Incidentally, this is in New Zealand rather than the Cook Islands which, as it turns out, are closer to the UK via the Americas. I should really have figured this out given the null meridian goes right through London and the flight out there involves crossing the date line...

62123: number of km in the air (38601 miles) 

and finally...

1: life to sort out in London afterwards, as a matter of urgency...! Well, after Mays and May Week, anyway. (On a serious note, if anyone knows of a job starting in June/July, please let me know!)

Woooo, mountains!

Hello again,

The other day, my flights were finally paid for and confirmed. It felt odd to see an overwhelming proportion of my bank account's contents disappear in one fell swoop, but the reality of being away for seven months has suddenly become real and tangible. I thought this might be a good time to provide an outline of what I will actually be doing in all this time, and also provide an incentive for me to figure that very same thing out. Given the high likelihood that I will get completely carried away writing these posts this will happen over several entries - I'll do my best not to be too boring...

The first stop of The Trip will be in Nepal, flying to Kathmandu from London via Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; the company I booked with clearly exploit all possibilities to make these round-the-world trips affordable - probably wouldn't have come up with that particular flight plan myself...

A three-week trek around the Sagarmatha National Park and to Everest Base Camp will take up most of the time in Nepal. This involves climbing some accessible peaks which require no more than scrambling - which is just as well as I have no mountaineering experience. 

There is an upgrade which involves a summit attempt at 6187m Island Peak, one of the most-climbed "trekking peaks" in Nepal which involves some sections of fixed-rope climbing - Steve and I are currently debating doing this, as the risks of altitude sickness rise quickly and are very, very real and nearly inevitable at that kind of altitude.  

Island Peak - pretty imposing. Credit to Alexandre Buisse - more on his site below!

If you're wondering what the attraction in doing this is (and maybe even more so if you're not), look at the photos this guy took on a similar trip. (Seriously, LOOK AT THEM. Not dissimilar to Jimmy Appleton's Photography which a fair few of you may be familiar with, but with much more of a mountaineering/trekking/climbing focus. I've been exploring his galleries for weeks now and would encourage everyone to do the same, some absolutely incredible stuff in there.)

Anyway - our time in Nepal will conclude with a few days in Pokhara, a town west of Kathmandu which has some stunning lakes and opportunities for a cheeky bit of paragliding. Going there by bus takes about half a day but the views (like in most of Nepal, frankly) are supposed to be stunning and it will hopefully be a bit more laid back than Kathmandu. 

I suspect that this is going to be a recurring theme almost everywhere I go, but I have a feeling that I will leave Nepal with a heavy heart, wishing for more time there - to linger, for the most part, and become a bit more immersed in everyday life in such a fascinating country which so many people (including, unfortunately, myself) breeze through for a trekking adventure. One of the advantages to starting travelling early rather than leaving it for later in life, though, is that the possibility of returning...but that's pretty definitely getting ahead of ourselves!

What's in a Name?

As the days until my departure inexorably grow fewer, the spectre of actually planning a 7-month trip looms ever larger. Somehow, the intention of seeing as much as I can of all the beautiful countries I will be visiting (Nepal, India, Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Japan and China) will have to be reconciled with the desire to drift rather than rush around, to try living and breathing a place rather than stumble from tourist trap to tourist trap, from sight to sight, without really seeing. 

Another difficulty, as the above paragraph highlights, is to attempt to talk or even think about this trip while avoiding all the terribly cliché "gap yah" terminology ("self-discovery", "cultural experience" and the like). This seems like an often a futile wish in a world in which tailor-made trips and tourists overrunning a place like locusts can strip pretty much any location of any heart and soul it may once have had - or even still have. 

Nevertheless, I harbour a little hope that I will be able to avoid the pitfalls of mass tourism, as well as of "booze cruise"-type holidays - both can be fun, but for now that is not what I am looking for. 

With hindsight, the benefits of undertaking a trip like this at the ripe old age of 23, rather than at 18 straight after leaving school, become apparent. The extent to which University and the last 5 years in general have changed me is pretty overwhelming, as anyone who has known me since first year or before would surely agree. Call it growing up, maturing, learning about yourself and others and human interaction - whatever it is, it has left me significantly better prepared to make the most of a trip "around the world". 

And if a few phrases or words have rather stereotypical connotations - well, frankly, so be it. I will do my utmost to avoid living these stereotypes, not for the sake of avoiding doing so but because I would like to get more out of this journey.

Over the next few weeks I will be musing over the various places and regions I would like to explore, and also the numerous bits and bobs that need sorting out, from the mundane to the slightly more random. Any comments, advice, opinions and criticism are more than welcome and will quite possibly contribute to making my journey...so pleas don't be shy!

Time to get back on it...

So after one failed attempt to begin blogging on something resembling a regular basis, this is as good a time as any to give it another shot. Having just finished University in June, I have managed to have a reasonably eventful summer thus far. 

It's odd how even after five years at Cambridge, and despite the feeling that it was very much time to bow out with whatever grace remained to me, I couldn't help but miss the place, along with all its quirks and oddities and most importantly all the incredible people who have shaped my life to such an overwhelming extent, really quite a lot. To an extent I still do, of course, but it turns out that the feeling of loss is strongest only as long as one has nothing else to fill one's days with.

In my case, this was to get a job with LOCOG out at Dorney Lake (which they, for some reason, insist on calling "Eton Dorney") where the Olympic Rowing and Canoe Sprint competitions are held. The transport team doesn't sound like the most glamorous place in the world to be working, but it has turned out to be excellent fun, both in terms of what we actually do and the people you get to work with. Once again, thanks must go to Steve, who got me this job in the first place instead of a volunteering post at the Olympic Village in Stratford. 

As it turns out, Transport actually have some of the best opportunities for contact with the athletes as we're in charge of running their buses between the Village and Dorney. This means that they wait for said buses right where we hang out, and they tend to actually be quite chatty - particularly once their competitions are over. I often found it difficult to talk to people I percieve to be so far superior to me in almost any respect, but they're mostly fairly down-to-Earth people. It probably helps that rowing is the kind of niche sport that only really gets any mainstream exposure during the Olympics, so maybe it's a nice change - rather than an onerous everyday reality - for athletes to be more universally recognised and "in demand". 

It was also nice to see that even during Olympic competition, athletes still like to have a bit of (nice and clean) fun, demonstrated here by a kayaking four/quad (K4): 

The one thing I really badly miss is doing sport myself. Obviously seeing Olympic crews paddling in Dorney contributed to this a lot, and it's good to have a job that involves being outside and a fair bit of moving around, but the absence of regular and frequent training is really grating. This may stem partly from a mild body complex(?) developed during my time with CUL (no regrets, mind - in fact, I'm still gutted I didn't trial this year) and partly from the simple fact that training twice a day was pretty normal for the last few months at University. 

Whatever the reasons, I can't wait to have enough free time for regular sport again, and to start rowing seriously again with a Tideway club when I'm back in London (where I may end up staying when I return from travelling).

For now, though, it's time to enjoy the Paralympics which promise more chilled work (shorter days, and quite possibly a more relaxed/convivial atmosphere) - and then, after a few days in London and Cambridge each, it'll be time to head back home to Vienna for a month to see all the lovely people back at home and spend as much time as possible with them before heading off to see the world (there's a great expression in Hungarian - világgá menni - which translates literally as going away world-wards)!

How to be(come) a lightweight

Sorry for the lack of post-age in a while - hopefully things will get a bit more regular once term gets going and there's something resembling an ordered timetable for me to follow. I thought I'd write a bit about how being a lightweight rower actually works. An image of scrawny men may come to mind, but not so - in fact, most lightweights actually weigh more than the 72.5kg (11.5st) limit for most of the year. If you're like me, significantly more. So here's a bit of an excerpt of what I do.

The squad, which is now down to 12 oarsmen and 2 coxes, recently got back from a 9-day training camp in France. In fact, make that Southern France, really near the seaside and beach. Sounds lovely and quite relaxing, doesn't it?

To me, I'm afraid it no longer does. For us, it meant training 3 times a day, every day. This wasn't too bad in itself as these sessions were generally finished by 4pm, but the amount of energy expended did mean that we generally lacked the motivation to do anything much more demanding than sit around munching on malt loaves and procrastinating in front of the laptops many of us had dutifully brought to uphold the theoretical possibility of getting some work done. In fact, some would go as far as to describe our time in France, somewhat simplistically but scarily accurately, as a repeat sequence of wake-eat-row-eat-row-eat-row-stretch-shower-eat-chill-sleep.

On a tenuously related note, malt loaves are awesome! These unassuming brown, squishy blocks which, let's be perfectly honest, don't look like the most appetizing thing in the world, are actually tasty and, given their stickiness, sort of fun to eat. I had my first taste of them in France and am impressed.

For many rowers they are the staple of choice and, to be honest, I don't know why they bother printing the nutritional info for 1/10 of a loaf on the packaging. I have some difficulty imagining anyone eating these things as intended (sliced and buttered...); it seems so much more convenient to wolf the whole thing down in one sitting. Maybe unsurprisingly, people have also had the idea of speed-eating these bad boys, and doing so seems all the more impressive after knowing how much they indeed tire out the jaw.

But I digress. To be a lightweight then, it first takes what it takes to be good at any other sport. A fuckload of training. Out of Cambridge sports teams, the rowing clubs are probably among the ones that train the most, although this isn't necessarily reflected in their status in terms of full Blue sports. A Blue sport is one of those Cambridge things that we pretend are important but nobody else actually knows what they are - full Blue sports are basically the oldest and/or most traditional sports in which a varsity match/race takes place annually against Oxford. As more and more sports became increasingly popular, Half Blues were introduced so these athletes could earn these so-called "University colours" as well. These days, the debate about which sports should or shouldn't get a sporting Blue keeps cropping up, and lightweight rowing is a prime example often used: we train as much as the heavyweights and put in the same effort etc etc, so surely we, like them, should get full blues.

From a fairness point of view, this is absolutely true, but, hard as it seems to accept, this is not the principle upon which the Blue status is based. And while a Full Blue would be nice, I have to say that ultimately, it really doesn't matter all that much to me. Much rather, it's nice to know that the people I row with at CULRC do it not because they want the status represented (within the Cambridge bubble, at least) by a Blue but because they want to do the sport and do it bloody well.

And enjoying the sport and the training, and being willing to accept all the changes in lifestyle that getting up at 5am several mornings a week and training twice a day entails, is a pretty key part of what we do.


The other part of being a lightweight, of course, is getting to our target weight. Since there is not only an individual maximum weight (72.5kg) but also a maximum average of 70kg which the crew must attain on race day (the official weigh-in occurs a few hours before the race), all crew members have to have as low body fat (generally ~5%) as is healthily possible. After all, fat will only make the boat go slower because it constitutes extra weight, and if losing it doesn't impede performance then it's a win-win situation.

The way of going about this, who would've guessed, is to diet. Luckily, though, given the amount of calories we burn every day, a diet for us is what for other people would constitute eating normally, or even a lot; it should just be healthy, which is a shame because it's a well-known law of nature that the less healthy something is, the better it tastes (Epic Meal Time provide ample evidence of this). But generally, dieting doesn't involve starving ourselves. I learned this the hard way early on in the season when I, being among the heaviest guys in the squad, tried to maintain too high a calorie deficit (i.e. input fewer calories than you burn). I ended up unable to complete a training session and needed a bit of a talking to. Usually, I end up eating about 3000 calories/day, with some people eating more than that. So, from an conventional point of view, we're not starving. :)



ps. Training camp was actually great fun - the squad came together a lot, and CUWBC were there as well. I think a good time was had by all, so this post isn't pity-mongering. :)

"But why on Earth would you do that?!"

Rowing at Cambridge is one of those things that almost everyone I mention it to has vaguely heard about, but interest in the subject tends to dwindle quickly as soon as it transpires that No, I won't be on TV racing Oxford in the Xchanging Boat Race in London. Nevertheless, I get asked a lot about why I bother rowing for the University, so I thought I'd try to give a bit of an insight into the motivations behind wanting to row for Cambridge. After all, it is more than legitimate to wonder why someone would give up a large proportion of their life to train 10 to 12 times a week, including at hours of the morning which few would consider humane, and to lose 20% of their body weight in the process, when there is little tangible, immediate benefit to be derived from doing so.

The Boat Race, after all, tends to evoke prejudices of huge hunks with no brains getting into top Universities for being good at sports and getting a free degree without having to do any work (MSc Water Management, anyone?). While this isn't the case, it's also besides the point – the point is that there are two other clubs which are practically unknown outside the (student) rowing community – the women's (CUWBC) and lightweight men's (CULRC) rowing clubs. These clubs also race their Oxford counterparts in late March/early April every year, but there is no such thing as media coverage, or general public interest. This is, to some extent, understandable, given that what attracts huge crowds to the Boat Race is not the rowing but the immense tradition of the event itself. It is a shame, though, because the Henley Boat Races – where the women and lightweights race – is characterised by the same all-or-nothing, winner-takes-all attitude. This poster, made a few years ago, sums it up well:

The heavyweight men's Boat Race crews regularly feature a number of international oarsmen and rowers from top schoolboy crews around the world and can compete at the highest level, e.g. in the top open events at Henley Royal Regatta. The „other“ University rowing crews cannot usually boast such a track record – this may make them less attractive from a sensationalist, glamorous media perspective, but it makes rowing for these clubs an entirely different experience.

Last year, I briefly trialled (i.e. tried out for selection) for the heavy men's Boat Race with CUBC, and while the brevity of this episode may mean that I don't have as much insight into this club as I would like to, this experience has significantly influenced my decision to trial for CULRC this year. While there was no such thing as being looked down upon for having only learned to row at Uni or being far less experienced, I felt a little...out of place. Maybe, given my experience of just two years, I was, but this, at the same time, is what makes CUBC somewhat different from rowing at Cambridge University as a whole. While people who learned to row at Cambridge sometimes make Goldie or even the Blue Boat, CUBC is generally dominated by extremely high-standard oarsmen who are often doing an MPhil or a PhD – and there is nothing wrong with this, it's not like they're not legitimate students or shouldn't be around or anything. It's just that for the majority of people who didn't row before coming to University, representing one of the other University Boat Clubs is the pinnacle of their sporting career during their time in Cambridge.

At CUBC, I felt like a bit of a tag-along – nobody made me feel unwelcome or useless, but it was impossible to shake off the feeling that the coaches had made up their minds about some of us fairly quickly and for the few sessions that we did get to go to, we were taken because a suitable time had not yet been found to cut us.

The most enjoyable aspect of rowing with CULRC for the last three months has been the contrast to this experience – feeling like an equal member of a squad of people with a reasonably similar background to mine. Being accessible to far more people on the basis that less experience is required and because it does not have a reputation that may daunt many potential triallists allows for a more diverse crowd. It's fantastic to compete for a place in the squad with people I can relate to, and who I know are ultimately gunning for the same goal I am: a place in the Blue Boat and a win against Oxford.

I realise this post may seem like a bit of a shout for attention from an „inferior“ athlete who didn't make it into the „top league“, but I hope it also goes some way to conveying why I have decided that it is a good idea to give up most of my free time - and food - for a chance to compete in a race that few know exists. It may not be everyone's thing, but it's certainly mine.