Tim checks the GPS for a firm position, are we lost in the jungle again?

Coming Soon…

By the time I finished work, decided on a location, brought some supplies (including the mandatory gin in a tin) we had a late start. We were aiming for the popular beach at Rhoscolyn. We arrived long after dark and had just the beacon to use for navigation. The White Eagle just 5 mins walk from the beach were good enough to make me a bowl of ice cream in a brandy snap basket well outside of kitchen hours. They also serve some fine ales. This sea kayaking is very civilised!

We awoke early the next morning to the sound of the fisherman removing all of our gear we’d left hanging off the side of their dinghy, they were surprisingly friendly! After a strong coffee we made our way to North Stack, passed the ferry terminal and onto the Skerries for some lunch. Stronger tides would have made light work of this but alas this was not the case, the seals at the lighthouse were happy to see us though. The afternoon brought a stronger wind than tide and the good chop to the sea made for an entertaining paddle, but ultimately hard work.
Giving up on the idea of making it all the way around, we opted to camp at Porth Wen in the old Brick Works, which was a fantastic campsite and I enjoyed, the challenge of drying my thermals over the fire, drinking a glass of wine with my dinner and having cheese and biscuits.

We had a bit of a fresh water shortage first thing the next day and only slowed our pace after we’d collected some drinking water from a public toilet. We then continued at a leisure pace heading around to Moelfre where we had arrange for our shuttle driver (cheers Rich!) to collect us. We even stopped half way through the morning to make a brew with a dying gas canister and the last of our biscuits!

Our annual trip to Ticino and Piemonte in May is a similar experience, after many years we know most of the rivers and some ideal camping spots. Some better than others! Van life, steep granite and good coffee is the prefect combination for a week away.
Not visiting the familiar classics like the Euga and Verzsca would be an offense to white water kayaking and the region but every year I try to find something new and unknown to do, this year the target was the Isorno.

Photo: Dan Butler | Location: Isorno

Just like a climbing guide book, a white water guide will give a rapid by rapid account of the river, allowing you to know what to expect. This can be a great aid when making a step into the unknown, but when confident in your ability and keen for adventure less information can be better. A quick guide in Kayak Session last year gave some info on a couple of unknown rivers in Ticino: the Rovana that we did last year and the Isorno. Rovana was an amazing day out and the Isorno was in a committing canyon, with mostly bedrock slides. The guide gave us a starting point and finishing point, an insight into the beauty we would expect and only a hint to the type of rapids and their difficulty.

Dan, Rich and I jumped on with what we thought could be marginal water levels but was actually OK, and scouted our way down 4-5km of quality white water. The canyon was everything that had been promised and must be one of the more remote rivers in the Alps with stunning bedrock sides, truly worth the long walk down and out of the river.

The white water itself will remain un-described, as far as this blog is concerned, a reward for those seeking a hard, steep adventure deep in the Swiss Alps.

Photo: Richard Watson | Location: Soana

It’s a cliche to say, I rip people that do, but for me within white water kayaking, it’s all about the journey and the adventure. Defining adventure can be difficult but I reckon it’s anything where the outcome is unknown. With this in mind you can could have an expensive but adventurous trip to Ikea where you’re not sure what you need!
I’ve enjoyed skiing over Europe and would describe myself as average. I know a bit about off piste and snow strength etc. and can zoom down a black without too much trouble but I wanted more from a skiing trip.  Something where I wouldn’t have to queue at the lifts and share the tracked out mountain with hundreds of others.
Kay & I were at the Kendal Mountain and watched a video about skiing in Kashmir, where totally hooked and booked flights.  Joined by two friends we spent a month in the powder.

Where is Kashmir?

It’s in the North West of India and on the border with Pakistan. In recent times, it’s been a hot bed of instability both internally and with border issues. The UK foreign office still advise against all travel to the region.
Sringar airport is well serviced from the domestic terminal in Delhi as it’s very popular with Indians for a holiday. There are several flights everyday from the major budget operators: Indigo, AirIndia and Kingfisher.

The Resort

Getting to Gulmarg from Sringar is a fairly short jeep ride. You usually have to change jeeps halfway to cope with the change in road conditions.
The town is spread over a large area and its easy to book somewhere in advance that is actually miles from the gondola. We didn’t book anything before we got there and looked around at an array of choices to where to stay. There are a couple of cold and smokey hostel type rooms where a bed in a shared room is pretty cheap. There are also some pretty posh places and some middle of the run hotels. We got a big room with 4 beds, heating, hot water on tap and breakfast for a very reasonable £10 per person per night. For many of the hotels, winter is the quiet season because the number of Indian tourists is low. Summer would be a different story where the hotels are fully booked weeks in advance. As Gulmarg becomes more popular it might be worth booking ahead but there was plenty of choice for us on the day.

Food

Breakfast could be a little hit and miss. The resort is really geared towards Western luxuries such as Nescafe, it was impossible to get Indian ground coffee. They do toast but it’s that sweet loaf, and our place did porridge that was a bit odd. The best was eggs or Puri Baji.
We stocked up from the market on lunching goods such as biscuits, crackers and chocolate. There are 2 main places to eat at the mid station offering a range of food that wasn’t massively expensive. I got the best coffee of the whole trip sat outside at the mid station! The Kashmir Kebab was a welcome warmer on the cold days.
Most of the hotels offer evening meals or buffets but there are also a few restaurants around the resort to grab a bite. We were there long enough to try many of the restaurants and hotels. One of the best was just off the main road opposite the ATM machine. Avoid eating Pine Place on the safety talk nights, it’s super busy and they just throw out fast, rubbish meals.

Equipment

There’s a couple of places to rent kit. Due to a breakage we had to hire a transciever and it was in good condition. I did get screwed a bit when I had my skis waxed and the first time they just used candle wax and the second totally over charged me. Don’t rely on a great service even if it is done with good wax.
We ran into a couple of traveler that stumbled into Gulmarg on a longer Indian/Asia tour and were able to hire everything including all in one suits.

The Skiing

The resort itself is spread around a central bunny slope with a number of drag lifts. Snowboarders are not allowed here at all so our plan to gently warm up with the snowboarding girls was a complete fail. This area was busy with the ski schools, Indians and the occasional Westerner.

The first gondola takes you up to 3200m to just above the tree line. This gives you access to a number of routes back to resort wherever you fancy. There are a couple of popular lines that are tracked out most of the time but if you are feeling adventurous you can walk/skin right as you travel up the gondola as far as you want and descent back to resort or the military road that runs along the bottom of the slope here and then boot back to resort.

From the mid station at the top of the first gondola you can get a coffee but more importantly access the chairlift. This was open far more often than the second gondola to the top of the mountain and became a stable base of activity during poor weather. Again from here there are some simple routes straight down but contouring both right and left you get a number of different lines to drop. If you contour left for a couple of bowls (taking all the necessary alvanache advice and precautions) you can end up in the Drang Bowl that doesn’t take you back to resort but drops you lower that Gulmarg and you require a taxi ride back to resort. You can ring in advanced but we were not waiting long when we choice to below Gulmarg, just ring a taxi when we were at the bottom for a lift and wait eating biscuits!
My favourite lines from the chair lift were to contour right as you go up the lift around as far as you can and then boot up a very short distance to the obvious bulge in the mountain and start here holding a left line towards the trees on the ridge. From here bomb straight and descent through the main gap in the trees back to resort.

Once the second phase of the gondola opens, the mountain truly opens up. You really need to know your stuff up here. You should know the avalanche forecast for the area, have all the right gear and ski properly. Dropping straight below the gondola is easy fun but the real reward is to boot up to the peak and drop whichever bowl takes your fancy. It’s possible to ski down the back and drop the bowls right at the end of the mountain. This is pretty much a full day out and requires a long skin or boot and ski down the military road back to town.

The second phase wasn’t opened everyday, due to various changes in the conditions but mainly due to lack of explosives to make the patrolled ski area safe despite the avalanche rating for the whole mountain being moderate. The explosives are controlled by the military and they aren’t accessable all the time to the mountain safety team. Once this changes, the whole resort will improve allowing greater access to the back country terrain.

I think it’s a fairly accurate observation that as one gets better at kayaking, one also gets better and more knowledgable at all the skills at the periphery of the sport. For example wilderness first aid, steep access (climbing/abseiling), repairing equipment, car camping and taking photos! But I think you will also have a particular interest in one area that will make you a specialist. Good team selection may well take this into consideration.

On my recent trip to Papua, I went with the only people that were mad enough to come with me. We each took a role upon yourselves and developed into that. I took the responsibility for the wilderness first aid and emergency extraction. My work demands good first aid skills and emergency planning so it wasn’t a giant step for me but I did feel I had to undertake further training and gather advice to do a job that ultimately was good fun, confidence inspiring (unless I was the one to get hurt giving me flash backs from Saving Private Ryan when the medic gets hit “tell us how to fix you”) and good for future trips. On this trip I asked Tom P to take responsibility for a larger, fuller first aid kit for the truck because he is very knowledgable and interested in this subject but I could have equally asked anyone else to fulfil this role because of the calibre of the team.

To develop as a rounded kayaker, I reckon one can take advantage of less formal trips where you can be take responsibility for one of the skills mentioned above and take the time to learn about that aspect from others, books or just trial and error (less applicable to first aid!)

Article by Tim Burne, first published on Team Pyranha Blog:

Claim It!

The kayaking world isn’t like the mountaineering world. Traditionally being gentlemen of high regard, mountaineers have always kept accurate records of their achievements. Kayakers, traditionally being scumbags, have not.

This has led to much pub (and internet) based based banter over who ran what first. It’s getting more and more difficult to find that elusive first descent, usually having to go harder, go more obscure, or go more remote to be able to conclusively “Claim it” – if that’s your thing.

I came back a couple of months ago from a trip where we took the latter option – go remote!

The trip in question was a month long expedition to one of the remotest and inaccessible parts of the world –Indonesian Papua. We’d heard stories before going about previous trips to Papua New Guinea (the other side of the island) and how they were fraught with logistical difficulties, and we accepted that we would have to deal with a number of these ourselves. The Indonesian side of the island is even less developed than PNG, and less politically stable, with many Papuan’s wanting independence from Indonesia. More obscure? Yep! More remote? Yep! We were on to a winner!

Negotiating one of the many obstacles on the jungle walk-in

As such, using the well accepted approach of “if I can’t find evidence of it on the internet, no-one’s paddled it before” we bigged it up as a first descent expedition and raked in generous amounts of cash and kit from our awesome sponsors.

Chris’s diary cam

Unfortunately the expedition itself was not the very model of success as a catalogue of unlucky events saw us off the river only 2.5 days into what we’d planned to be an 8 day descent. Separated from our boats, with food and equipment stolen (do not underestimate the importance of shoes in the jungle), and police reluctant to let us even leave the police station for fear of capture by Papuan Separatists, we were forced to abandon our kayaks and return to civilisation.

First rapid of the expedition

Kayak fashion vs Papuan fashion, Photo: Pete Woods

Still, we consoled ourselves that we can at least claim that coveted First D title for the section of river we did manage to paddle!  Awesome.

Or could we…

Whilst on the trip we discovered that the name the locals use for the river is Kemabu, rather than Derewo as we had been using.  Now back home, I decided to stick Kemabu into Google and see what appears.

It turns out that back in 1995, a Russian chap, Vladimir Lysenko set himself the challenge of rafting down the highest peak of every continent. His last peak to raft from was Puncak Jaya, the highest mountain in Oceania, and the source of the Kemabu/Derewo river.

Interestingly, it seems he shared many of the same experiences we did, on our trip fifteen years later… except that he generally had it worse – and was paddling solo, so had no one to complain to! Whilst some of our food was stolen, all of his was stolen (he survived off scrounged potatoes and tea). Whilst my shoes were stolen, all his rafting clothes were stolen (he still manned-up and got on), we both had issues finding a plane which would take us to the correct airstrip in the interior, Pete got ill as a result of infected cuts on his hands, Vladimir also got ill from infected cuts picked up on his walk-in. In short, I think we were schooled in the art of manliness.

Here are a few of Vladimir’s photos of his solo descent:

Brilliantly this isn’t even the first time I’ve claimed a remote first descent, only to later find that we’d been beaten to it (again, by Russians). I guess the moral of the story is: no matter how remote your venture, no matter how unique your idea, no matter how gnarly the rapid; someone (undoubtedly a Russian) has been there before you and solo’d it in his one-man raft and homemade kit.

Respect is most definitely due to the pioneers of our sport!

Many thanks to the following generous organisations, without whom we’d not even have got anywhere near the river: Transglobe Expedition Trust, Welsh Sports Association, Canoe England, RawCut TV, Pyranha Kayaks and Palm Equipment.