Another Pair Of Eyes

Ireland

I’m back from the Emerald Isle. Anyone miss me?

Probably not, what with Honduras and the Wimbledon finals and days so hot you could die, but there we have it. I certainly enjoyed being disconnected from everything and living with a group of college friends for a week or so. We were right down south near Cork in a house by the sea and it was lovely (although there were the inevitable days when it was Rain and everyone was stuck inside and sharp edges started to show). Hats off to the organiser, who did a fantastic job. The house also had the world’s most out-of-tune piano, which was fun. Still, after all the good times and all the constant company, being dropped back into the world is so mundane.

However, back in the real world I am, and with that comes to inevitable job hunting, boredom, work and mysteriously wasting day after day without really understanding what you’ve been doing. Any holiday at home is a holiday at home too long, in my opinion – I like to be doing things. If life is getting boring, then you’re doing something wrong. Harsh? Maybe.

Anyway, enough of that. At some point during the holiday we were all sitting around the dinner table assigning an animal to each person based on their characteristics (read: based on very little). It was one of those throwaway converations that start suddenly out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. Still, some interesting things came out of it: some people are really quite perceptive.

One thing I did (re)discover in Ireland was my love of reading. The only things I read at uni are road signs and textbooks, neither the most inspiring works. If I do read a book, it takes me quite a while before I can get through it because lets face it, time spent reading could be used for cooking or working or going out or chatting and it feels kind of indulgent. As such, I only brought a couple of books with me to Ireland. They were finished in the first two days (incidentally, The End Of Mr Y. is really quite an interesting read, and very closely matches my ideas about God), and a further 3 bought from Waterstone’s  in Cork went in a similar fashion (C.J. Samson. Go read.). It just goes to show how much I missed it: the phrase ‘vociferous appetite’ would not be out of place.

I do suffer the same problems with books that I do with films though. Even if I know a book to be good, I will have great difficulty starting it if I think it’s going to be serious and thought-provoking, even though I know I’ll probably enjoy it. Still, its enjoyable, can’t complain.

I count myself lucky to be able to read as I do.

I’m going to stop writing now. Literary verbiage.

maybe I’ll just write a quick note directing you to Florence + the Machines’ Rabbit Heart, because I like it. Stick with it.

Macro Quiz 2

I’m off to Ireland for ten days, hopefully to have a grand time. Life is good. I will leave you with the second installment of the macro quiz – enjoy!

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Boots

The first concern of anyone doing anything adventurous ever should be boots. I know it isn’t, people are all wrapped up in tents and hand warmers and rehydration and food and shells/gloves/breathabe eva-fabric windstopper membrane-layer magic fleeces/base layers/cameras/bags/flights and whatever. But people should think about boots more, because ultimately that’s what you’ll spend nearly all day, every day, wearing. And if they aren’t comfy you’ll go through hell until they are. Boots are important.

“But enough about boots!”, I hear you cry, “and show me lots of holiday photos and regale me with all sorts of stories which at first will have a point but will just continue easily into the realms of ‘you had to be there’ before fading into absolute obscurity, much like this sentence!”

It turns out, of course, that this story starts with a pair of boots. New, shiny, black, semi-rigid cross-country skiing boots, in fact. I wore them to the exclusion of all other footwear for six days marching across frozen lakes, up icy slopes, down deep powder drifts and even in the chopper to the airport in Kusuluk, and for the first three days of wearing them they made my life hell. Rule number 1 – break the boots in. I had so much compeed on my feet I was basically wearing a second pair of socks. I was putting compeed on top of other pieces of compeed. It was a mess (although not a patch on the feet of my father – images of that are not for the faint-hearted). The latter three days were improved, but not perfect. Lesson re-learnt.

Anyway, nobody wants to hear the blow-by-blow account of the boots and how they wore in, or the travel (two days just to get to Anamagsalik, the island we were circumnavigating) or indeed the blow-by-blow account of very much at all, so I’ll give you a few of the highlights with some photos and few words, thereby saving everyone’s time. Of course, I suppose if you didn’t want to know what was going on in the icy wastes you’d not be reading this blog, so I can waffle a little bit…

This is Kusuluk International Airport. The hub of transport for the southeast coast of Greenland, and proud winner of the prestigious ‘Most Pointless Window 2009 Award’.

At some point our guide, an absolutely lovely inuit guy with a happy smile 24 hours a day and a dog sled spotted, white-on-white, a polar bear print about ten metres from where he was driving the sled. He stops the sled immediately, circles the prints, whips out a pair of binoculars and starts scanning the landscape. Pointing excitedly (he spoke almost no english) he jumps back on the sled, lets out ropes behind for us to cling to and then starts yelling enthusiastically at the dogs which leapt immediately to the fore. We ended up racing headlong for two polar bears, a mother and cub, being dragged behind a sled. I managed to take this shot (and I am mightly proud of this) with a 40-year-old telephoto manual focus lens, one-handed with the other clinging to a rope being dragged along by ten dogs over not-so-flat ice.

We visited an ice cave, on a kind of odd day trip – we all boarded the sled, leaving the bags and skis behind, and went off on a dog sledding morning before starting the day. It was beautiful, and at the back the floor was this glassy, smooth ice reflecting the polished waves of the ceiling. Ice is the most glorious blue.

Speaking of dogs, there were a great many of them. They slept outside on the snow, and dug themselves small hollows in which they would sit. The ten dogs in our guides team were not large, and yet they could pull (when chasing the bears) about half a ton of people and baggage. Forcefully. This was one of the fluffier and more excitable ones I came across.

Finally we come full circle (and this circle is not for the squeamish). As I said at the start, boots are important, and broken-in boots are even more important. I know you think blisters aren’t so bad, but there are blisters and there are blisters. I give you the worst feet of the trip, thankfully not my own.

Both feet. Both sides.