Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Day 1 – Ah, the ineffable glamour of intercontinental travel!

2 Replies

Saturday 17 February 2024  – It all started so well, too.

We are travelling to Antarctica via Argentina, and in Argentina, we arrive in Buenos Aires before a transfer down to the bowels of Tierra del Fuego – Ushuaia, whence our cruise departs on Tuesday. Our outbound flight, a mere 16 hours of it, including popping in to Rio de Janeiro en route, was due to depart at 2210, leaving us the whole of the day to make final preparations before allowing us slightly too long to spend staring at each other with scarcely-concealed tension as we awaited the taxi.

Arrive it did, and whisked us off to Heathrow Terminal 5 with the recommended three hours still to elapse before the flight was due to leave.  The good thing about departing at this time on a Saturday evening is the lack of queues – we cleared security in a trice and headed for the lounge, an indulgence we’d granted ourselves to ease the rigours of such a long journey.

During the afternoon, we’d had a minor attack of the vapours when Tripcase, the website I use to store our itineraries, reported that our flight was delayed, first by 30 minutes and then by an hour. The BA app would hear nothing of this, and in the end even Tripcase shuffled its electronic feet and muttered that actually the flight wasn’t delayed after all.  So, having rescheduled our taxi, I unrescheduled it and so we found ourselves in the BA lounge with some two and a half hours to go.

After about an hour, Tripcase piped up again to tell us that our flight was now delayed by 80 minutes. I decided to ignore this, but then it was BA who had to shuffle its feet and admit that the departure time really was now 2330. So we settled down with a glass of something to await developments.

After about another hour, a member of staff came over, shuffled his feet and admitted that they were about to close the lounge, so we would have to leave. However, consolation was offered in the shape of access to the first class lounge downstairs. Off we trooped, where the Magic Access Code of “249” (our flight number) got us in.

The lounge is vast. And it was pretty much empty,

and underserved in one crucial area,

not that it mattered, since it was by now a bit too late to start in on the gin and also because before very long at all they called our flight anyway, so off we trooped again, through a very spookily empty departure hall.

Our gate involved a train ride. And a Sliding Doors moment. Jane was speedier than I was down the escalator, and headed towards the shuttle just as they announced that the doors were closing. So she made it through, and I, being not about to test whether the door mechanism had a “do not crush travellers” safety override, didn’t. This left me as the single person awaiting the return of the shuttle, another spooky and lonely experience.

When you are in an airport departure hall separated from your passport and boarding pass and you’re waiting for the shuttle that will reconnect you, time passes, I can tell you, slowly. But Jane and I reconnected at the gate, where they were just calling our group for boarding.

It was immediately apparent that this boarding process was not going to be straightforward. Instead of heading towards the aircraft, we were shuffled into one of those zig-zag queue arrangements.  This is the situation, then, at 22.32.

Here it is again at 22.53.

20 minutes of standing with a 13kg backpack whilst not knowing why the actual fuck we weren’t  being allowed on the aircraft was very frustrating, particularly since it looked like the odd individual was drifting past the queue and moving on. There were also a lot of people in BA suits doing the “walk fast and look worried whilst talking into a mobile phone” thing, which is rarely a comforting sight.

Eventually, some moments after they had vouchsafed that they were doing “final security checks”, we were allowed on to the plane, which pushed back at 23.25, so decently on the rescheduled time.  The nice captain came on the blower to apologise for the delay, which was caused by a technical problem with the original aircraft (an Airbus, so, whatever the problem was, all its doors were still attached), and we were all jolly glad that BA could rustle up a spare.

From that point on, things proceeded as expected, except that I declined a drink or dinner; it didn’t seem a good idea to have Fillet of Hampshire Pork Loin or a Butter Chicken Curry at midnight if I then wanted to get some sleep.  So I just got my head down. I think this is the first time ever on an intercontinental flight that I haven’t had a drink or watched a film. They even had Oppenheimer available, but I spurned this offer in favour of some shut-eye.

The rest of the journey passed off entirely uneventfully. We stopped for an hour or so in Rio de Janeiro whilst all of the crew and a good number of the passengers were exchanged for new versions, and eventually arrived in Buenos Aires at around midday. The formalities at the border were swiftly dispatched, and our bags duly arrived on the carousel about three minutes after I started getting worried.

We were met by the impressively well-organised Mariana, who whistled up a driver to take us into the city. On the 40-minute journey she told us about all the great things we could do: antique market! wine tasting!! shopping!!!  Since we’re (a) only here overnight and (b) only one of cares about only one of those things, we let them pass, but worked out the bare bones of a plan that suited us for when we get back to Buenos Aires, on 13 March.  In the interim, we got a couple of recommendations for places to eat.

At the hotel our room was ready for us (praise be!) and so we relaxed a bit before going out for a walk. Obviously.

My original plan was to include some pictures from the walk, but actually it was a very engaging experience, one that is well suited for its own blog post.  So, this post is merely a self-indulgent ramble about the vagaries of intercontinental travel. The next one (a) takes the story on a little further and (b) has some more interesting photos in it.  I will now start writing it whilst you skim through this one.  See you soon, I hope!

 

Going South

12 Replies

Friday 16 February 2024 – Just one sleep to go before what is very likely to be an epic journey, at least for Jane and me, both in terms of distance travelled and of cultures explored. For this is definitely an exploration: travelling to Antarctica.

Similarly to our Canada trip, the timing of this one has been bedevilled by events.  We started planning in 2019 for a 2020 trip which fell foul of the first pandemic lockdown.  Subsequent rescheduling then fell victim to the current unpleasantness in Ukraine, which trapped our vessel where it couldn’t get away in time. The excitement has been building, therefore for the best part of five years, and we owe a great deal to the patience, persistence and good humour of Joe Johnson at Sunvil for actually pulling the whole thing together for us.

The vessel we’ll be travelling on, M/V Hondius, is not simply a sort of floating Selfridges, it’s a proper exploration ship – “the first-registered Polar Class 6 vessel in the world, meeting the latest and highest Lloyd’s Register standards for ice-strengthened cruise ships.”  So there.

This is comforting in a way, particularly the knowledge that a Titanic-style end probably doesn’t await us. But I’m finding the overall trip to be a daunting prospect, principally on two counts.

Firstly, given that we’ll be travelling via, and staying for a couple of days in, Buenos Aires (current temperature 29℃) via Ushuaia (9℃) and Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands (12℃, winds gusting to gale force 8) to the pointy bit sticking up to the north of the Antarctic continent* (anywhere from freezing point to -40℃, as far as I can work out), how to pack for the variety of conditions?

Secondly – and much more importantly – the strictures placed, quite rightly, on visitors to the Antarctic and South Georgia are quite draconian.  There is a huge emphasis placed upon biosecurity generally and fighting avian flu particularly.  Whatever the conditions, we will be obliged to wear waterproof trousers and jackets, being careful about carrying everything with us in only one waterproof bag, and only being allowed to stand once we land: no sitting, squatting or putting anything down on the ground.  I absolutely understand and support the need for and the importance of these, but it’s going to make handling camera gear into a non-trivial task, complicated further, of course, by the need to wear robust enough gloves.

Here’s our cruise itinerary, spanning some three weeks in total.

This is, of course, only an initial plan – specific destinations will be subject to weather and sea conditions, as you’d expect.  But it’s an exciting prospect as well as a daunting one.

I’m hoping to get some suitably dramatic scenery photographs of snow and mountains (somewhat different from my recent skiing holiday vistas). Also, of course, there will be plenty of opportunities to take photos of the wildlife – seals, whales and a wide variety of birdlife, from albatrosses to terns. Among all the possibilities there are nearly a dozen types of whale, over half a dozen varieties of seals and penguins, five sorts of albatross and nearly two dozen different kinds of petrel.  So I doubt there will be a petrel shortage (indeed, I expect to Fulmar boots) and I might even get a shag out of the trip. But please don’t skua my pretensions, at least for the moment.

There are many challenges ahead, almost none of which are of any great pith or moment. What photographic gear to take? Will I be able to cope with being offline for possibly days on end?

I will write about them as I go along, but I have no idea as to when I’ll be able to publish anything. I hope you’ll be patient enough to wait for and then read about the trip, so watch this space!

 

*   Yes, I know that everything sticks up to the north of Antarctica

Skiing in the ’80s and 70s

5 Replies

Wednesday 24 January 2024 – Some Guy has challenged me to show myself in my skiing gear, 20th vs 21st century.

So I will.  But you’ll have to read through some  more of my ramblings first.  For every prize, there’s a price!

I started skiing in 1980, 44 years ago, when I was 27, on a visit to Sauze D’Oulx.  The fact that I’ve now visited a further eight times since then shows that I like the place.  Is it perfect? No, not for several reasons. But its character is clearly something that resonates with me.

The place has changed somewhat since that first visit.

  • The best bar in town, Andy Capp’s Pub, closed down sometime before 2003; its eponymous ski race, that I always used to look forward to participating in, therefore is no longer run. When I mentioned this race to a group of Scottish people also staying in my hotel, there was a somewhat shocked reaction as they tried to absorb the implications of running a ski race on a public piste.  But the race course was set up every week and used for racing by  punters recruited from Andy’s and also by the ski school for people who had been taking lessons. More on this later.
  • The lift system has got better – a bit. The lift near the town now carries four people at a time rather than two, but is still slow; the large number of drag lifts have been replaced by a smaller number of (better located) chair lifts; the most important chair lifts have been upgraded to high-speed operation; and a few new lifts have been installed, and these now link Sauze to neighbouring resorts in a big area called the Via Lattea – the Milky Way.  It’s great to have the possibilities of skiing further afield, but I read somewhere a telling comment that the lift operator’s business model is cost minimisation rather than market share expansion.

Some things haven’t changed much.

  • The Sportinia plateau that I mentioned earlier, is still a lively hub, with several restaurants and cafés, most of which are pretty much exactly as they were back then, and all of which provide great rest stops and a contribution to the charm of the place which (you’ll have noticed from my previous post) is important to me.

  • The best place on the mountain is still the best place – a hotel/restaurant called Ciao Pais.

  • The town is a lively place in the evenings.  There are some great bars, some dating back to 1980, like the Scotch Bar and Il Lampione, and some new ones, like the Ghost Bar. That said, I didn’t spend a lot of time in them, but that’s down to me; as a younger man, I was ever in favour of bar crawls, but I’ve grown out of that desire. Or maybe, as Robert Heinlein so memorably put it “It’s amazing how much ‘mature wisdom’ resembles being too tired”. OK, I’ll come clean; I was too tired even for a post-prandial drink in the hotel bar, far less an evening going out drinking. But I did take an after-dinner walk a couple of times around the town and it was clear that it’s still a lively place, if not quite as hooligan as I remember it.

And, finally, I’ve changed, in more than just my attitude to drinking.  I used to choose skiing resorts to visit on the basis of the extent of the ski area, as I used simply to want to cover as much of the lift system and as many of the pistes as I could.  On this holiday, I relished the exercise component of skiing; I’m now probably much fitter than I ever used to be, and my main objective this week was to ski from the start of a run to the end, without stopping (or crashing into something, of course).  This is something that I rarely, if ever, used to do, simply because I often needed to stop and rest on the way down. This week (after a slow start, admittedly), I could do a 4.5km run from top to bottom of the hill at an average 25kph with energy to spare, which I found rather gratifying at my age.

On my first day in Sauze this year, I covered 17km at an average of 18kph, and expended 747 calories doing so. On my last, I skied 18km at 25kph, expending just 395 calories, which is an elegant demonstration of how my confidence and ability increased over the course of the week. I even felt, at the end, that I was near regaining whatever used to pass for style when I was a regular skier:

A gentle potter down the piste in 1987 or thereabouts

And so to my friend Guy’s challenge – to display my skiing gear between the centuries.

Here is a selection of my various outfits between then and now.

1980, taking part in the Andy Capp Ski Race
1987 – WINNING the Andy Capp Ski Race. Be sure to clock the racing pants!
1996 – still using the Salomon boots and 205cm skis
2001 – using rented boots and more modern carving skis

And these days?  Well, the jacket and trousers haven’t changed since 2001 (just not quite so tight, these days), with one exception….

 

I used to hate wearing a hat or goggles. I only tolerated a woolly hat when my increasing baldness meant that I otherwise got a sunburnt scalp.  This year, as a precaution in case the 18-year lacuna led to a crash, I rented a helmet but was sure I wouldn’t use it after day 1.  Wrongly, as it turned out; should I ever go skiing again, I will be sure to be sporting one and using goggles as well.

And for a final laugh, here is my first ever lift pass

Will I ever buy another lift pass?  Who knows?  I certainly enjoyed myself enough to entertain the idea of skiing well into my 70s.