hellsbells

Hello All. Once again apologies for the infrequency of the blog updates - I have to admit it is mainly through laziness and frustration with slow internet connections. We´ll we´ve travelled a fair way since we lef the Colca Canyon and are now in a rather lovely part of North West Argentina staying with some wonderful hosts Alex and Rijkje (spelling may not be quite right) of Casa Hernandez. We´ve arrived here via Bolivia and Chile but I´d better start back in the distant past in Cusco, Peru. We weren´t that impressed wiith Cusco initially, the bus dropped us in a yard at 6am , nothing close to resembling a bus station, where they kept the big metal gates firmly closed to keep the hoards of taxi drivers at bay from the bleary eyed travellers. The ... read more

Hello everyone hope you are all well! We have covered a lot of miles in the last 10 days, Whistler - Vancouver- London- Leicester via Ashdon (it´s in Essex for those of you who don´t know) - Birmingham - Newark - Lima. So as you can imagine there hasn´t been much time to update anything really. We said our goodbyes to the snow and wonderful scenery and people of BC and have been enjoying the heat and bustle of Lima for the past couple of days. We´re staying in Barranco, a seaside suburb outside of the city centre, and what a good idea that was after experiencing "downtown" yesterday. I guess it´s pretty much the same as every major city centre, busy, noisy and polluted but we weren´t expecting it to be so hot and pretty ... read more

Sorry for yet another delayed Blog entry! Last weekend (4th April) I (Iain) went off with 3 other guys I've met out here for a day at Powder Mountain Cat Skiing. Basically this involved a group of 12 of us heading off into the amazing back country down the road from Whistler and getting ferried about the mountains in a snow cat whilst snowboarding fresh untracked powder. This is was a real treat for all of us, riding deep powder is the reason why we are all here, its a sensation that is very hard to describe but is probably as close to flying / floating that you can get. Needless to say we all had an amazing time - 8 runs and about 16,000 vertical feet of riding and thankfully no hiking due to the ... read more

Over the last weekend I (iain) and one of the lads I've met out here (Lez) did a 2.5 day Avalanche Awareness Course and am now qualified by the Canadian Avalanche Centre - Avalanche Skills Training Level 1. The course started on Friday night with 3 hours in the classroom (quite a while since I'd done anything like that) learning all about what causes avalanches and what to look for to avoid getting caught in one, what to do if you get caught in one and finally how to rescue people who manage to get caught in one. Saturday we went out on the hill and did some transceiver searches - these are the beacons you wear incase you get buried - they are pretty simple to use and our snow shovelling techniques were refined - ... read more

We had a great time last week with our friends Anna and Steve over here on holiday. The weather was great all week and we were sorry to have to wave them off on Sunday, the lucky pair were upgraded on the flight home which I am sure softened the pain of going back to work. Olympic fever has hit Whistler this past week, with the 1 year countdown starting on the 12th. The village centre has been over run with TV crews as they get ready for the celebrations. There's barely room to swing a snowboard so to speak, although getting taken out by a rogue pair of skis slung casually over a shoulder is always a danger. We had another decent amount of snow on Sunday night which caused a dilemma as Sunday night ... read more