Friday, 24 July 2015
Riding at Kilpitiya
On Day 2 we spent the morning riding, a 4 hour trip that started at Kalpitiya beach and followed the coast up to a christian Church, where we had brunch. The horses had travelled all the way from Colombo in a box, and are used for endurance riding. Of the Marwari breed, they have curly ears, are very intelligent, and can ride for over 100kms with most of that at a canter. Needless to say, that posed a few problems for our "intermediate" standard of riding - Eliza had to swap horses with Jemima because hers was b ouncing too much. Awesome ride though.
Eliza with her horse.
Jemima was her original horse, which Eliza adopted.
The horses cooled down in the sea periodically.
Monty as a cowboy.
Breakfast at the Kirimundel sub post office.
Ole.
Sarah's horse bolted towards the end which was quite amusing for everyone, and ran a few kms down the beach. It doesn't like kites, so riding past 100 kites at the kite-surfing beach proved too much.
Monty loved his horse. Monty always loves his horses.
So does Mima. This was originally Eliza's horse and bounces quite a lot. Highlight of the trip was probably when we all cantered over the top of a mongoose fighting an Indian Cobra. These are very rare to see so that was a treat although unnerved the horses and we were lucky that everyone stayed on - also that none of the horses got bitten on the way past.
A well-deserved roll in the sand at the end.
Kitesurfing at Kalpitiya
Hanging out in the pool
Preparing for Kitesurfing at Kilpitiya
Monty looks confident
Rubbish French instructor "Julian" does his best to put them off
Wouldnt' see this vehicle at West Wittering
Of course Dad would make a much better instructor
Eliza up and running...
Jemima up and running...
Back in the boat ready to go home...
...for another swim...
Bit of a test, haven't used this for a while
Arrived safely in Dutch Bay after 24 hours or so of travel. A quick dip, dinner, then a well earned rest. Kitesurfing tomorrow.
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Our final destination is Yellow Point
Our final destination is Yellow Point, back on the other side of the island. We have decided that the journey back across to one of the ferry ports from Tolfino is just too far to risk missing the boat. Sarah trawls the internet, and finds an apartment that is free for a couple of nights in a kind-of complex place. Not the sort of place that the Goodfellow family usually heads for, but there is a swimming pool, tennis court etc., and from the photos it does look beautiful.
The drive across the island takes rather an age – there are roadworks on the road across the mountains, and we stop for a break at a place advertising the biggest redwoods around.
We arrive at Yellowpoint (finally) and the apartment is indeed very comfortable. It’s nice, I guess, after living wild for a week, and everyone is able to clean up. We go for a bit of a drive to find supplies, and stumble across and “English Pub”. Thoughts are very much turning to home by now, and we stop in for a pint. Alas, no children are allowed, although we find a lost one who seems to live there, who shows us how (not) to catch bullfrogs in a pond which is ridiculously full of them.
So we head back towards the apartment, armed now with a couple of cold tinnies. At this point SG has a good plan, and we park up at on the side of the road and trek down to a small beach which is clearly popular as a good place for a dip. There is someone swimming, and his dog, but it really is very cold and none of us venture in. It’s a great place to watch the sun go down. On the way back, we have fights with fir cones and, rather predictably, there are tears. A cracking shot from me, as it happens, but I get no credit for it.
The rest of our time here is fairly chilled – we have a good game of tennis, we go crabbing, we hunt for the famous purple starfish (these are not hard to find).
The drive across the island takes rather an age – there are roadworks on the road across the mountains, and we stop for a break at a place advertising the biggest redwoods around.
We arrive at Yellowpoint (finally) and the apartment is indeed very comfortable. It’s nice, I guess, after living wild for a week, and everyone is able to clean up. We go for a bit of a drive to find supplies, and stumble across and “English Pub”. Thoughts are very much turning to home by now, and we stop in for a pint. Alas, no children are allowed, although we find a lost one who seems to live there, who shows us how (not) to catch bullfrogs in a pond which is ridiculously full of them.
So we head back towards the apartment, armed now with a couple of cold tinnies. At this point SG has a good plan, and we park up at on the side of the road and trek down to a small beach which is clearly popular as a good place for a dip. There is someone swimming, and his dog, but it really is very cold and none of us venture in. It’s a great place to watch the sun go down. On the way back, we have fights with fir cones and, rather predictably, there are tears. A cracking shot from me, as it happens, but I get no credit for it.
The rest of our time here is fairly chilled – we have a good game of tennis, we go crabbing, we hunt for the famous purple starfish (these are not hard to find).
My thoughts turn finally to work, as I download the emails that I have not looked at for the past ten weeks. I intend to go through these on the plane on the way home. Reassuringly, I am really quite excited to hear how things have been going while I have been away. I wonder how my partner Rachel has been getting on with my clients…
Packing up is, predictably, as miserable as it ever was although at least we don’t need to do it again now. We faff about deciding whether to drive down to Victoria for an early boat, or stay up here for a later one, and eventually opt for the latter, to spare ourselves a drive. It means that things will be a little tight at the airport, but we are getting good at that bit now. In the end it all works like clockwork – we have a hearty breakfast, then join the queue for the boat, and there is a good kids’ playground to occupy people while I wander around eyeing up RVs that I am going to buy when I return to Blighty.
The boat is then easy, getting to the airport is easy, even getting on the plane poses no issues for us now. There is very much a sense that everyone wants to get home and it feels a bit as if we are treading water, just waiting for that to happen. We have had a fantastic time, and looking back on the previous trips that we have done, it really could have been six months that we have been away. I feel rejuvenated, we have had a great time as a family, and the kids have all grown up a lot. We simply must do this again one day…
Monday, 4 January 2010
An hour or so down the hill is Horseshoe Bay. We grab a Burger King on the way through (one of the great pleasures of travelling) and despite going up and down the motorway a few times in error eventually make it to the Ferry Terminal in good time before the departure. 
We have booked (well done Sarah G.) so have no trouble getting on the boat, and our Voyager takes pride of place right up the front. Once we have parked, we immediately charge up to the top deck, which is deserted throughout the journey, apart from us and a few smokers. As we find pretty soon, sensible people who have done the journey before take shelter below decks; only mad dogs and Englishmen brave the high winds up top.
We see no whales on our journey (another thing that Sarah is keen to see now that the Moose has been ticked off), although there are plenty of mysterious fins that appear and disappear, frustratingly, always just out of vision. The journey itself is only a couple of hours, and we arrive on Vancouver Island at Nanaimo late afternoon. Sarah has booked a stop-over hotel for the evening, because our place on Frank Island isn’t available until the next day. It’s cheap and cheerful, but we don’t brave the bar food and so go exploring around the harbour. Soon enough we find a Thai restaurant which serves us noodles and glasses of milk in vast quantities. We sit by an open window and freeze. The kids play in the ornamental pond.
The next day we explore Nanaimo harbour in the daylight. We find a decent café which serves us bagels and jam (Jemima is hooked on bagels) and look at the boats. Frankly, although Nanaimo puts itself out there as a tourist destination, you wouldn’t want to do much here other than pass through. One treat awaits, however; the local highland dancing club is putting on a display to commemorate something momentous that happened here a long time ago, so we watch their prancing up and down, accompanied by a burly ginger-haired piper whose genes tip their hat to a Scottish legacy.
He is a good piper. And then, the real highlight of the show – at 11am the piper is to light a huge cannon in front of which the girls have been dancing. Some Japanese teenagers have been watching, and one is selected to put the taper to the powder to light the cannon. This she does (albeit clutching a friend closely), amid much giggling and fingers in ears.
The cannon itself is indeed very loud, and the kids think the whole affair is great fun.
The Voyager awaits, so we drive off to the other side of the island after breakfast. The journey is complicated slightly by our need to buy supplies for the next three days, and also because if we arrive after 4pm the tide will be in and we will be cut off from our dwelling for the night. We pass through lakes, mountains, and forests of the biggest redwoods in the world. It’s all very spectacular.
We follow the instructions and arrive at the beach just short of Tolfino in time for the tide. There then follows one of the most impressive movements of supplies in the history of human endeavour – everyone carries something and everyone is carrying far more than they can comfortably manage. Eliza and Jemima between them carry the new green bag; Sarah is carrying a couple of rucsacs, and Monty some food. I carry the North Face red clothes bag on my back, and also booze supplies in a rapidly failing box, alternatively in front of me, on my back, and finally on my head. It is a long walk – well over a mile, and this becomes tiresome for everyone soon enough. But there are some nice waves to watch rolling in as we suffer.
Eventually we walk onto a long spit of sand extending away from the land with sea on either side. Long strands of kelp are washed up, like bullwhips. Monty thinks these are fun to jump on, because they have a floaty thing at one end which pops when you stand on it. Flocks of small birds skitter around, flying in waves as if connected or in sync somehow. I think these are sand pipers. They are so small that you can’t make them out until you get quite close, and their legs move too fast to see. We are told by an aged beech-comber that these wonderful birds have been quite rare recently, and she is pleased to see such a number this season.
And at the far end of this spit of sand is our island - Frank Island. And on the island is our house for the next three nights.
No plumbing, no mains power. An outside loo, an outside shower (which we don’t find for a day or so),
and just a few car batteries recharged by the sun to power a couple of small reading lights. The hut has been put together well, albeit in an amateur way, and is literally perched on a rock on its own 10 acre patch of land, invisible from the mainland, and facing out to sea. There is a small room in which the kids sleep, and a double bedroom upstairs on a kind of maisonette level, which also provides access out onto an outside area with a couple of seats from which you can watch the whales spouting a few hundred yards off the shore.
With binoculars, we can see humpbacks breaching every now and then. The first time we saw one, we couldn’t believe it, so we fished out the binos and spent long hard minutes looking into the sunset through them, hoping for a breach. It’s pretty much guaranteed that if you do this you will be looking in the wrong direction. The trick is to see one with the naked eye and then focus for the next 5 minutes or so on that place, in that hope that it pops up again. We reckoned that there were probably 4 or 5 different whales mucking about one evening. Sarah gets excited about going out on a boat to find them.
We drink too much white wine in the sun that evening, then rise late and throw together some breakfast.
We have bottled gas, but no running hot water so washing up involves warming water in pans. Slow, but we have plenty of time. We then decide to go and explore Tolfino, so make the long walk back to the beach and the car parked where we left it yesterday. The waves are not looking quite so strong today, so I begin to get itchy feet in case the swell drops off altogether. This puts surf rental at the top of our priorities, and I do this straight away while Sarah and the kids order breakfast in a café opposite the rental shop. Monty makes friends with the owners by climbing up the counter and pulling the whole thing down on top of him. Next door is one of Tolfino’s many activity centres offering bear-watching tours, whale-watching, speedboat rides, sea-kayaking etc. Sarah is getting excited about whale-watching, so we book a trip for lunchtime.
We have plenty of warm things with us, but it turns out that we have to don comedy suits anyway as protection against the cold and the spray.
They don’t have ones Monty’s size (as usual, we have had to be optimistic about his age when booking), so there is lots of rolling up of sleeves and trouser legs etc.
The trip itself is really very good – our guide is a local who clearly knows his whales and their habits, and we see Grey Whales (with very bad breath) and Humpbacks, both very close to the boat.
.JPG)
We also see sea otters, sea lions and gulls of various sorts in droves.
Being far out to sea also allows us to look back at Vancouver Island and its impressive topology.
Whale-watching is all very well, but I am by now almost beside myself at not having yet got into the sea. We go back to Frank Island and I get into the water. The sea is extremely cold and I now understand why everyone else is wearing full suits with socks, gloves and balaclavas. Fortunately the surf is good enough to keep me warm inside. I enjoy my 6’2 which is a bit shorter than I am used to (Costa Rica excepting).
The next day is spent chilling on the island. We go crabbing, fishing, scrambling; Sarah does art and crafts with the kids while I go in the water again. I could live here for quite a long time doing this.
Sarah less so, though, so the following day sees us once more in Tolfino, but this time sea kayaking. We go in pairs, with Jemima crewing with Mum; Monty with me, and Eliza with the guide. I have never seen so many star fish – they come in two shades, either purple or orange. We also see another otter, which is cool, and perhaps coolest of all – a dead shark which must be at least ten feet long. It is washed up on a sand bank in the middle of Tolfino sound, so we all disembark and have a good look at it. The guide has a leatherman with him so we pull a few teeth out for no reason. The kids make a sand castle.
We have supper in a local restaurant (Shelter), served by an Ozzie who gives me some advice on the best breaks while clearing up soft drinks spilt on him by the kids. Good food, good wine – this Tolfino place could be worth a return trip one day. The sun is set by the time we finish so it’s a romantic walk back to Frank Island across the beach in the fading light.
In fact, we do the same walk home again on our last night, only this time in complete darkness. The reason is that we attend the Tolfino lantern festival in the early evening, a cracking “do”, whereby all the kids around have made lanterns in which candles are lit, so that in the dusk light (and, later, complete darkness), the colours and shapes are lit up. The lanterns are hung in the trees and you walk along paths through the woods with the lanterns lighting your way. Very jolly, and there are various bands dispersed around the place providing accompanying music.
One more surf the next morning, and then it’s off to our final destination on the other side of the island – Yellowpoint.
We have booked (well done Sarah G.) so have no trouble getting on the boat, and our Voyager takes pride of place right up the front. Once we have parked, we immediately charge up to the top deck, which is deserted throughout the journey, apart from us and a few smokers. As we find pretty soon, sensible people who have done the journey before take shelter below decks; only mad dogs and Englishmen brave the high winds up top.
We see no whales on our journey (another thing that Sarah is keen to see now that the Moose has been ticked off), although there are plenty of mysterious fins that appear and disappear, frustratingly, always just out of vision. The journey itself is only a couple of hours, and we arrive on Vancouver Island at Nanaimo late afternoon. Sarah has booked a stop-over hotel for the evening, because our place on Frank Island isn’t available until the next day. It’s cheap and cheerful, but we don’t brave the bar food and so go exploring around the harbour. Soon enough we find a Thai restaurant which serves us noodles and glasses of milk in vast quantities. We sit by an open window and freeze. The kids play in the ornamental pond.
The next day we explore Nanaimo harbour in the daylight. We find a decent café which serves us bagels and jam (Jemima is hooked on bagels) and look at the boats. Frankly, although Nanaimo puts itself out there as a tourist destination, you wouldn’t want to do much here other than pass through. One treat awaits, however; the local highland dancing club is putting on a display to commemorate something momentous that happened here a long time ago, so we watch their prancing up and down, accompanied by a burly ginger-haired piper whose genes tip their hat to a Scottish legacy.
He is a good piper. And then, the real highlight of the show – at 11am the piper is to light a huge cannon in front of which the girls have been dancing. Some Japanese teenagers have been watching, and one is selected to put the taper to the powder to light the cannon. This she does (albeit clutching a friend closely), amid much giggling and fingers in ears.
The cannon itself is indeed very loud, and the kids think the whole affair is great fun.
The Voyager awaits, so we drive off to the other side of the island after breakfast. The journey is complicated slightly by our need to buy supplies for the next three days, and also because if we arrive after 4pm the tide will be in and we will be cut off from our dwelling for the night. We pass through lakes, mountains, and forests of the biggest redwoods in the world. It’s all very spectacular.
We follow the instructions and arrive at the beach just short of Tolfino in time for the tide. There then follows one of the most impressive movements of supplies in the history of human endeavour – everyone carries something and everyone is carrying far more than they can comfortably manage. Eliza and Jemima between them carry the new green bag; Sarah is carrying a couple of rucsacs, and Monty some food. I carry the North Face red clothes bag on my back, and also booze supplies in a rapidly failing box, alternatively in front of me, on my back, and finally on my head. It is a long walk – well over a mile, and this becomes tiresome for everyone soon enough. But there are some nice waves to watch rolling in as we suffer.
Eventually we walk onto a long spit of sand extending away from the land with sea on either side. Long strands of kelp are washed up, like bullwhips. Monty thinks these are fun to jump on, because they have a floaty thing at one end which pops when you stand on it. Flocks of small birds skitter around, flying in waves as if connected or in sync somehow. I think these are sand pipers. They are so small that you can’t make them out until you get quite close, and their legs move too fast to see. We are told by an aged beech-comber that these wonderful birds have been quite rare recently, and she is pleased to see such a number this season.
And at the far end of this spit of sand is our island - Frank Island. And on the island is our house for the next three nights.
No plumbing, no mains power. An outside loo, an outside shower (which we don’t find for a day or so),
and just a few car batteries recharged by the sun to power a couple of small reading lights. The hut has been put together well, albeit in an amateur way, and is literally perched on a rock on its own 10 acre patch of land, invisible from the mainland, and facing out to sea. There is a small room in which the kids sleep, and a double bedroom upstairs on a kind of maisonette level, which also provides access out onto an outside area with a couple of seats from which you can watch the whales spouting a few hundred yards off the shore.
With binoculars, we can see humpbacks breaching every now and then. The first time we saw one, we couldn’t believe it, so we fished out the binos and spent long hard minutes looking into the sunset through them, hoping for a breach. It’s pretty much guaranteed that if you do this you will be looking in the wrong direction. The trick is to see one with the naked eye and then focus for the next 5 minutes or so on that place, in that hope that it pops up again. We reckoned that there were probably 4 or 5 different whales mucking about one evening. Sarah gets excited about going out on a boat to find them.
We drink too much white wine in the sun that evening, then rise late and throw together some breakfast.
We have bottled gas, but no running hot water so washing up involves warming water in pans. Slow, but we have plenty of time. We then decide to go and explore Tolfino, so make the long walk back to the beach and the car parked where we left it yesterday. The waves are not looking quite so strong today, so I begin to get itchy feet in case the swell drops off altogether. This puts surf rental at the top of our priorities, and I do this straight away while Sarah and the kids order breakfast in a café opposite the rental shop. Monty makes friends with the owners by climbing up the counter and pulling the whole thing down on top of him. Next door is one of Tolfino’s many activity centres offering bear-watching tours, whale-watching, speedboat rides, sea-kayaking etc. Sarah is getting excited about whale-watching, so we book a trip for lunchtime.
We have plenty of warm things with us, but it turns out that we have to don comedy suits anyway as protection against the cold and the spray.
They don’t have ones Monty’s size (as usual, we have had to be optimistic about his age when booking), so there is lots of rolling up of sleeves and trouser legs etc.
The trip itself is really very good – our guide is a local who clearly knows his whales and their habits, and we see Grey Whales (with very bad breath) and Humpbacks, both very close to the boat.
.JPG)
We also see sea otters, sea lions and gulls of various sorts in droves.
Being far out to sea also allows us to look back at Vancouver Island and its impressive topology.
Whale-watching is all very well, but I am by now almost beside myself at not having yet got into the sea. We go back to Frank Island and I get into the water. The sea is extremely cold and I now understand why everyone else is wearing full suits with socks, gloves and balaclavas. Fortunately the surf is good enough to keep me warm inside. I enjoy my 6’2 which is a bit shorter than I am used to (Costa Rica excepting).
The next day is spent chilling on the island. We go crabbing, fishing, scrambling; Sarah does art and crafts with the kids while I go in the water again. I could live here for quite a long time doing this.
Sarah less so, though, so the following day sees us once more in Tolfino, but this time sea kayaking. We go in pairs, with Jemima crewing with Mum; Monty with me, and Eliza with the guide. I have never seen so many star fish – they come in two shades, either purple or orange. We also see another otter, which is cool, and perhaps coolest of all – a dead shark which must be at least ten feet long. It is washed up on a sand bank in the middle of Tolfino sound, so we all disembark and have a good look at it. The guide has a leatherman with him so we pull a few teeth out for no reason. The kids make a sand castle.
We have supper in a local restaurant (Shelter), served by an Ozzie who gives me some advice on the best breaks while clearing up soft drinks spilt on him by the kids. Good food, good wine – this Tolfino place could be worth a return trip one day. The sun is set by the time we finish so it’s a romantic walk back to Frank Island across the beach in the fading light.
In fact, we do the same walk home again on our last night, only this time in complete darkness. The reason is that we attend the Tolfino lantern festival in the early evening, a cracking “do”, whereby all the kids around have made lanterns in which candles are lit, so that in the dusk light (and, later, complete darkness), the colours and shapes are lit up. The lanterns are hung in the trees and you walk along paths through the woods with the lanterns lighting your way. Very jolly, and there are various bands dispersed around the place providing accompanying music.
One more surf the next morning, and then it’s off to our final destination on the other side of the island – Yellowpoint.
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
We all go on a bear hunt
We arrive in Vancouver with nowhere to stay. 
Text messages have been swapped with Ali Williamson, because Lisa has invited us to her family cabin in Whistler, but it turns out that she is already on the flight home so we have to think again. We have a hire car, one of those “Voyager” type things, which has automatic buttons to open the boot and the slidey doors at the side. You can imagine how well this goes down with the kids – there’ always someone ready to offer to open the doors for us, and we all know what a ghastly job that can be.
So we decide to drive through Vancouver and hammer it up to Whistler that same evening. The drive itself is probably two hours at the most, and gives Sarah time to organise somewhere for us to stay, on the hoof. I can’t remember how she does this, either by phone or on the web, but we arrive at some terrific and reasonably priced hotel (Pan Pacific Village Centre) with a suite about the size of our whole house. This would be a good place to spend a week skiing, but I guess the price probably goes up a bit then. We have gas fires in each room, a hoofing great living area, kitchen, and two enormous double beds, so we end up staying here for 2 nights in the end.
Whistler in the summer is a top fun – we rent bikes, we go climbing, we go shopping for gear (this is OK, this is not “normal shopping”), we eat sushi, and generally gad about the place. Biking was tremendous fun – Sarah, Jemima and Eliza had their own bikes, while Monty and I shared one with one of those tow things, and there are mountain bike tracks galore.
We spend almost an entire day riding around, stopping here and there for pranks and photos, getting lost and found, then back to Whistler for food and afternoon beer in the sun.
I go into one of my dreamy phases when I spy a downhill bike rental place. They kit you up, body armour and all, and send you up the skilifts to the top of a huge range of downhill runs ranging from beginner (blue) to psycho (red) ending up at insane (black). I have a look at some of these and no self-respecting almost 40 yr old would do anything other than blue. They have names like “Monkey Hands”, “Samurai Pizza Cat”, “Drop-in Clinic”, “The Test of Metal”, “GearJammer”, and “No Duff”. Looking at the kids who are doing the black runs, they are all teenagers or in their early 20s. I guess anyone older than this has had a bad fall and doesn’t do it anymore. I wish I was 20 again, but since I’m not, decide to give the downhill bike rental a miss. Haslemere friend Woody bought a downhill bike to do the MegAvalanche in Alpe D’Huez and came back with broken ribs and a story about someone he met who fell off and broke his leg on the first steep pitch, then someone ran over the other one and that broke too, putting him off-games for 6 months. Enthused by this, Woody went out and ebayed himself a new downhill bike, only to break his wrist on the first jump down at Rogate.
I decide to go out and do some cross-country instead.
So I wake up at 5am the next morning and take Sarah’s basic MTB out for a spin (mine still has a tow attached). I head for the Last Lake Loop, and rides in that area with more sensible names like “Captain Safety”. Given that I am unlikely to meet anyone else around at the time, I don’t want to risk too much although I do end up falling off a few times. There is “White Gold”, “Ho Chi Minh Trail” and many many others. New ones are being built all the time – cracking bits of single track with no long ups or downs, just rolling and winding. Eventually, it begins to get a bit lighter, and I see joggers and the odd dog-walker on the main trails between the MTB loops. I also see (or rather, hear) a chap coming from some way off. He is singing and ringing his bell. I assume that he is insane.
But shortly afterwards, I realised that he probably wasn’t insane. In fact, it might have been me who was short of a few. As I came roaring around one corner (my guidemap advised “descend the naturally technical foreplay trail back into the Lost Lake area”) I ran smack into a large Black Bear. Now I didn’t actually hit it, but it was damn close. I was riding extremely fast, and by the time I rammed my brakes on I was only 20 feet away. Now I’m as happy to see a Black Bear in the wild as the next man, but by the time I stopped I can only have been 5 or 6 feet away, so there was not much that I could do other than emit a rather pained groan as I glided nearer and nearer. But bizarrely (or perhaps this happens all the time to this bear) it didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. He was big fellow, no doubt about that, much much bigger than I thought they were, but this one was not aggressive in the slightest. He looked at me, and I looked away as you are supposed to do and started walking back up the trail the way I had come, and then he just strolled off into the brush. I watched him for a while, as long as I could from the trail, as he wandered through the brush, digging a bit here and there, grubbing there, making quite a racket as he went. Thank goodness I came across a gentle one.
After that, I was a little more circumspect about the speed at which I took the trails, which took some of the fun out of it frankly. I decided to head back home, although before doing so, resolved to find the start of the famous “Comfortably numb” 24km black run. I found this with no trouble, and went along it for a few hundred yards. It was technically very difficult – narrow, with many roots, and had really dark impenetrable brush on either side. After my bear experience, I decided that this trail was one to do with some company, so I turned back and headed home.
The team was only just getting up, having had a late one at a Sushi Bar the night before. We pack (again, this is getting painful), then head over to the climbing wall so the kids can get rid of a bit of energy. This proves a massive success. There is no one else there, so we are left to our own devices. Using the autobelay devices (I need one of these for the garden) the kids charge up and down the various routes for a couple of hours. Of course I am proud Dad, and maybe all kids can climb like cats at this age, but they really did do well.
We noted that during the evenings, this climbing centre does supervised sessions for families called “Climb and dine” whereby the kids go climbing and the adults go off and have dinner. Now that’s what I call clever thinking.
We then down the mountain in the Voyager towards the ferry station, and our last destination, Vancouver Island.
Text messages have been swapped with Ali Williamson, because Lisa has invited us to her family cabin in Whistler, but it turns out that she is already on the flight home so we have to think again. We have a hire car, one of those “Voyager” type things, which has automatic buttons to open the boot and the slidey doors at the side. You can imagine how well this goes down with the kids – there’ always someone ready to offer to open the doors for us, and we all know what a ghastly job that can be.
So we decide to drive through Vancouver and hammer it up to Whistler that same evening. The drive itself is probably two hours at the most, and gives Sarah time to organise somewhere for us to stay, on the hoof. I can’t remember how she does this, either by phone or on the web, but we arrive at some terrific and reasonably priced hotel (Pan Pacific Village Centre) with a suite about the size of our whole house. This would be a good place to spend a week skiing, but I guess the price probably goes up a bit then. We have gas fires in each room, a hoofing great living area, kitchen, and two enormous double beds, so we end up staying here for 2 nights in the end.
Whistler in the summer is a top fun – we rent bikes, we go climbing, we go shopping for gear (this is OK, this is not “normal shopping”), we eat sushi, and generally gad about the place. Biking was tremendous fun – Sarah, Jemima and Eliza had their own bikes, while Monty and I shared one with one of those tow things, and there are mountain bike tracks galore.
We spend almost an entire day riding around, stopping here and there for pranks and photos, getting lost and found, then back to Whistler for food and afternoon beer in the sun.
I go into one of my dreamy phases when I spy a downhill bike rental place. They kit you up, body armour and all, and send you up the skilifts to the top of a huge range of downhill runs ranging from beginner (blue) to psycho (red) ending up at insane (black). I have a look at some of these and no self-respecting almost 40 yr old would do anything other than blue. They have names like “Monkey Hands”, “Samurai Pizza Cat”, “Drop-in Clinic”, “The Test of Metal”, “GearJammer”, and “No Duff”. Looking at the kids who are doing the black runs, they are all teenagers or in their early 20s. I guess anyone older than this has had a bad fall and doesn’t do it anymore. I wish I was 20 again, but since I’m not, decide to give the downhill bike rental a miss. Haslemere friend Woody bought a downhill bike to do the MegAvalanche in Alpe D’Huez and came back with broken ribs and a story about someone he met who fell off and broke his leg on the first steep pitch, then someone ran over the other one and that broke too, putting him off-games for 6 months. Enthused by this, Woody went out and ebayed himself a new downhill bike, only to break his wrist on the first jump down at Rogate.
I decide to go out and do some cross-country instead.
So I wake up at 5am the next morning and take Sarah’s basic MTB out for a spin (mine still has a tow attached). I head for the Last Lake Loop, and rides in that area with more sensible names like “Captain Safety”. Given that I am unlikely to meet anyone else around at the time, I don’t want to risk too much although I do end up falling off a few times. There is “White Gold”, “Ho Chi Minh Trail” and many many others. New ones are being built all the time – cracking bits of single track with no long ups or downs, just rolling and winding. Eventually, it begins to get a bit lighter, and I see joggers and the odd dog-walker on the main trails between the MTB loops. I also see (or rather, hear) a chap coming from some way off. He is singing and ringing his bell. I assume that he is insane.
But shortly afterwards, I realised that he probably wasn’t insane. In fact, it might have been me who was short of a few. As I came roaring around one corner (my guidemap advised “descend the naturally technical foreplay trail back into the Lost Lake area”) I ran smack into a large Black Bear. Now I didn’t actually hit it, but it was damn close. I was riding extremely fast, and by the time I rammed my brakes on I was only 20 feet away. Now I’m as happy to see a Black Bear in the wild as the next man, but by the time I stopped I can only have been 5 or 6 feet away, so there was not much that I could do other than emit a rather pained groan as I glided nearer and nearer. But bizarrely (or perhaps this happens all the time to this bear) it didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. He was big fellow, no doubt about that, much much bigger than I thought they were, but this one was not aggressive in the slightest. He looked at me, and I looked away as you are supposed to do and started walking back up the trail the way I had come, and then he just strolled off into the brush. I watched him for a while, as long as I could from the trail, as he wandered through the brush, digging a bit here and there, grubbing there, making quite a racket as he went. Thank goodness I came across a gentle one.
After that, I was a little more circumspect about the speed at which I took the trails, which took some of the fun out of it frankly. I decided to head back home, although before doing so, resolved to find the start of the famous “Comfortably numb” 24km black run. I found this with no trouble, and went along it for a few hundred yards. It was technically very difficult – narrow, with many roots, and had really dark impenetrable brush on either side. After my bear experience, I decided that this trail was one to do with some company, so I turned back and headed home.
The team was only just getting up, having had a late one at a Sushi Bar the night before. We pack (again, this is getting painful), then head over to the climbing wall so the kids can get rid of a bit of energy. This proves a massive success. There is no one else there, so we are left to our own devices. Using the autobelay devices (I need one of these for the garden) the kids charge up and down the various routes for a couple of hours. Of course I am proud Dad, and maybe all kids can climb like cats at this age, but they really did do well.
We noted that during the evenings, this climbing centre does supervised sessions for families called “Climb and dine” whereby the kids go climbing and the adults go off and have dinner. Now that’s what I call clever thinking.
We then down the mountain in the Voyager towards the ferry station, and our last destination, Vancouver Island.
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