author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
The most talked about subject in Britain at the moment isn’t the upcoming London Olympics, but the crap weather we’ve been having. First it was the wettest April on record, then it was the wettest May on record. I happened
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The photograph on the wall in the farmhouse at La Esperanza where we stayed the night had been taken 15 years ago, but it looked very different from the place we had walked through earlier in the day. I use
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In this, the second of my posts about my recent visit to the mountains of Colombia, I’m going to digress from my usual topics of trekking and mountaineering to talk about flora. This isn’t unprecedented. Last year I managed to
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“The most marvellous of all Abyssinian landscapes opened before us, as we looked across a gorge that was clouded amethyst to the peaks of Simyen.” Rosita Forbes, From Red Sea to Blue Nile – A Thousand Miles of Ethiopia (1925)
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Why great photography takes balls It’s a bit embarrassing to say this, but as far as photography’s concerned I’m still something of a point-and-click man. I have several thousand photos on my website from dozens of expeditions worldwide, and some
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The great Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner famously claimed to have seen a yeti when he was camping alone in a clearing in Tibet in 1986. Whatever it was, it moved adeptly on two legs and was too big to be
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I’m going to conclude my trio of posts about Bhutan by relating an incident that happened at a place called Jangothang on the Jhomolhari trek. In previous posts I’ve been moaning about the weather in Bhutan, and how the beautiful
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This is a post of two halves, with the second instalment next week looking at the other side of the coin. Much has been said about the high cost of tourism in Bhutan, where the government charges a minimum fee
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Looking back at the Save Our Forests campaign Across the Middle East grassroots movements are toppling governments one after another like dominoes. Tunisia and Egypt are already down, and Libya and Yemen are next in line. Somewhat less momentously, but
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It’s not been the best of weather this weekend, but even so I may have preferred to spend it outdoors rather than sitting in front of a computer screen responding to a boring government consultation document. It’s a task I’ve
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