Alex's Asian Adventure

This morning in my Finance class, as I was listening attentively, I noticed that I had a pants-related issue. Apparently there's some "friction" that is causing a severe deteriorating of the inseam.

Yes, you heard me. Severe deterioration. Inseam.

Now, this is a curious wardrobe malfunction to have because it is exactly like what happened to me last summer in Alaska, with exactly the same type of pants. The pants at question are Columbia's. They were the only pants I had, being the "half the clothes & twice the money" traveller that I pretend to be.

We went on a climbing trip on the first weekend of the trip. I wore a harness for much of the weekend. After we came back from the glacier, I noticed the same sort of deterioration of the inseam. I figured the pants would last. Nope.

A few days later I was hiking up Mt. McGinnis with Dominik. I stepped forward onto a big boulder thing. RRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The exchange proceeded roughly as follows:

Alex: "Hey, Dominik, are my pants ripped?"
Dominik: "Yep"
Alex: "Hmm. That's bad. I don't have another pair of pants."

As you can see from the picture below (taken later that day, from the summit of Mt. McGinnis), I am taking pains to hide my horribly disfigured pants from the camera.



I bought a new pair of pants later that day. Then I bought an identical pair of Columbia pants once I got back to Canada.

I wore my boots for another day, with predictable results. Pain and misery. I went to Adventure Guide to take matters into my own hands, and bought these boots. Yes, they're red. Yes, they're hugely rugged and scary-looking. And they're also very light and, most importantly, they fit well.

Also, my SuperFeet footbeds fit inside them just fine, and my they work well with my crampons. I tried on the boot, gaiter & crampon combination in my bedroom and thought to myself "holy crap these feet look deadly." And, I don't care in the least that the carpet is getting a little scraped by the sharp pointy metal teeth. Micky can suck it up.

Here's a word of advice: don't buy boots from Mountain Equipment Co-op, unless you're damn sure they fit 100%. If the person at the store didn't measure your feet, proceed with caution. Needless I say, MEC will be taking back my old boots and giving me my money back. Apparently the magic words to say are "this product didn't meet my expectations." The boots hurt. I'm no masochist - they didn't meet my expectations!

Thank you Rob at Adventure Guide for helping me fit them.

Back in January I bought new boots for my trip. These boots. I tried them on at MEC and everything seemed fine.

A few days later I discovered that they seem to rub my heels the wrong way. I went to Adventure Guide where Mike, the owner & world's best bootfitter, did a super-terrific job of altering my boots and things seemed to be okay.

Today I decided to wear them to school. The heels still rub. I have blisters on my heels now. I tried a bunch of things tonight to see if I can fix it myself, like pushing the footbeds forward, playing with lacing, etc. The verdict: still rubbing. Will it get better? I don't know. Can I alter them further? I don't know. I'll try them again tomorrow.

I called MEC and a very nice person told me I can return the boots, except MEC is in Toronto and I am not. I could buy new boots from Adventure Guide and hope for the best (frankly, I trust the guys there to help me with boots a lot more than I trust anyone at MEC), but I might still end up with boots that don't quite fit exactly as they should. If I go for new boots, I get to make an exciting trip to Toronto on Friday to do the return, for the cost of gas & the hassle of going to Toronto.

I leave in three weeks and I don't have time to deal with this. Finals next week. Too much to do, too little time.

I sent a mass mail about this blog. Sure enough, people read! My friend Matt Goldblatt, who I haven't seen in two years, decided to find me on MSN.

Matt seems to want to join me in China if he's able to take the time. I think that would be beyond ordinary cool, and into the realm of high-intensity cool.

Matt, if you're reading this, definitely try to make it to Beijing on the 21st!

It would make sense to actually disclose what I am doing on my 3-month travel extravaganza.

The flight itinerary is:

April 17: Toronto -> London
April 20: London -> Beijing
June 2: Hong Kong -> Delhi
July 7: Delhi -> Toronto

This means I have two days in London, six weeks in China and five weeks in India. The London plan is to hang out with my friend Mark Scannell (if he has time off work) or with myself (it he doesn't). The China plan is to be a tourist. The India plan is to trek for a month and try to climb Stok Kangri, 6121m. More on the India part later.

The China tourist itinerary is fairly flexible, but the basic plan is this:

• Arrive Beijing April 21st. 4-5 days in Beijing, including checking out the main sights around town and visiting the great wall at Simatai. I've been told that Simatai is much nicer than the usual tourist trap at Badaling.
• Take the overnight train to Xian around the 25th or 26th. Spend 2 days, maybe 3, in & around Xian. There is a terracotta army to check out.
• Take a train to Chengdu and spend a few days in the Chengdu area. Notable sights include the giant 71m buddha at Leshan and the panda research base. I actually have a hookup with a travel agency in Chengdu, and they can help me organize all this.
• Fly to Lhasa, spend at least 4 days in Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet. Depending on the situation, I may venture further afield and make a trip to Shigatse, the second largest city in Tibet.
• Fly from Lhasa to Kunming, travel up to Lijiang, hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge. This might take 5 or 6 days.
• Return to Chongqing, and a take a cruise down the Yangtze river.
  
• From wherever the cruise ends (likely Wuhan, but maybe earlier - Yichang), I'd like to travel down to Guilin and unwind. Apparently it's awesome.
• From Guilin, proceed to Hong Kong for a few days to get my act together and fly to Delhi on June 2nd.

There's a lot of flexibility built into this plan. There's actually a fair number of places that I'd like to visit if time permits, which it may not. The list includes:

• Jiayuguan, at the far western end of the Great Wall. This one's kinda unlikely since's in the middle of nowhere and immediately to the west is the Taklamakan desert.
• Wudang Shan (quite doable from Yichang) and the shaolin temple on the mountain.
• Yungang Temple & hanging caves near Datong, which (according to my map) is close to Beijing. This seems very do-able.
• The island of Hainan, strongly recommended by Casey. Someone told me today that it is a lot like Hawaii. I haven't been to Hawaii. I'm not sure if it's my sort of place.
  

Anyway, there are more places to visit than I have time for. For example, I won't be able to make a pilgrimage to Kailash on this trip, nor will I be able to visit Kashgar. However, six weeks is hardly anything to sneeze at and being the active type, I hope to cover a lot of ground.

I'm looking for input into itinerary changes, places to visit. I don't think the bulletpoint list I have above covers six weeks of travel. There's (intentionally) lots of flexibility built in. So give me suggestions.

I'll talk about the (very exciting) India part in a later post.

I figure I should write something here so that people with too much time on their hands have something to read.

I'm going trekking in India largely because I really like mountains. Some people think I'm a weirdo because of it (Krysta, I'm looking at you). I may as well explain what's fueling this obsession.

My first mountain trip was in 2000, when I went to my dojo's Rocky Mountain Training. In a nutshell, a crew of us went to Jasper National Park. We trained in the morning and went hiking in the afternoons. It was an absolute, total and utter blast. I loved it. Two years later I went on the next Rocky Mountain Training and again had a blast.

Back in the spring of 2004, my friend and fellow karate-ka Kevin, who's now a philosopher in Alaska (no better place to think really hard about stuff) was in Toronto and gave a slideshow of his recent trip to climb Aconcagua, which just happens to be the biggest mountain outside of Asia and the tallest thing in the Western hemisphere. Aside from being a philosopher, Kevin also runs the University of Alaska Southeast's outdoor studies program. Kevin's done some pretty hard-core mountaineering, too - including a ski descent of Denali. I was pretty impressed. I thought... "man, that's cool!"

Anyhow, later that summer, I was trying to figure out what to do with a bit of time I had between the end of exam and the start of my next work term. I ran into Kevin at the Bruce's Mill Training (another dojo favourite) in July and mentioned that I was looking for something to do in lieu of the Rocky Mountain Training, which didn't run that year. The conversation went something like this:

Alex: "I'm looking for something to do for a week or so in August"
Kevin: "Why don't you come to Alaska?"
Alex: "Hmm...."
I thought for a while. The thought concluded with "why don't I go to Alaska?"

I went, and spent a little over a week hiking in Juneau, surrounded by mountains, glaciers, ocean and rainforest. One of my proudest moments of the trip was getting to the top of Mt. McGinnis, a 4200ft peak, in about 4 or 5 hours. I was alone. Because of bad planning, I also had had no food or water. I sustained myself on blueberries and ate snow. But OH MAN, it felt like an accomplishment.

Hanging out with Kevin for that week got me thinking more & more about climbing and mountaineering and being more outdoorsy. Being in a mountain/ocean/glacier/rain forest paradise like Juneau was as incredibly relaxing as it was physically demanding. I liked it so much that I went back the following year to do even more of the same: climbing, hiking in the woods, hanging out on glaciers, being away from the rat race. It was probably the best vacation I've taken to date - certainly the most memorable.

There's something liberating about being in the mountains. Maybe it's the clean air. Maybe it's the fact that everything is a lot bigger. Maybe it's the fact that when you're on the side of a mountain, what you're doing is so exhausting that you don't have the time or energy to think about anything other than putting one foot in front of the other. And mountains are definitely great to look at. One way or another, though, being surrounded by peaks seems to make me happy.

Am I superstar outdoors guy? No. Am I a mountaineer? Not a chance. But that doesn't matter - I'm willing to invest in doing more of those things, learning more about mountaineering, rock climbing, glacier travel, etc. Since I despise hypocrisy, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and taking a very mountain-themed vacation as a way of celebrating being done University. After all, being outside and being physical has made me happy before - I'm hoping the trend continues, only on a bigger scale.

More later.

This is a test of the emergency photography uploading system. I hope it works. If it doesn't, there will be hell to pay.



This picture (from August 13, 2005) was taken at our base camp the day after Kevin, Jacek, Stefan, Michelle, Dominik & I climbed the 6th Mendenhall Tower, in Juneau Alaska. I am a terrible rock climber and I'll freely admit to having had a pretty tough time. But I got to the top, rapelled down, and got home in one piece. The only injury was to my ego. I hope to do more of this stuff in the future.

This blog is not to provide verbal diarrhea to do with my feelings on the world.

This blog is to keep people in Canada informed of what I am doing in my travels.

Oh yeah, and the title is not suggesting anything. Get your minds out of the gutter.

More coming.