Avalanche Peak Chat

Our walk in Arthur's Pass National Park, in the form of dialogue excerpts.

"Hey, let's go on this 6-8 hour walk up the side of the mountain and back down"

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"Before I give you that guide, I have to ask... Do you have crampons and ice axes?"

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"We've not had much snow this winter, so you should be able to get up to the edge of the bush line and back down, but stick to the paths and be sensible."

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"You know how we said we were going up the side of the mountain? I didn't think it would be this much up."

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"oo there's snow!" "oo there's a pretty view!" "oo more snow" "oo another pretty view" "oo the snow is getting deeper"

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"Getting up this track is pretty slippy, but I think getting down will be even worse. But that's a problem for after a cheese sandwich."

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"10/10 lunch spot"

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"There's no snow on the rock ledges, let's climb higher"

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"That's the top just there... oh wait..."

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"We're almost at the edge of the bush line...oh wait..."

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"I don't think the views will get any better if we climb any higher."

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"Yeah, I was going to suggest a controlled slide down."

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"These bridges were near the start, right?"

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"I'm bored of going downhill"

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"You know how we were going to climb up to that waterfall afterwards. I don't think I can be bothered."

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"Those bridges weren't near the start."

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"Yay, the bottom. Let's just have a kitkat"

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"You should definitely go to the waterfall viewing platform, it's only 20 minutes!"

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"You know when I said I couldn't be bothered to climb to the waterfall. I was right."

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"Ok. It was worth it."

Quake City

Walking into Christchurch didn't feel like walking into a city centre. No big tall skyscrapers, no massive branded shops that are in every city in the world; There's corners without coffee shops, and there's barely a road anywhere without road-works on. We wandered and wondered where all the people were, why it was so quiet, why the tram goes round on a tiny loop to nowhere, desperate for passengers to give it some purpose. It wasn't until we sat down in Cathedral Square, in front of a derelict old cathedral that we realised the earthquake of five years ago was the answer to all of our questions, and the reason that there is a definite lack of identity in the middle of the second largest city New Zealand.

Christchurch is desperately trying to find itself again, after being literally shaken to the ground. Beautiful buildings that once stood are now piles of rubble, in an area waiting for a new building. New buildings have developed, and are bright shining beacons of the future in a world that has few reminders of the past. Office blocks are growing, museums have found new homes (or been created from the events themselves - Quake City). Hotels are appearing again, and tourists are slowly making their way back to a city (and wider area) that desperately needs their income. There's one lonely food cart on Cathedral Square (who sells some decent French Fries - try the chilli mayo!), and a city mall (Re:Start) made from shipping containers, which hopefully isn't temporary, because it is a great visual representation of the incredible things we can do in the face of adversity. A new memorial is being created by the river bank, to all of those who lost their lives during the quakes. Christchurch is rebuilding itself.

And amidst all of this is the cathedral, part standing by itself, part being held up by scaffolding, and part demolished, fenced all around, with no access to a once proud structure which is now clearly not safe to enter. Due to disagreements about who should pay for the next step, it stands alone in the city, the one last remnant of 22^nd February 2011. One last reminder to those who lived through it and are trying to piece their lives back together, to the tourists who only saw what happened on the TV and can't quite picture it (because that kind of thing doesn't happen to you, right?), and to those who have simply forgotten it happened, and need to remember the reason why Christchurch still isn't quite up to full strength. 

Australia Five Photos

So I've been in Australia for 7 months now, mostly working for PGL at Camp Rumbug, and it's been an absolute blast. It's hard to describe everything that's happened, so I'm going to do that thing where I post my top 5 photos and an explanation of each in less than 150 words... Here goes.

Me and my Brits (L-R:Jake, Drew and Katie) These are the guys I lived with, ate with, had water pistol fights with (sometimes indoors - sorry Mum!), BBQed with, went to the zoo with, played cards with, watched far too many films with, and went to the beach in matching hats with. We're so cool. They were an absolute pleasure to live, work and play alongside :) 

Each morning on group, I had to go to work at least half an hour before breakfast and make and butter toast for my whole group. This is roughly 1 loaf per 10 people, and when I had up to 200 people (including teachers) in a group, that works out as a whole lot of toast far too early in the morning. Why am I talking about toast when the picture is clearly of the sunrise? This is the view that made it all easier. The view that made standing at that toaster bearable. Foggy days were hard work - luckily there weren't many of them! 

This is some more of the gang, at a party in our house. They are complete lunatics, but they are my Rumbug family. They were welcoming, and accepting of all of my (our) British idiosyncrasies (most of the time - it's still a hoover though guys). They put up with me in my good moods and my bad, and as with my actual family, criticised my odd socks every day. They invited me to their houses, let me invite myself round to their houses, had a surprise birthday party for me (not the party pictured), fed me, laughed with me, listened to my rants, worried about me when I had a cold (and got stressed that I was still wearing shorts in the winter) and helped me whenever I needed help. They are awesome people. 

Mostly, I had weekends off. This one weekend, I had big plans to stay up all night to watch Wimbledon, and to sleep during the days (time zones make watching sports in the UK very difficult!). I knew that I had to go to the post office on the Saturday morning though, so I got up thinking I'd drive there and back, and straight back to bed. On the drive there, it was such a beautiful day, I changed my plans. I headed down to Wilsons Prom, the local National Park, and climbed Mt Oberon, and had the most spectacular views. Found a quiet spot and had some time watching the clouds float by.  

Over Easter, we were lucky enough to get two weeks off work. Me, Katie, Drew and Claire flew over to Tasmania, and had a fabulous 2 weeks, with great weather. We stayed in Hobart for a few days, headed down to Port Arthur (one of the British Prisons), went up to Cradle Mountain (I've got a great photo of a rainbow over Lake St Clair which was very close to being on this blog!) and Wineglass Bay, we stayed in a town called Penguin (The only town called Penguin in the world), and camped on Bruny Island - this photo is from our private beach that we camped next to. Life is so hard when you have a private beach! 

As you can see, it's been pretty spectacular, and spectacularly pretty. I'm now off to New Zealand, followed by South East Asia, so will be blogging mostly to keep Mum happy ;) but it's also good to have some kind of record of my travels, because I am terrible at keeping a diary! As this chapter of my adventure comes to an end, and another one is about to start, this one quote sums up how I'm feeling pretty much perfectly...

"As I go on, my idea of home is expanding &

I can’t wait to find out how big it will be" 

- Brian Andreas

Blog Break

So, apparently I didn't write anything about my actual Latvia trip, or even my SECOND Latvia trip - the one where I was the leader of the project in 2015. For details on either of these projects, please follow these links:

GOLD Latvia 2014

GOLD Latvia 2015

2016 has found me in Australia, working for PGL at the most beautiful camp in the entire world - Camp Rumbug (I may be a little biased). My time at Camp Rumbug is almost at an end, so when I finish I'll write a blog about that and then continue on with my upcoming adventures... 

One week to go

As the title says, it's now just over one week to go until my GOLD project. On Saturday, I was lucky enough to attend the Midlands Region International Debrief, despite having not been on my trip yet! Whilst it was great to see photos and hear stories from all the other region trips that have happened this year, the most exciting bit for me was the chance to catch up with some fellow GOLDies - one who went to Guyana in 2013, and one who arrived back from Malawi and her onward travel last week!! It was really useful and important for me to chat with them and to see how excited they are for me, because right now, I'm at the stage of feeling a little overwhelmed and a lot underprepared!! They did assure me that this is totally normal (which I did know deep down but still appreciated the assurance) and that despite all apprehensions and nerves, I am going to have an amazing time - another thing I do actually know, but just need to keep reminding myself of!!

Three weeks in one country; sleeping, cooking, planning, working in hostels with 5 teammates; and leading and training people who may not necessarily understand the language being used is a daunting prospect, and while overall, I relish the challenge and am eager to get going, there's still that child in me that used to hide behind my mum's skirts whenever I met anyone new.

But. Time to put the nerves away and to crack on with the packing... Now, where DID I put my passport?!

The one where I throw myself off a tower several times...

I love abseiling. I do it every chance I get, even if it means going out after work and helping out with a late night training session here at Caythorpe. I've abseiled off a 100ft (~30m) sea cliff in the Isle of Man, and a 100ft waterfall in Australia. Abseiling is pretty much my favourite thing in the whole world, and most of my friends know that. So when I was planning what to do for my fundraising, obviously I thought about abseiling. But it's not a challenge for me, and it should be a challenge if you want people to sponsor you. There's not a building, cliff or rock face here in the UK that's tall enough to be a challenge for me. So how could I make it a challenge? An endurance abseil! So, I decided to do an hour long abseil session down the 40ft (~12m) tower at work- with the aim of 40 descents during the hour - and set May 12^th as the date. 

At 5am on Monday morning I woke up, suddenly very nervous. My head had just done the calculations - 40ft tower, 40 descents, that meant abseiling 1600ft (~480m). That's a long way. It also means I'm doing one descent every minute and a half - from clipping in at the top of the tower, down to the bottom, unclipping and running back up the stairs to the top again... My head kept spinning - Would it be faster to walk down or jump down the wall? What would be the quickest way to clip and unclip myself from the ropes so that I could get back up the stairs? Oh my, the stairs. Would my knee (always a little bit dodgy) cope with the stairs? Eventually I managed to persuade myself to sleep again and get a bit of rest before the time.

It was an easy morning at work, there were no guests on site, so we had a meeting at 11.30, lunch at 12, and then it was time to go. With my four helpers (Brit, Lewis, Hannah, and Amy), we set up the abseil ropes and I harnessed up, and stepped off the tower, ready to go, with various cheers from people working below me. Lewis checked I was safe, and the timer started. I flew down the wall, Hannah helped to unclip me, and I was back to the top of the wall again in 34 seconds. After 5 minutes, I'd done my first 5 descents. It was only going to get harder though. After about 14 descents, Lewis and Brit commented that I should have said I was doing a sponsored stair climb rather than a sponsored abseil, because that's where the hard bit was. I flew up them the first few times, but a 46 step spiral staircase isn't something to be taken lightly. I soon slowed down, including suggesting I take a nap half way up the staircase at one point. Apparently I wasn't allowed. 

At 25 minutes, I'd done 20 descents - half way to my aim of 40, and Amy took over from Brit at the top of the tower. After about 25 stair climbs, I grabbed my inhaler for some much needed lung relief - definitely worked! I hit 30 descents with about 20 minutes left. I had to do 1 descent every 2 minutes to hit my target. The stairs varied from feeling like the longest staircase I'd every climbed in my life to feeling like I only had to climb 2 stairs and I was at the top. With 10 minutes left, I had 5 descents left so, like any true endurance runner, I sprinted to the finish. I climbed out of the tower for my 40^th descent at 56 minutes, and hit the bottom with 3.5 minutes left, so I headed back up to do one extra one, because there's nothing like beating your target. I took it a bit slower though, and enjoyed it! 

All the way through the hour, I had my friends and colleagues cheering me on, with random shouts of "How many have you done?" and "How long left?" which I generally let Hannah answer because I couldn't breathe! So I'd like to say thank you to everyone cheering from the ground, and an even bigger thank you to Lewis, Hannah, Brit and Amy for their technical support - I literally couldn't have done it without them!

I'd also like to say a big thank you to everyone who's sponsored me so far - Right now, I'm not entirely sure how much I've raised, because there's still money coming in, but I think it'll be around £200. If you'd like to sponsor me in retrospect, you can do so either in person, or on my justgiving here. It all helps to get me to Latvia for my GOLD project!

PS - I also owe a thank you to PGL Caythorpe Court for the use of the tower, and to the Chief Instructor Lana for letting me go for a shower and sit in the office doing some laminating for a while before I went back out to work with the kids - it took me a while to return to a normal colour! 

Second Briefing - Just like the first, but a little bit louder...

So this weekend found all the 2014 GOLDies (i.e. everyone doing a GOLD project this year) at Bramhope Scout Campsite, just North of Leeds, for our second briefing. We arrived scattered throughout the evening, with those of us on trains appearing on time, whilst those in cars were definitely late - apparently driving up the M1 on a Friday night isn't the best idea - who knew?!. The fog also descended which didn't help the drivers, but eventually Team Latvia were reunited at about 11pm - at which point we decided a Team Sleep would be the best use of our time!

Saturday morning started with the sad (but not entirely unexpected) news that the Ukrainian GOLD project has had to be cancelled this year. We are all really sorry for the Ukrainian team, and hope that they have a fun year whatever they end up doing. They are all guaranteed a place on a GOLD trip next year, if they want it, so I wish them all luck with next year's projects!

After breakfast each team did an interactive presentation or activity about their country or project (even the Ukrainian team), which provided a highly entertaining morning with a wide variety of tasks, ranging from finding hidden facts to true or false quizzes, to blockbusters, to tying neckers and playing with balloons. We learnt a lot about the other projects and their aims, which was really interesting, as a lot of the first briefing was focussed on our own project. We also discovered some teams know A LOT about what they're meant to be doing in country (Peru!) and some know nothing (Latvia!).

Next up was some time in our own groups. For Latvia this meant attempting to plan our lives and fit in two more briefings before we go in October. We didn't manage it. In our team of 6, we have two members who work Monday-Friday office jobs, one who works freelance, one who works nights at the weekend, a nurse on shifts, and me who works 6 days a week with often strange timings. We tried every weekend, we tried mid-week, we tried a combination of the two... we discovered it was impossible. So Team Latvia will be together again for 3 days in August, and will be having LOTS of teleconferences to make up for our lack of briefings! 

We also discovered that Team Latvia love squash.

After lunch (soup!), we had workshops on delivering trainings and WAGGGS, as well as working with translators and facilitation skills. It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of information, and there were some very sleepy GOLDies at dinner time!

BUT. We soon woke up again because the evening was BIG BROWNIE BIRTHDAY! Each team had selected a Brownie badge and based an activity on that badge. We had the entertainer badge (create a dance for your country), we had the hostess badge (plan a party relay race style), we had the world traveller badge (play Good Evening Friend Brownie with various greetings from around the world), we had the designer badge (create a brownie uniform from a different country out of recycling), we had the booklover badge (sack race with book related questions), we had circus skills badge (put food in each other's faces basically...), we had the dancer badge (create a dance based on a fairytale, with props), and Team Latvia's Swimmer badge (relay race with swimming kit and bubbles...). As you can imagine, there was a lot of laughter and a lot of mess! But once again, I was amazed at how quickly a group of 18-30 guides can tidy up - within 10 minutes (including time for photos) the hall looked just as it did before we started!

Team Latvia 2014

Unsurprisingly, we all slept VERY well that night! Team Latvia almost didn't wake up for breakfast, as we all forgot to set/turned off alarm clocks. Luckily I woke up at 7.45, and in 10 minutes we were all out the door (including two members showering!) - and even with enough time to get good seats at breakfast!

Sunday morning saw us learning about our various roles - documenting (writing blogs and taking photos), accounting (yawn) and first aid (in the smallest hottest room in the world) - followed by more team time (which turned into us buying badges in the campsite shop!). We also planned most of our Challenge badge, which will be coming out very soon!

After lunch (all the leftovers you can imagine), all the GOLDies cleared up the two blocks we had been using, in record time. I hoovered. Then my team mates set off party poppers just after I'd hoovered. Thanks guys.

Our final half an hour consisted of an inspirational speech from Anna, GOLD co-ordinator, a slideshow of photos from our GOLD journey so far, and the realisation that this was the last time all of the 2014 GOLDies would be in a room together. We've been given all the tools and information that we need to undertake a successful project, and from now on, we split off down our own paths. In December, Team Latvia will join up again with Team The Gambia and Team Sri Lanka for a debrief in Northamptonshire, but the other teams (Peru, Cambodia, Guyana and Malawi) will already have had their debrief earlier on in the year.

2014 GOLDies with Anna (left - GOLD Co-ordinator) and Carly (Right - Events Co-ordinator)

Good luck to everyone on their projects, and I can't wait to read all your blogs! (I'll put up links to all blogs on here in a few weeks if anyone is interested about any of the other projects)