Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: travel blog

The Kindle needs me :-)

Oh dear it has been officially noted that I’m been very lazy. Just received this from Amazon:-

We noticed your blog (listed below) has not updated for more than 30 days. Kindle customers expect to receive frequent updates for blogs and news feeds to which they subscribe. Because blogs should update at least once per month, we are cancelling blogs that have not updated in more than 60 days.

Please update your blog regularly. If it is a seasonal blog, please let us know the publication frequency

I should be writing about my exciting new toy The Fitbit You can see my daily stats on my wordpress.com blog

Or the bad time I had when The Russians broke into all my blogs and wreacked havoc. Only resolved when Quentin came to my rescue  writing UNIX command lines such as:-

grep -r -l eva1t * | grep -v phpbak | xargs -n 1 sed -ibak -e ‘s/..php.*eva1t.*/\n/’

& cleaning out every php file in 30 websites. For which I’m eternally grateful.

Or my experiences with my new Xmas present from Sally , the  Oregon weather station up to Wunderground (sorry it’s down at the moment as it needs a PC between it and the net).

Roc d'Enfer from Mont Chery

Hopefully my writers block will be freed up and folks will have less to complain about my tweets always been from scripts!

In the mean time I will enjoy my apartment in Les Gets & the great snow conditions!

and also a Happy New Year to all!!

 

Reflections

One of the reasons I enjoy travelling so much are the fascinating people you meet. in unexpected situations.

Yesterday when getting on the bus to Marocos I bumped into Ann & John, we instantly struck up a rapport, (they were confused as they had been told to use Bus 1 whereas we were on Bus 208 that was on Bus Stand 1 🙂 )

They were taking a day out from their cruise trip, A Boddington’s special cruise in their words! Ann was trying to find a beach John , I suspect, was more after a walk!

What fascinated me is that they had left England 20+ years ago to live in Switzerland with John’s job as an industrial chemist. This, immediately bought back memories of my time doing bucket chemistry in the labs at Renishaw Iron Company and at the same time made me reflect on the job offer I turned down 34 years ago  to work at ILL in Grenoble, France when Nick was 1.

They alighted at Santa Cruz whilst I continued to Marocos to walk the Levada do Canical to the Canical tunnel. A lovely walk where, for the first time, I met several walking parties who would definitely be in the Cambridge Rambling Club B group. Near the end I saw the sign to Boca do Risco (its rated a black walk  in the Rother walking guide to Madeira) so I thought why not! The climb up to the Boca (Col) was excellent. I started to get nervy as I rounded the bend and saw the crashing  Atlantic waves over a thousand feet below me. I continued on but at a land slip my head finally stopped my feet from continuing! After my near drowning in the Trisoli River in Nepal I’ve become far more cautious. Looking back at the narrow path cut into the vertical rock face I was not disappointed at my decision….

In the evening whilst having my after dinner coffee in Cafe do Teatro who should come in for their after dinner drinks,  before their cruise sailed at 11pm, but John & Ann. Ann was adamant that Madeira wasn’t for her as no decent beaches!  So I guess you will find her on Gran Canaria. John it turned out had recently walked and thoroughly enjoyed the  Camino de Frances from SJPP to Muxia, just like I did in 2004 the year I retired! He had found it every bit as emotional as I had, (At the end I was in tears on the bus from Muxia to Santiago and would gladly have turned around and walked it again).

All in all a very interesting day and so good to meet up with a very interesting couple, maybe we will meet again in July when Sally & I go with Paul and Sarah to Les Gets, I’m quite sure we will be visiting the thermal spa in Ovronnaz so we could all meet up there!.

 

First week in Madeira

Madeira mountain view
Geoff Jones in Madeira
Geoff in Maderia

One of my dreams has been to live in the winter sun, I really hate to be burning up money just to try and keep myself warm! It seems a lot more economical to live in a climate where the sun keeps you warm! However, I couldn’t live in really hot countries like Dubai etc where you equally  have to waste money on AC.

So the challenge is to find somewhere that is sunny but  still cool!, reasonably economic to live and with walking and snowboarding close by 🙂

So here I am in Madeira. 32 degrees North of the Equator surrounded by the cool Atlantic ocean, so warm but not hot! Currently its around 20ºC in the sun but cooler in the light wind. As a mega bonus the walking is superb, I’ve spent the last 7 days walking over very varied terrain and still haven’t seen but a fraction of the island.

My return flight from Stansted on Easyjet was  £57.93  I’m now staying at the very central (behind The Cathedral) Residencial queimada de baixo which is run by the Chafariz Hotel,  the rate I’m paying is €500 for a month (Equivalent to 14 days at their €35 day rate). Which I think is very reasonable; it includes breakfast and a daily clean too. For the 10 days Sally is here they are charging me €50 more 🙂 My evening meal at Cafe do Teatro is about €17 for beer, main, dessert & coffee. Coffee’s in town are about €1and the cakes are delicious.

The hotel has no internet but the municipality have installed wifi points around town so you can get free internet OK. (T-mobile are charging £10 for 50MB on their roaming tariff).

Walking is a dream 🙂 Buses (SAM, Horarios do Funchal & Rodoeste )  to the the walk starts are between €2 and €3. I’m using the Rother walking guide to Madeira. In the past week I’ve completed walks 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 17, 19 & 35 so still 41 more to do in that book!  Although some will need taxi’s to get to the starts and a couple I’m probably not capable of doing due to my vertigo 🙁

All my walks I’ve done this last week are on Everytrail with pictures on Picasa.

Two very useful iPhone apps (both based on the Open Street Map project) are OffMaps which stores the OSM map locally on your iPhone and the slightly buggy Mobile City Maps on Madeira by dubbele.com.  The OSM map so far has had all the Levadas and walks beautifully mapped and its great to know exactly where you are and in what direction you are facing!  Thank goodness for the dxpower WT-1700B power pack on the iPhone.

So far I’ve only found one outdoor shop, O Bordao on Rue Carreira 171 run by the very helpful Joao who sold me a cheap trekking pole! Very useful since Easyjet won’t allow my lovely Leki’s on the plane 🙁

And now to plan tomorrows walk…..

 

Guide to Panchasse

After my last independent trek here in Nepal, I decided to try a trek with a guide especially one who I had just created a website for 🙂

We took of from Pokhara in Buddhi’s brothers taxi to Naudader to start walking the Panchasse Circuit. Buddhi had planned it would take 2 nights and three days.

We set of downhill to start with but soon started our 2500 feet climb to the village at Panchasse village. It was interesting talking to Buddhi especially  to contrast relationships 🙂 At 25 his parents decided he should be married. So a young lady was found in another village. Buddhi played no role in this ! He met his future wife only a few days before the wedding and then only for a hour or so. Buddhi in turn was shocked that I had been married and divorced twice !!! What a contrast.

We then started talking about the caste system over here in Nepal, which IMHO cripples mobility and stigmatises people I was appalled that your caste is shown on your government ID so basically its state approved racism. Also if you marry a person of lower caste, then you and your children assume that castes lower status, also certain jobs are reserved for certain castes. What a way to cripple a persons chance in life!

We eventually reached Panchasse after many more discussions on starting & running businesses etc etc all very interesting given the huge difference in costs and rewards eg they pay £25 a month for each childs education. Quite a lot here but nothing compared to The Perse’s £1,000a month!

The ‘Happy Heart hotel’ in Panchasse was truly amazing! Red mud flloors in the bedroom (swept daily so they shine) and a kitchen out of date by a few hundred years (the village has no electric)! All the cooking (and we had a delicious Dal Bhat) is cooked on an open wood fire with no chimney! It was very interesting to see the sisters control the temperature by pulling the sticks in and out of the fire plus an occasional puff down a pipe to get it to flare again. Even more interesting was watching the sisters clean the pans by mixing the wood ash with a little water to make a paste to wipe the pans with!

The next day we were up at 5am to do the trek to see the sunrise on top of Panchasse Hill a nice brisk 1500 foot climb before breakfast. After breakfast we descended steeply down to catch the rickety old bus from Pame back to Pokhara.

A memorable trip (especially meeting one of the founders of Auroville, which is top of my list of places to visit in India -after 40 years in Auroville he has now married one of the sisters) and many thanks to Buddhi my ace Nepalese guide!

PS: We only took 2 days as we are both quite quick walkers 🙂 It’s OK he can go slower he was telling me about a customer he guided for 60days as the guy could only walk an hour or two each day!

The post header is THe Annapurna Range from Panchasse Hill

Here is the walk on Everytrail:-
Panchasse trek at EveryTrail
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