Riding through Iceland's lovely Westfjords

Thunder Bay, July 21, 2013

As heavy rains lash down outside, it’s a perfect day not to go for a bicycle ride and instead to try to summarize last month’s three and a half week bike trip around the amazing island of Iceland.  In order to make sure that this actually gets uploaded soon, I will divide up the trip into two sections:  the Westfjords, followed by the north, the central highlands and the south coast.  Today’s installment will be about what for me was the highlight of the trip, the lovely Westfjords.

Terri and I flew to Keflavik airport on Saturday, June 8.  We arrived to grey skies and a cold, searching wind that soon had us seeking shelter as we waited for the shuttle bus from our hideously overpriced motel, Motel Alex, to arrive.  We picked up our bicycles, which we had mailed to Motel Alex from Switzerland two weeks earlier to avoid Lufthansa’s irritating “we can’t guarantee that we can take your bikes” policy on the first leg of the flight, and put them together.  It was hard to fall asleep, despite our travel weariness, with the 24-hour perpetual daylight penetrating the paper-thin gauze curtains, but we eventually nodded off.

Departing the Motel Alex on June 9th

The next day, our first day in the saddle, started out promisingly and ended poorly.  We ate to the point of bursting at the breakfast buffet, trying to get our money’s worth, and then spent some time on the inevitable fine adjustments at the beginning of a trip, particularly on Terri’s bike which had never been ridden with so much luggage on it.  Eventually we got the details right and rode off into a bracing headwind, the story of most of our days in Iceland.

We made our way slowly along the main highway towards Reykjavik before turning south towards the most famous tourist spot in all of Iceland, the Blue Lagoon.  We rolled through a bleak landscape of black lava covered with grey lichen towards a plume of steam visible from Keflavik.  This part of the country lies right on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the European and North American continents are spreading apart at 2 centimetres a year, and the earth’s crust is very thin, leading to lots of volcanic activity (hence the lava) and geothermal hot springs (hence the parade of tour buses passing us).  We got to the Blue Lagoon, parked our bikes, pulled out our swimsuits and headed into the complex. 

The milky white pools of the Blue Lagoon

After paying a truly astronomical sum to enter (over $50 a person; welcome to Iceland!), we found ourselves in a gigantic natural hot pool, where mineral salts made the water an unearthly greenish blue and coated the black lava stones of the bottom with a thick layer of chalky white mineral deposits.  The water was hot enough to make us forget the cold weather and the rain which started up while we were in the pools.  We drifted around the long perimeter of the lagoon, trying out the volcanic mud’s effect on our skin and treating ourselves to a shared beer at a painful price.  It was a beautiful spot, but the high prices and rampant consumerism detracted somewhat from the magic. 

Eventually we summoned up the courage to get out of the pool and get back on the bikes.  The rain had not abated and we pedalled through cold wind and driving rain all the way to Reykjavik, a rather unpleasant 55 km that left us soaked and frozen.  The scenery was unremittingly bleak, the traffic was heavy, the winds got stronger and stronger, and there were no towns or even gas stations in which to feed ourselves.  By the time we hit Hafnafjorthur, the furthest outskirts of the capital, we were ravenous and tucked into some French fries after cleaning out the local supermarket.  With the rain continuing, we abandoned plans to camp and headed to the Reykjavik Youth Hostel for a few hours of sleep and drying out wet clothes.

Very early the next morning we rode our bikes to a distant suburban bus station, Mjodd, in search of a bus to Stykkisholmur.  The bus services out of Reykjavik have changed completely this year, and it had taken lots of phoning around from the helpful woman at the hostel front desk to figure out where the bus would leave from.  We arrived just in time, loaded our bikes and bags in the bottom of the bus and sped off up the west coast.  We changed to a tiny minibus halfway to Stykkisholmur, but it had a luggage trailer the perfect size for taking our bikes.  I’m usually opposed to taking buses during a bike trip, but given our time constraints, we had decided that it was worth it to get directly to the Westfjords and start riding as soon as possible. 

The first of many wonderful hot pots, near Kross, on the first evening in the Westfjords

By 11:00 we were in the pretty harbour of Stykkisholmur, where we put on more clothes (it was only 8 degrees with a stiff wind), had some of the fast food that is the only affordable fare in Iceland (burgers and fries are as ubiquitous as huge four-wheel drives; Icelanders have a love affair with US culture) and spent an enjoyable few hours waiting for the afternoon ferry up a small hill by the lighthouse.  The crossing to tiny Brjanslaukur took a few more hours, featuring a number of puffins spotted in the distance, flying by or bobbing in the ocean, and then, finally, we were on the south coast of the Westfjords.  The traffic was non-existent and the scenery was wonderful, with steep cliffs, scattered sheep farms, tumbling waterfalls and iridescent green colours in the evening sun.  We rode south and then west for 14 easy kilometres, relishing the perfect riding conditions and deserted road, to arrive at the first of many geothermally heated pools (hot pots) that would mark our path around the island.  We paid our 500 kronur ($4.50) each and slipped into a 15-metre-long swimming pool that was blissfully warm.  After a long wallow, I got out and got dressed to search for a suitable camping spot.  Terri, more reluctant to emerge, was shown by the lady running the place to the actual hot pot, a tiny stone-lined hot tub behind the swimming pool, surrounded on three sides by the ocean, where she soaked happily for a good while longer.

We camped that night just down the shore, in a beautiful seaside meadow, the first of many great campsites.  As we set up the tent, I made the unwelcome discovery that I didn’t have the right set of tent poles for my tent.  I had brought the Crux mountaineering tent that I had had on Peak Lenin and Muztagh Ata and in Ladakh last summer.  One of the poles had snapped on Muztagh Ata and Crux had kindly sent a complete set of replacement poles.  Unfortunately, since it had been snowing in Leysin right up until my departure, I hadn’t gotten around to putting up the tent and hadn’t realized that Crux had sent me a mismatched set, with one of the long poles replaced with a much shorter pole.  We improvised a solution, but the tent was floppy and loose, which was annoying whenever it was windy (in other words, pretty much every night).  A classic rookie error on my part.

The first big climb between fjords

The next day, our first full day of riding in the Westfjords was a rollercoaster, both physically and (for Terri) psychologically.  We slept well, had a good breakfast of muesli and yoghurt and were rolling along the coast by 9:30 am, although through a headwind.  After an hour, the road turned inland for the first of many crossings between adjacent fjords.  The climb itself was not enormously high (about 425 metres) or hugely steep; Terri had done much longer, higher climbs many times in the Alps on her racing bike.  This was, however, her first time doing a climb like this with full camping gear, four panniers and a sturdy touring bike.  The many extra kilograms, which to me have become so natural as to be barely noticeable, were a tremendous shock to her system and the climb was a long, painful ordeal that exhausted her legs and left her starving.  We descended through beautiful moorland to the blue waters of the next fjord and then turned left, off the asphalt onto the unpaved road leading out to the bird cliffs of Latrabjarg.  

The beautiful beaches heading towards Latrabjarg

At first this went well, with a fairly well-graded gravel road that ran more or less level, but as we progressed, the road began to undulate more and more, while the gravel grew looser.  Trying to make a fully-loaded touring bike climb a loose gravel road when the going gets steep is an acquired skill, and Terri found it to be a baptism by fire.  We pulled into a quirky little museum café in the middle of nowhere to buy expensive cake and soda to fuel Terri up the next big climb, but by the time we reached the top, Terri was mentally and physically done.  Unfortunately, however, we weren’t really anywhere we could camp, so we continued our roller coaster ride up and then down, down, down to the motel at Breithavik, located beside the sea in a beautiful setting some 15 km short of Latrabjarg.  There was a commercial campground there that charged an outrageous 1900 kronur ($18) per person, but with Terri not able to continue, we had little choice.  At least we had access to an excellent indoor kitchen to cook dinner, and were able to do a bit of laundry.  Terri was despondent that evening at the thought of more steep unpaved hills to come, and I could not convince her that she would eventually get used to them.

A razorbill auk at Latrabjarg

The spectacular coastline of Latrabjarg

The next morning Terri hitchhiked out to Latrabjarg while I rode my bike.  Given the paucity of traffic, I actually arrived a few minutes before her, enjoying an easy ride with no luggage to slow me down.  The sun came out and the colours of the last little fishing village and the splendid coastal cliffs led to lots of photo stops.  When Terri arrived in the car of a local archaeologist, we set off together on foot to one of the great natural sights of Iceland, the nesting grounds of hundreds of thousands of seabirds in high-density high-rise accommodations.  Razorbill auks and Burrich’s guillemots clustered in their multitudes along tiny shelves in the otherwise sheer basalt cliffs.  Overhead glaucous gulls and northern fulmars cawed and wheeled in dense swarms.  We walked along a path through the grassy meadows, staying away from the very edge of the cliffs where puffin burrows have undercut the earth and left the ground crumbly and dangerous. We hiked along, pausing to take pictures of the birds and searching for puffins.  We knew that there were thousands of these comical seabirds floating offshore in the rough ocean, but we had heard that there were also puffins to be seen up close and personal on the shore.  After an hour of searching, we had almost given up when I suddenly spied one just below the lip of the cliff.  We lay down atop the cliff (to minimize the risk of the ground giving way beneath us) and peered at the elusive bird.  Once we had trained our eyes to see them, they were everywhere, and we had several very close encounters with some very unafraid puffins. 

One of Iceland's 10 million or so puffins

Eventually it was time to drag ourselves away from the amazing birdlife and get going.  Terri got a lift back while I zipped along the road, enjoying the views and the perfect weather.  Back at Breithavik, we packed up our camp and headed back along the road we had followed the day before.  Despite Terri’s misgivings, she found the climb back over the pass towards the main fjord much easier than the day before, even though the sky suddenly clouded over and got cold and unpleasant.  We passed the museum again, warmed ourselves up with some instant soup, then pedalled along the south shore of Patreksfjorthur, almost entirely untroubled by cars.  Eventually, after 35 kilometres of dirt road, we rode onto the pavement and then turned left along the north shore of the fjord toward the little town of Patreksfjorthur. 

An hour’s hard riding through the chilly headwind brought us into town.  We stopped for burgers and fries in a little diner where a friendly local man was pleased to hear that Terri was a Kiwi.  He told us of numerous young New Zealanders that had come to tiny Patreksfjorthur over the years to work in the fish processing plant in the course of working their way around the world.  We found the local campground (almost every village in the country seemed to have one), put up the tent and settled in for a good night’s sleep. 

Terri fleeing the fogs of Patreksfjorthur

Crossing from Patreksfjorthur to Arnarsfjorthur

The best thing about this little campground was that the showers weren’t working yet (the place was still under construction).  That meant that for our 1000 kronurs each, we also got a free pass to the local swimming pool, a state-of-the-art facility that we visited the following morning as soon as we woke up.  We had the piping hot pots to ourselves, and it made for a very civilized start to a foggy, cold day.  After a prolonged breakfast back at the campground, we finally rolled out of town and up the next pass.  After 150 vertical metres, we popped out of the fog into the bright sunshine that would follow us for days through the Westfjords.  An hour’s brisk climbing brought us to the top of the pass, 400 metres or so above the fogs of Patreksfjorthur.  The exhilarating descent down the other side to the next fjord made the long climb worth it, and got the blood pumping for the next climb, straight up another 400 metres across the typical bleak moorland that starts not far above sea level.  Terri climbed slowly but steadily and soon enough we were at the top, looking back at the sinuous path of our road and ahead to the sun-soaked blue and green of the loveliest fjord so far, Arnarsfjorthur (Eagle Fjord). 

Terri and Jan relaxing in Reykjanesfjorthur's natural hot pot

Another screaming downhill brought us back to sea level and after a roadside sandwich on the outskirts of the lone settlement, we rode for a couple of hours along the fjord, past occasional isolated farmsteads, fluffy sheep, big flocks of white and black eider ducks and imposing basalt cliffs.  We passed an impressive waterfall at Foss, then rolled a bit further to probably the best campsite of the entire trip, at Reykjanesfjorthur.  We had seen an intriguing hot spring sign on the map, but hadn’t found anything about it in our guidebooks.  We found an old, abandoned geothermal swimming pool that had seen better days, but behind it was a natural hot potl in a river that steamed at 38 degrees.  A farm had once occupied the fertile meadow behind but was now abandoned, and a sign announced that the hot springs were free for anyone to enjoy.  We set up our tent on the shore, cooked dinner and then set about enjoying the magnificent setting.  A couple of other sets of travellers dropped in:  a South African couple on a motorcycle, and a pair of German guys in a car, along with an older Icelandic guy with whom we struck up a conversation as we sat in the swirling steam.  Jan worked as a tour guide in Arnarsfjorthur, doing whale-watching, hiking and sailing in a replica Viking longboat.  Chatting with him, we watched the hot water of the river steam its way towards the frigid waters of the fjord as the shadows lengthened.  Iceland in June is perfect midnight sun country; the sun actually does set, but only for a couple of hours, and the sun remains close enough to the horizon that you can read a book outside at 1:00 am. 

Our perfect campsite at Reykjanesfjorthur

Leaving the fogs behind

In the morning, we awoke to morning sea fog again, and as we cooked breakfast, we spotted Iceland’s lone species of indigenous land mammal.  An Arctic fox, its pelt an incongruous grey, looking squatter than most types of fox, wandered down from the high moorlands and poked around, probably looking for bird eggs.  With no other mammals to eat, the foxes of Iceland survive largely on sea birds.  We watched through binoculars until it disappeared in the distance, then packed up and set off for what promised to be a challenging day of riding.  We trundled along the lovely fjord for a while, past endless flocks of eiders and a few tufted ducks, then turned resolutely inland and began to climb.  This time the climb wasn’t a simple up-and-down crossing to an adjacent fjord.  Instead we climbed fairly high (500 metres) to a road junction where we found ourselves, after all these days, only 14 kilometres from where we had started at Brjanslaukur, then undulated for a few hours across an endless bleak moorland, still dotted with leftover snow.  The road eventually dropped 200 metres, then immediately climbed again to 500 metres, passing a plethora of tiny lakes and a couple of pretty large rivers draining this soggy landscape.  Terri rode well and made the top easily, but was glad when we finally started the long, curving descent down a very pretty river valley.  Near the bottom, our destination for the day finally came into view:  one of the highest waterfalls in Iceland, Dynjandi falls.  There was another free campsite at the bottom where we set up our tent and settled in for a lazy late afternoon. 

The descent to Dynjandi waterfalls

Terri was tired after the day’s climbing, and more or less passed out in her sleeping bag on the grass, her Kindle perched unopened on her chest.  I fed her soup, whisky and a big supper, pleased that she had not cracked on the tough climbs and was getting into climbing shape.  The falls were spectacular, but after a long day in the saddle, we decided to defer the hike to the top until the morning.  As we lounged on the grass, we had a long conversation with a pair of Canadian sisters who were on a hiking trip.  The problem with hiking Iceland this June was that everything was under much more snow than usual at this time of year, and a lot of trails were completely or partially closed.  Terri also made friends with the inhabitants of a couple of huge camper vans that were sharing the campground with us.

One tired cyclist relaxes at Dynjandi

The decision to hike in the morning looked pretty foolish when we woke up to morning fog again; the falls were more or less invisible from the bottom, so we decided to cycle onwards towards Thingeyri.  Terri had heard horror stories from drivers coming from there about how much higher and steeper this road was than any other pass in the Westfjords, so she decided to try to hitch a ride.  Luckily a camper rolled up behind us after a few minutes and picked her up, leaving me to ride over the top.  As it proved, the pass was only a bit higher than usual (550 metres, instead of the usual 500) and the road was no steeper, despite alarming signs at the bottom.  I was over in little more than an hour and then had a wonderful sweeping downhill (interrupted by a misplaced and annoying brief uphill) to Thingeyri.  I found Terri in the care of the campers, a hospitable retired French couple named Titou and Giraud who had fed her lunch.  With difficulty I got her back on her bike and we rode along the fjord, stopping for a hot dog (Iceland’s national dish) in town and a cheese sandwich and beer (thanks to the campers the night before).  We had another pass to cross before supper, but this one proved to be easy and Terri, with her legs fresh, zipped over the top in good time.  We coasted down into the most populated fjord yet, dotted with farms that seemed to specialize in the stocky, beautiful horses that are a symbol of Iceland.  We found a great campsite on the shore of the fjord and settled in for the night, well satisfied with another good day in the saddle.

Heading out of Thingeyri

We had now ridden five full days in the Westfjords, and only now were we approaching the regional hub, Isafjorthur.  The next morning found us climbing up to the mouth of the all-season tunnel that has replaced the old road over the pass.  Luckily, in practical Icelandic fashion, bicycles can easily traverse the tunnel as it’s well lit, with passing bays at regular intervals.  It’s still spooky, but with very scant traffic and our lights on we felt pretty secure, although very cold.  It was a relief to poke our heads out of the other end and see the metropolis of Isafjorthur (population 3000) sprawling picturesquely into the calm waters of the fjord.

Our first priority was a good meal.  We had heard tales of good, affordable fish at one of the local restaurants, and it proved to be the best meal of the trip.  We tucked into cod and potatoes in a stylish little pub, fueling us up for the lean kilometres ahead.  We had originally planned to spend the night in town, but the local campgrounds were either closed or dismal, so instead we looked into bus schedules, had a prolonged soak in the hot tubs at the local swimming pool, stocked up on groceries at the supermarket and rode 25 km along the shore to the fishing hamlet of Suthavik.  On the way we spent most of the trip gazing north towards the snow-choked slopes of the Hornstrandir peninsula.  This is usually a hiking mecca, with no permanent habitation and no road access, but the record snows of the past winter had left half the peninsula closed to hikers, while the other half had tiny paths worn between towering snowbanks.  Terri and I had originally toyed with the idea of hiking there, and were glad that we had eventually decided against it.

Gazing north towards the Hornstrandir peninsula

Suthavik has a brand new municipal campground, and we were the only inhabitants that evening.  We first dropped by the Arctic fox centre, a little museum detailing the research being done on Hornstrandir into the habits of this little creature.  Foxes were ferociously hunted and poisoned over the centuries, and farmers still try to rid their lands of them.  Only on Hornstrandir are they completely protected.  Since my sister Saakje spent a summer in the Canadian Arctic studying lemmings (Arctic foxes’ prey of choice wherever they’re available, but not present in Iceland), I was intrigued to see what scientists have found about the foxes.  After the museum, we retreated to a café for the inevitable burgers and then to our tent to escape the brisk wind that had sprung up.

Bleak weather as we cycle toward Ogur

The next day, June 17^th, proved to be the last full day of cycling we did in the Westfjords.  After days of sunshine and relative warmth, Iceland’s latitude reasserted itself with cloud and cold southerly winds.  Since we spent the day going up and down fjords oriented north-south, this made for Jeckyll and Hyde riding.  Going south we gritted our teeth, put our heads down and rode in close formation, Terri drafting behind me, struggling to keep the speed at 13 km/h.  At the head of the fjord we would turn downwind, pass a stunning waterfall or three and suddenly accelerate to close to 30 km/h, letting the wind blow us along like sailboats under a spinnaker.  At the end of an 86-kilometre day we found a perfect campsite below the road near Ogur, looking back towards Isafjorthur and the series of inlets we had traversed.  The wind abated a bit and we lay on the shore, sipping our evening glass of whisky and admiring the views.  It had been a great week, and it was hard to see how the rest of Iceland was going to compete with the emptiness, views, nature and good weather.

Yet another dramatic waterfall

June 18^th saw our farewell to the Westfjords.  Since we were hundreds of not-so-exciting kilometres from Akureyri, and since we had decided to go whale watching at Husavik and mosquito-feeding at Myvatn, it made sense to use a bus to get to Akureyri.  We rode 30 km through biting winds and intermittent rain to the hot spring hotel of Reykjanes, gobbled down burgers and fries and suddenly were loading our bikes into an overstuffed and outrageously overpriced bus.  Another bus, less crowded but equally expensive, followed as we backtracked more than halfway to Reykjavik before finally catching the more reasonably priced government Straeto bus to Akureyri, arriving at almost midnight.  It was time for the second part of our adventure to begin.

Looking back towards Isafjorthur from our last campsite near Ogur

Mal-diving!

Leysin, Switzerland, May 19, 2013

Our tiny piece of paradise, Makunudu

It’s a snowy mid-May morning here in the Alps, so it’s a good time to catch up on my shamefully neglected travel blog.  With a trip to Iceland coming up next month, and a student trip to Cyprus before that, I should get the fingers loose and type up a few words about my trip to the Maldives, my 112^th country. 

The view from our cottage of an afternoon storm rolling in.

The swing where we whiled away many enjoyable minutes.

I rarely take package holidays; mass tourism is not really my style, and I think that tour buses, charter flights and cruise liners bring out the worst in human nature.  Having said that, there are certain countries, like Bhutan (see my post from my 2008 trip there) that essentially require you to take a tour in order to enter the country, and the Maldives is one of these.  You can fly to Male independently, but if you want to get out to one of the paradisiacal islands that dot the Indian Ocean, booking a package tour is the only reasonable way to go.  Years ago, while backpacking around India in 1997, I looked into booking a holiday deal to the Maldives from Madras or Trivandrum, but it was well beyond my microscopic budget at the time. 

Since then, the Maldives (like pretty much every country on Earth that I haven’t yet visited) has been on my radar.  It’s legendary for its diving, its manta rays, its sybaritic luxury resorts and its outrageous prices.  This March, when, despite a December-mid February ski season of record-breaking snowfall, it seemed as though the Engadin valley wasn’t going to provide Terri and me with great ski touring, we made a snap decision to go to the Maldives.  Although our trip coincided with Easter, a huge holiday season in Europe, we managed to get reasonably inexpensive package deals to a little island named Makunudu through a Swiss holiday outfit called Manta Reisen.  Within a couple of weeks of deciding that we would head for the sun, Terri and I found ourselves getting on an Edelweiss Air direct flight to Male, the capital of the Maldives.

Our first afternoon on Makunudu

 

The Maldives, a bit like Bhutan, has adopted a model of tourism in which they try to maximize economic benefit to the country from foreign visitors while minimizing the impact of the tourists on the daily life and culture of the country.  While Bhutan has done this by restricting tourist numbers, the Maldives has thrown open the doors to tourists but restricted where they can go inside the country.  The country’s 1192 islands, grouped in 26 oval atolls, are divided into either tourist islands or local islands.  The tourist islands are completely given over to expensive resorts, while the local islands have only local Maldivean inhabitants.  Given the bare flesh and booze of the resorts and the strict Sharia law in force on the local islands, it seems to make sense to keep the two cultures apart.  However, given the long history of repressive government, particularly under the former president Maumoun Abdul Gayoom, it also points to a government keen on maintaining control over the economy and individual citizens.

The colourful crabs that prowled the rocks of the breakwater

 

We landed in Male a bit bleary-eyed, met our Manta Reisen rep and strolled across the street to the boat jetty where a sleek speedboat awaited.  There were 15 or  so other tourists aboard, all destined for a different island resort owned by the same company as owns Makunudu.  As we sped off across the gentle waters inside North Male atoll, we could see the highrises of the crowded capital city off to our left.  The individual islets of the atoll are so low (the highest point of land in the entire country is only 2.4 metres above sea level) that we didn’t see many islands until we were quite close, giving the strange feeling of speeding off on a small speedboat into the far reaches of the Indian Ocean.  After a stop at Cocoa Island resort, a big hotel bristling with water cottages built directly over the ocean, Terri and I arrived at the tiny island of Makunudu and immediately fell in love.

Friendly hermit crab

Big Bertha of the hermit crab world

Makunudu is a microscopic island, perhaps 150 metres long and 50 metres across at its widest point.  It contains 40 or so bungalows, a restaurant, bar, dive shop and employee housing.  The island is densely forested and is surrounded by a huge expanse of coral reefs.  There is basically nothing to do other than swim, snorkel, scuba dive, eat, sleep, read and watch stunning sunsets.  Hermit crabs trek across the beach, stingrays cruise into the sandy shallow and waterhens prowl the undergrowth.  

The juvenile stingray who cruised right up to the shoreline every day

Since it was such an inactive vacation, it seems as though there is little to describe about our trip, but the underwater action was really quite spectacular.  When we went, Terri, who last dived well over a decade ago, wasn’t sure whether she would dive or not.  As it turned out, she loved diving so much that she did her advanced open water certification, and she and I dived quite a lot.  The coral reefs weren’t as spectacular as they might have been (the Maldives has been prone to lots of coral bleaching as the Indian Ocean water temperatures increase), but the fish life is very healthy.  The shark population seems pretty robust, there are lots of turtles, and we saw manta rays.  

Feeling pretty happy with life on Makunudu

The manta ray encounter, appropriately at Manta Point, was pretty spectacular.  We were making our way along a steeply sloping coral wall, and I was the first to spot the manta sailing serenely into view.  I had seen a manta before, in the Philippines, but this one was in much clearer water and so was much easier to see.  It was huge, a good 2.5 metres across, and he headed directly towards Terri, much to her alarm.  Something that big, even if you know it’s a gentle giant filter feeder, can feel menacing when he’s making a bee-line at you.  He passed perhaps a metre from us and soared effortlessly past us up the slope, his wings flapping lazily but efficiently.   We missed another manta while we were in the water, but snorkelers at the surface saw more than the divers did, with mantas circling just below the surface and breaching from time to time.

We saw plenty of white-tip sharks on most dives, with a few blacktips here and there.  The best shark experience, however, was on a night dive right off the beach in front of the restaurant.  We saw a few sharks here and there as we drifted down to 10 metres, but then our guide had us kneel on the sandy bottom and hide our torchlights against our chests.  After a minute or two we all shone our lights around, and the torch beams lit up a good half-dozen nurse sharks cruising around us in circles, an experience which definitely got our pulses racing.

Terri and her dive instructor Satoko, on the way home from diving

We went diving on a fairly slow local boat, giving us lots of time to absorb the sun and the views from the roof.  One particular coral patch that we passed frequently was a favourite hunting ground for a pod of dolphins, and we saw their dorsal fins bobbing up and down through the surface as they rounded up shoals of fish.  The marine life in general seemed to be in good shape; we didn’t see a lot of fishing going on near the dive sites, and there seems to be a marine reserve in place around a lot of islands.  There were always a few tuna and trevally flashing past in the deep water, and vast clouds of colourful reef fish like red tooth triggerfish.  It was good to get underwater for the first time since my trip to Oman in December, 2011.

Warming up in the sun after a dive

Terri atop our dive boat

Our days above the water floated by delightfully.  I read several books on my Kindle, did yoga, snorkeled, caught up on a few months of grading physics labs, and ate meals of sybaritic luxury.  We had saved a bundle of money by only signing up for half board at the hotel, but the breakfasts were vast spreads that kept us going through the day, aided by a clandestine sandwich that we would sneak out of the restaurant every morning.  The food, like the service and the room cleaning, was remarkably good.  Evening meals would be preceded by sunset cocktails at the western end of the island, and by 10 pm we would be tucked up in bed (usually decorated in clever ways by the man who cleaned our room), ready for another day of relaxation.  It was hard to peel ourselves off the beach and get back on the long flight back to Zurich at the end of the week!

Not a bad seat for a lazy afternoon

Decoration by our room cleaning man

I’m not sure I would go back to the Maldives anytime soon (there are still nearly 100 countries left to explore first), but it was a wonderful, restoring experience with some of the best diving I’ve done.  It's well worth visiting, not just to tick off another country, but also to see some of the best-preserved marine life in the Indian Ocean, and experience some luxurious pampering. It was fascinating from the point of view of natural beauty.   

Night life in the Maldives

Another Makunudu light show

However, on the human front the country’s political future is still unclear, with the reformist former president (jailed and tortured for years for opposing Gayoom) having been removed from office after an army mutiny in 2012 and now under arrest for abuse of office, and the old tyrant Gayoom positioning himself to run for president again.

While we were on Makunudu, we watched a documentary called The Island President, about ex-president Nasheed, his years in jail and his attempt to get the Maldives’ position on climate change and the dangers posed by rising sea levels recognized at the Copenhagen climate change conference.  The optimistic tone of that film contrasts with the political gloom currently enveloping the country.  Given the natural beauty of so much of the Maldives, I can only hope that it manages to steer clear of the political and civic ugliness that has marred so much of its recent history.

The culmination of a week of innovative towel and flower arrangement

In an amusing postscript to our trip, as we were waiting in Male airport, I spotted a bottle of 50-year-old Balvenie’s whisky for sale in the duty free.  It’s faintly ironic that in a country where the inhabitants are prohibited from buying alcohol, they’re selling some of the most expensive whisky on earth.  And who on earth buys a $46,000 bottle of hooch on the spur of the moment in airport duty free?

Yes, you read that price right

By the Numbers

Makunudu, Maldives, March 30, 2013

OK, I admit it.  I’m a terrible blogger, completely devoid of the tenacity required to keep up with regular posts.  In fact, I owe my few faithful readers a number of backdated posts, on Newfoundland (three years ago!), several posts on my last year and a half in Leysin, last summer’s mountaineering in Central Asia, my Christmas swing through Togo and Benin, this trip to the Maldives, and a few assorted posts from here and there.  With my energy somewhat restored by a few days of sloth, diving, good food, snorkeling and general relaxation here in the Maldives, I think it’s time for an update, but I’m going to start with a very brief one.

The Maldives, where Terri and I arrived a few days ago in an almost last-minute decision to flee the dying winter and unpromising ski touring outlook, is the 112^th country I have visited in my life, not counting my home country of Canada.  Of course, exactly what constitutes a country is a bit slippery.  My well-travelled friend Natalya Marquand holds that the only objective list is the 193 permanent members of the UN.  Others hold that these countries, plus the non-UN-member Vatican City, make up the 194 canonical countries of the world.  I think the reality is a bit slippier.  When I visited Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia, despite the fact that these countries aren’t universally recognized, I had to get a visa to visit them and cross at a border post manned by people in uniform who stamped my passport.  Somaliland not only has its own consulates and border guards, it even has its own currency.  And, to take an extreme example, anyone who claims that Taiwan isn’t effectively an independent country isn’t really recognizing what’s been de facto the case since 1949.

So my list of independent countries is a bit bigger than 194.  It’s about 204 countries; the number may fluctuate a bit, and it doesn’t include three countries (Western Sahara, Palestine and Tibet) with pretty legitimate cases but without their own border guards.  One of the many lists of countries on Wikipedia lists 206 entries that either are recognized by at least one other state as being independent, or effectively control a permanently populated territory, but they include Western Sahara and Palestine which are at the moment illusory pipe dreams, to the distress of the people who inhabit them.

Anyway, without further preamble, here’s my list of the countries I have visited, arranged according to the date I first visited them.  The non-UN/Vatican members of the list are coloured red; there are eight of them, so if you’re counting by the UN+Vatican list, it’s 104 (out of 194).  I would make it 112 out of 204.  Whichever way you count it, I’m now over half-way to my goal of visiting them all, and my to-visit list is now down into double digits.   

1969

1. US

1977

2.  France

3.  Switzerland

4.  Liechtenstein

5.  Germany

6.  Netherlands

1981

7.  Tanzania

1982

8.  Norway

9.  Italy

1988

10.  UK

11. Vatican

12.  Greece

13.  Hungary

14.  Austria

15.  Czech Republic (Prague, then part of the now-defunct Czechoslovakia)

1990

16.  Belgium

17.  Monaco

18.  Poland

1991

19.  Australia

20.  New Zealand

21.   Fiji

22.  Cook Islands

1994

23.  Egypt

24.  Turkey

1995

25.  Spain

26.  Kenya

27.  Uganda

28.  Democratic Republic of Congo

29.  Japan

30.  Singapore

31.  Indonesia

1996

32.  Philippines

33.  Malaysia

34.  Thailand

35.  Cambodia

36.  Nepal

1997

37.  India

38.  Sri Lanka

39.  Pakistan

40.  Luxembourg

41.  San Marino

42.  Andorra

1998

43.  China

44.  Portugal

45.  Morocco

46.  Tunisia

47.  Jordan

1999

48.  Israel

49.  Syria

50.  Lebanon

51.  Chile

52.  Argentina

53.  Peru

2000

54.  Bolivia

55.  South Korea

2001

56.  Mexico

57.  Brunei

58.  Laos

59.  Taiwan

2004

60.  Kazakhstan

61.  Kyrgyzstan

62.  Tajikistan

63.  Uzbekistan

64.  Turkmenistan

65.  Iran

66.  Bahrain

2006

67.  Vietnam

68.  Burma

2007

69.  Mongolia

70.  Palau

71.  Bangladesh

2008

72.  Bhutan

73.  Cyprus

74.  Northern Cyprus

2009

75.  Kuwait

76.  Azerbaijan

77.  Georgia

78.  Armenia

79.  Nagorno-Karabakh

80.  Iraq

81.  Bulgaria

82.  Serbia

83.  Kosovo

84.  Macedonia

85.  Albania

86.  Montenegro

87.  Bosnia-Hercegovina

88.  Croatia

89.  Libya

90.  Malta

2010

91.  Ethiopia

92.  Somaliland

93.  Djibouti

2011

94.  Denmark

95.  Abkhazia

96.  Russia

97.  Ukraine

98.  Trans-Dniestria

99.  Moldova

100. Romania

101.  Slovakia

102.  Belarus

103.  Lithuania

104.  Latvia

105.  Estonia

106.  United Arab Emirates

107.  Oman

108.  Qatar

2012

109.  Slovenia

110.  Togo

111.  Benin

2013 

112.  Maldives

The next country in line is Iceland, set up for this summer.  I’m hoping to clean up my European to-do list over the next 18 months:  Ireland, Sweden, Finland and (I hope) South Ossetia.  Then Madagascar awaits a long, leisurely exploration, and my long-awaited African road trip should polish off almost all the outstanding African countries and take me into the 150s.  A couple of more trips, through Central America and northern South America, and another one through the Caribbean, would finish a lot of the remainder.  Then comes the hardest part:  finishing off the stragglers, many of them either dangerous (Afghanistan), expensive and annoying (North Korea) or hard to get to (Pacific islands).  But what would be the fun if it were too easy?

A Valley and Two Lakes: Trekking in Ladakh, India

July 2, 2012, Delhi

It’s 40-something degrees in Delhi, and the roads are the usual chaos of vehicle fumes, rickshaws, pedestrians, hawkers, beggars and dust. I’m so glad that I’ve only had to spend a day and a half here, in the air-conditioned oasis of the Hairy Porko Hotel in the tourist slum known as Paharganj. After loafing around in the hotel almost all of yesterday, Terri and I dragged ourselves out of the hotel to head to Humayun’s Tomb today, the red-stone prototype for the Taj Mahal. It was beautiful and impressive, but the hammer-like impact of the sun detracted somewhat from the experience. We took the metro and then walked for rather longer than we had anticipated through the affluent neighbourhoods of South Delhi. Walking through Delhi shows the crazy geographic proximity of extreme wealth and abject, miserable poverty. We wandered by the very posh Delhi Public School, which is right next to a huge garbage dump inhabited by hundreds of “sweepers”, the hereditary caste that disposes of other people’s garbage and who live very, very close to their place of work . Some of the quieter residential streets reminded me of Rangoon’s posher neighbourhoods, although with much more litter strewn everywhere. Between the crowds, the pollution, the insane summer heat, the traffic, the interpersonal hassles, the touts, the rubbish, the smell of urine and feces everywhere and the general chaos, I don’t think you could pay me enough money to make me live in Delhi.

Luckily, most of this past month was spent, not in Smelly Delhi but in Lovely Ladakh, doing two beautiful treks and loving every minute of both of them. After a slow, frustrating start, in which we had to abandon not one but two previous plans, we finally got going on the trail three days after our anticipated date, on June 13. Our original plan, a 19-day trek along little-travelled trails from Hemis to Darcha, was impossible to find horsemen for. Plan B, the long-established standard Lamayuru-Darcha trek, suffered the same problem. Horse owners, and even the local donkey-owners of Lamayuru, were reluctant to set off before the Lamayuru Festival, and showed an amazing lack of will to make money by renting out their animals. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of reluctance in any other mountain area in the world. Very strange and very frustrating.

 

In the end, we decided to do two shorter treks. We started off with the most popular trek in Ladakh, the Markha Valley trek, for a week. Then, after a turn-around day in Leh, we went for 8 days along a higher, wilder, more remote trek from Rumtse to Tso Kar and on to Tso Moriri, two of the high-altitude salt lakes that dot the southeast corner of Ladakh where it merges into the endless plateau of Western Tibet. Both treks greatly exceeded our expectations and left us impressed and often awe-struck at the endless vistas, surrealist colours and sheer natural beauty of this stark, rocky landscape.

 

Our naught grey mare rolling in relief once Tundup had released her from her load

Our little wind and snow-proof summer home (note the welcome mat!)

The Markha Valley trek was great fun, particularly as there were only a handful of other trekkers doing it in mid-June. Later in the season, it must become unpleasantly crowded in the campgrounds, but we were alone in most of campsites throughout the trek. We drove across the Indus from Leh to the starting point in Zingchen, met Tundup our trusty pony-wallah and set off mid-morning. We had been warned that Tundup might not speak a word of English, so I had brought along my guide-book Ladakhi phrases, but he turned out to speak quite good English, so communication was never an issue. The owner of the horses had insisted, in order to weasel more money from us, that we take no fewer than 4 horses, when 3 or even 2 would have sufficed. Our horses had personality, especially the grey mare who had a terrible attitude and managed to kick most of the other three horses, while kicking and missing at Tundup and myself. The big black mare needed to be in front, while the white gelding was the solid workhorse of the lot, and the little black gelding needed to be led along by Tundup, when he or Terri wasn’t riding it.

One of the many marmots we saw on the Ganda La

The Markha Valley trek is a wonderfully diverse cross-section of the rugged Zanskar Mountains that run south of the Indus. We spent a couple of days climbing up and over the 4950-metre Ganda La pass, past dozens of completely fearless marmots. Despite having been at 3600 metres for five days at this point, both Terri and I found ourselves gasping and out of breath atop the pass, having slept very poorly at 4350 metres the night before, both sure signs of lack of acclimatization. Mercifully, we dropped down over the pass to a lovely campsite at Shingo at 4150 metres, and slept much better this time around. We continued down the valley to join the actual Markha Valley at Skiu the next day at 3300 metres, at which altitude it was distinctly hot, dry and dusty. The Markha Valley is dotted with irrigated green oases that contrast beautifully with the red rock of the gorge walls. There are picturesquely situated gompas (monasteries) and chortens (Buddhist stupas) perched precariously here and there, while in the distance high snowy peaks play peek-a-boo with us along side valleys.

Hangkar Fort

After camping in an idyllic isolated meadow called Hamourja, we continued to wend our way along the valley floor to the village of Markha, where we camped beside the river and endured some serious winds that knocked down Tundup’s precarious parachute tent, breaking its central pole. For the rest of the two treks, his tent kept getting shorter and less stable as the pole broke again and again. I have a new tent for this summer, a very strong winter tent made by Crux, and it proved its worth again and again by staying virtually motionless in the most howling of Himalayan gusts. Markha is the metropolis of the valley, with at least 50 houses (most of them empty), a telephone office, a medical centre (closed) and a very picturesque gompa. From this point onwards we left the flat, hot valley floor behind and climbed more steeply uphill. We slept in beautiful Tachutse, watching a herd of bharal (blue sleep) play far above us on the skyline, having walked through the wonderfully situated hamlet of Hangkar with its ruined fortress perched, Walt Disney-like, atop a vertiginous crag. The rock faces beside the river grew ever more vertical and sculpted as we gained altitude and looked (to my untrained eye) like a fantastic place for serious rock climbers to come and explore.

Kang Yatse rising above Nyimaling

Heading up to the Kongmaru La



The impressive striped gorges leading down to Shang Sumdo



From Tachutse, we started to climb in earnest up to the high-altitude pastures of Nyimaling, where we put up our tent and then walked up to the snowline on the impressive glaciated peak of Kang Yatse (6400 metres) which had dominated our views for the previous two days. It’s a very pretty peak, with a skiable face on the west and a dramatic cliff separating the main and subsidiary peaks. The landscape had changed entirely, opening up from the confines of the canyon into vast grasslands that were a relief to the eye. We slept comfortably that night at 4850 metres, and trotted over the final 400 vertical metres in an hour and 45 minutes to the top of the 5250-metre Kongmaru La. The views from the top back down the Markha Valley were epic, with endless layers of steep rock faces overlaying each other all the way to the horizon. We paused for breath, cookies and photos, and then trotted down the much steeper northern face of the pass towards the road at Shang Sumdo. The downhill proved to make for very interesting walking, as we descended steeply into a narrow gorge threaded by a path that sometimes seemed more canyoning than walking, with dozens of stream crossings. Terri rode the horse to keep her feet dry, but I put on my Teva sandals and got wet. We finally emerged onto a new jeep road, had a bite to eat and drink, and were whisked off by jeep back to the sybaritic comforts of Leh: big, soft beds, mango lassis, tandoori chicken and morning pancakes.

Dining well on the trail!  Check out those professional-looking chapatis!

Not that we didn’t eat well on the trail, mind you. We cooked for ourselves, and with the horses there to carry extra weight, we bought a pressure cooker and a chapati skillet and spent many a happy afternoon creating great meals: curried lentils, stews with dumplings, pancakes, omelettes, soups, cups of bouillon, chapattis and much more. We brought along lots of potatoes, onions, carrots, flour, eggs and other heavy, bulky items that, had we been carrying everything on our own backs, we would not have brought. It certainly makes a difference living off delicious real food, rather than instant noodles and dehydrated meals as has been the case in the past. We even brought along a bottle of duty-free Glenfiddich and made a point of having a wee dram (or as they call it in India, a peg; or, thanks to Terri’s Kiwi accent, a “pig” or a “piglet”) in the late afternoon. We tended to go to bed very full of great food, and to have great breakfasts of oatmeal or eggs or pancakes to start the day. Since we had bought food originally for 20 days of trekking, we had ample quantities (or, in the case of oatmeal, grossly over-ample quantities) of most things, and we seemed to eat until we were ready to explode. The strange thing is that, despite the fact that we usually only walked 4 or 5 hours a day, not carrying heavy luggage, and that we ate gluttonously, we seemed to lose weight quite quickly. Altitude, even though we were well acclimatized by the end of the Markha trek, is hard on a metabolism, and produces dramatic weight loss, both of belly fat (good) and of leg muscle (not so very good). I expect to look very skeletal by the end of the summer’s mountaineering!





Argali near Tso Kar



Kiang near the last pass

Our second trek turned out, by coincidence, to be with Tundup and the same horses. This time, for a change of scenery, we opted for a more high-altitude wide-open landscape. Seven years ago, when my sisters and I bicycled through Ladakh, we always regretted that we did not make it to the lovely lakes of Tso Kar and Tso Moriri, so Terri and I decided to put this regret behind. We caught a lift up to the village of Rumtse, met up with Tundup and the four horses, strapped on the luggage (now carried in two nifty tin trunks that Terri bought in order to reduce the chaos involved in packing our food and cooking gear in burlap sacks), and set off uphill. Rumtse, at 4150 metres, is by far the lowest point on the trek, which traverses a series of 5000+ metre passes on its way to the lakes. By now we felt much better at altitude, and walked easily uphill towards the first pass. The second day of the trek we crossed two big passes (5150 and 5230 metres), and I definitely felt the thin air on the second ascent, although I slept well at 5050 metres that night. On the third day, we crossed a third pass at 5300 metres, and then descended towards the beautiful blue patch of Tso Kar lake. On the way down, we scared up a large herd of argali (bighorn sheep) and watched how effortlessly they bounded uphill away from us. Terri watched them thinking “I bet they’d make great eating!”, as her carnivorous instincts overcame her vegetarian trekking diet. As we descended, Tundup told us that we would see “zebras”, and this puzzled us until we saw the first one, and realized that he meant the kiang, or Tibetan wild ass, an equid that bears a striking resemblance, other than colouring, to a zebra. We spent most of the rest of the trek admiring kiang and trying to take pictures of them, difficult as they tended to keep a lot of distance between them and us. 

Newborn foal and mother near Tso Kar

At Tso Kar we celebrated Terri’s birthday by visiting a nearby tourist camp and having a slap-up dinner of Italian food. The next day, as we trudged across the endless windswept plains around Tso Kar, I realized that I had eaten something that disagreed with me, and spent the next 24 hours feeling very sorry for myself, and not appreciating the tremendous views across the plains to the salty shores of the lake and to the high, snowy peaks beyond. We did see lots of kiang, a herd of argali and what Tundup thought was a wolf (it was difficult to see as it was far away and moving quickly). The next day I was better, and thoroughly enjoyed the last 4 days of the trek as we barely saw another human being while walking through endless high-altitude meadows full of horned larks, Tibetan snowfinches, robin accentors, kiang, marmots, pikas and voles. Every valley seemed to present prettier vistas than the last one, and the final pass, at 5450 metres the highest point of the trek, was fantastic, a huge open bowl ringed by 6000-metre peaks on one side, and a steep descent to the vast azure expanse of Tso Moriri on the other.

Contemplating eternity on the shore of Tso Moriri

It was a shock to the system to emerge from this Alpine idyll into the dismal end-of-the-road dump that is Korzog, the only settlement of any size on the shores of Tso Moriri. We gave our tins, cooking pots and leftover food to Tundup in gratitude for his stalwart service over the past two and a half weeks, checked into a tourist camp, bathed and slept and ate disappointingly, and then walked out of town along the shores of the lake to a secluded shaley beach that provided amazing views across the impossible blue of the lake to the riot of pastel colours that made up the opposite shore. We sat there, sketching and writing and trying to absorb the beauty and sublime setting, conscious that our trekking days had come to an end.

The jeep ride back to Leh, like all experiences in a vehicle in India, was more to be survived than enjoyed, although we figured out where all the nomads of southeastern Ladakh were while we were trekking through empty grasslands. They were grazing their flocks along the jeep road, looking very picturesque as they moved camp, yaks carrying their tents, hundreds of sheep grazing along slowly, and the nomad families themselves riding their horses. We dropped eventually down to the Indus and drove recklessly and dangerously along the road back to Leh. A day of complete sloth in Leh, and it was time for a flight here to the hellfires of a Delhi summer.

The view across Tso Moriri

Overall, the month in India has been a tremendous experience, for my seeing new areas (Lamayuru, Markha and Tso Moriri were all new places for me), acclimatizing for Peak Lenin and Muztagh Ata (my primary objectives for the rest of the summer) and for spending wonderfully fun, companionable time in nature with Terri, seeing wonderful animals and birds, eating well and getting into shape after the laziness and middle-aged spread of this past school year. I don’t know when or if I’ll be back to India again, but if this is adieu, it’s been a great send-off.