Start Point: Camp 1, 3,730m

End Point: Camp 1, 3,730m

The plan for today was to have a rest day. If all goes according to plan, we leave for our summit attempt at midnight tonight. The problem is, there is not a lot to do in camp. The weather is still scorching, so most pasty white Irish people need to stay in the shade. But the only shade available is the mess hall, with its constant comings and goings of various teams on various timelines; and our sleeping hut, which heats up like a sauna and constantly smells of damp socks. It’s a choice between sunstroke and heatstroke.

To remove some of the tedium of the day, our leader and our guide offered an additional skills session this morning. Only four of us (out of 11) were sufficiently confident in our stomachs, knees and feet to risk it. Everyone else opted to give their offending body parts a much rest before tonight.

The first part of our training was “snow parkour” – an obstacle course designed by Ivan to improve our snow and ice-axe confidence. We decided not to wear the crampons as several boots and trouser legs have already been torn up by those pointy death contraptions. The course involved climbing rocks, jumping imaginary crevasses, climbing other rocks without our feet touching said rock, and jumping a longer imaginary crevasse which required a bit of a run-and-jump. We all performed adequately well but were surprised how out of breath we were after running only about five feet in the snow.

We also practised moving up and down a fixed line, something we’ll need to do in our final summit bid; and moving in a line roped together, which we’ll only have to do if conditions are particularly bad. While the four us walked across the slope, the leader and guide took turns simulating a member of the team falling into a crevasse by grabbing the rope and pulling it down the slope as hard as they could, dragging us with them. Our job was to drop to the ground with our ice axe dug into the snow below us – an ice-axe arrest. It was great to practise, but a bit worrying that in the soft powdery conditions, despite having our weight on top of them, our axes just cut through the snow like a shark’s fin through water and we flew down the slope.

Getting back to camp, there was talk of building a makeshift shelter to protect us from the sun. We considered using trekking poles as a frame, and curtains from the hut or ground-mats from our beds as a cover. There were a good few creative ideas. We did nothing.

I got a bit of slagging today when I began to sort out the ridiculously large bag of snacks I brought up with me. The food I’ve getting has been tasty and plentiful (although a lot of the team would probably disagree on the tasty), so I haven’t really needed the snacks. Unfortunately one of the things I brought and had forgotten about (and I can’t myself understand what I was thinking at the time) were four little single servings of cheese from Marks and Spencer. Red Leicester, Cheddar with Chive and Onions, White Stilton with Cranberries. Peak notions!* As they hadn’t been refrigerated in more than a week in 30+ degree heat, and as the altitude had caused the packs to swell up, I figured it would be a silly idea to tempt faith, so threw them out.

Another team in our hut were due to summit overnight. Only a few of them set out (due to similar health problems as our team), some returned at 3am, and the rest arrived back 12 hours later having summited the East Peak. The East Peak is only 21m lower than the West but from the North Side, where I am, it is much closer and easier than the West (from the South side, both peaks are equally difficult, as far as I understand). But it’s the West that gives the local beer its name (5,642), the West that’s listed as one of the Seven Summits and the West that is the highest point in Europe. It’s the West I came to do.

At times like this I wish Elbrus only had one summit. In Kilimanjaro or Aconcagua, there’s no option, so there is way to go for an easier summit day. I’m one of a team here and the team has varying degrees of experience, fitness and health issues. There is also a big question mark over the weather. But if I had my choice, assuming it is safe, I would rather try the tougher one I and fail if needs be, rather than set out knowing we have an easier option if things get tough.

It’s coming up to 5.30pm as I write this and dinner is at six. That’s when we hear what the plan is. Then we go to bed to get up at midnight for breakfast and the beginning of the trek. I wanted to write this up before hearing what our guide and leader have decided.

*pun intended

​Start Point: Camp 1, 3,730m

High Point: Middle Lenz Rock, 4,837m

End Point: Camp 1, 3,730m

Today was an acclimatisation day. We were planning on gaining 1,100m altitude to get our bodies used to the lower oxygen in the thinner air. Climbing high, spending a little time up there and then sleeping lower down is the best way to get the body ready for going higher again.

However I was also very aware that tge temperature usually drops about 1 degree for every 100m ascent, and given we were starting at 3,700m, the chances were that it would be well below freezing by 4,800m. It wasn’t. It was a fecking scorcer! We got roasted.

We took light enough bags containing our summit down jackets and summit mits, but I had to delayer before we even started and spent most of the day in a t-shirt and light top. And the top was really only to keep the sun off my arms. Unfortunately that particular top has little holes for your thumbs, through which I got two little round circles of sunburn so bad it seems to be grey. Oddly I didn’t even notice it until we were back in camp.

The team continues to be plagued by stomach bugs. One guy sat out the day’s training and another was very sick soon after returning. The cause isn’t clear as we’re all eating and drinking more or less the same food and water and following the same (minimalist) hygiene routines. I might be next.

Other people are suffering a lot from blisters – probably exacerbated by the rental boots and the heat. Again, I might be next, though at least I am well used to the boots at this stage.

One of the lads who was recovering from his dose was given a helping hand by Vlad today in the form of a snowball to the back of the head for not sitting facing the mountain to check for avalanches.

For an acclimatisation day, it was very tough. The heat was one factor and the steepness of the track through the snow another. Luckily the sbow had frozen overnight meaning while our boots had dropped right through it yesterday, today we were sometimes able to more or less walk across the top.

The steepness increased at one point when we were about 300m above camp. It was probably all quite safe but it felt pretty hairy to me when I looked behind me to see the team below me and camp well below them again. 

It took us four hours to trudge uphill in the snow to the lower Lenz Rock at 4,550m, which is reasonable though not fast going. We past the wheel of a helicopter which had crashed a few years before and began to wonder where the rest of the helicopter was if only a single wheel was here.

The team noticed Ivan’s unusual timekeeping. His watch slows or speeds up depending on his own speed. So when he is walking and tells us a rest stop is 15 minutes away, it’s actually between 30 and 40 minutes. But when resting and he gives us 10 minutes to have a drink and a snack, those 10 minutes rarely last more than 4 or 5.

At Lower Lenz Rock, Ivan told us he needed to collect some gear from the Middle Lenz Rock another 300m up. Six of us volunteered to go with him. It took us about an hour to get there – again, very tough going – then Ivan left us to rest for 30mins while he went to chat to a team who were camping nearby and to find the stash of equipment his mates had deposited but not collected. After half an hour, I was expecting Ivan to come back with tents and fuel cannisters for us to stow in our bags. Instead he came back with a box of crackers and a wheel of ice cold Laughing Cow spreadable cheese triangles (mushroom flavoured). Possibly one of the nicest mountain snacks I’ve ever had. We had spent the 30 minutes admiring the view we now had over the Caucasus and into Georgia, taking each other’s very high heart-rates, and wondering what smelt so bad (it was us).

On the way down, Ivan took us “exploring”. We passed the rest of helicopter as well as what appeared to be some sort of mountain siren sitting on a rock smiling and waving at us. She was from the team who were camped nearby and were actually just using Elbrus as training to prepare for Peak Lenin in Kyrgyzstan, rather than as a challenge itself.

Getting back down to camp on tired legs, in scorching heat and with no water was a struggle. 

We got back to camp around 3pm and had the afternoon to kill, which lead to a very heated and aggravated game of cards that I think would be better not to talk about. I don’t want to get sued – and it seemed like a possibility for a while. The game’s controversies can be summed up as: 1) if you forget a rule exists, that does not mean it it has just been made up; and 2) just because a rule seems stupid to you, doesn’t mean you refuse to let the game proceed until you get your own way.

​Start Point: Camp 1, 3,730m

High Point: Random Rock on the mountain, 3,900m

End Point: Camp 1, 3,730m

Today was a rest and skills day. Resting helps acclimatisation so half the day was set aside for sitting around doing nothing. The other half of the day, the morning, was an opportunity to get out on the snow field near Camp 1 and practice putting on and wearing harnesses and crampons, and walking with ice axes, which a lot of the team haven’t done before and I have really only done on rest and skills days on other expeditions.

Ivan had hightailed it back down to basecamp to collect our (now recovered) 11th trekker, so Vladimir and our leader took a team each. I went with our Irish leader – he led us in zigzags up the mountain, breaking trail in the fresh snow and switching position from front to back in the group to get used to both walking on a well(ish) worn path (fairly easy) and in deep soft snow (not easy at all).

After a while we reached a small group of rocks poking up out of the snow and stopped for a rest. Vladimir and his team joined us shortly after and (using 10% Russian, 10% broken English and 80% hand gestures) quite coherently gave out to some people for sitting facing downhill as they wouldn’t be able to spot avalanches. He didn’t complain at all at our game of throwing snowballs at each others ice axes trying to knock them over, nor at the game of throwing snowballs as far as possible downhill and seeing how far they rolled, which Warner Bros and Disney have led me to believe is the main cause of avalanches. 

The teams switched when we left the rocks and Vlad complained about us not walking straight enough, not cleaning our boots enough, cleaning our boots when they didn’t need to be cleaned, looking down to check if our boots needed cleaning, not looking back to check the team enough and not looking straight ahead. All again through mime and mutters. He’d be a very good mime.

One unexpected aspect of the day is that it was absolutely roasting. The sun was very hot and we all stripped down to barely one or two layers. However whenever a bit of cloud covered the sun or a breeze blew we were reminded we were nearly 4,000m up a snow-covered mountain. That said, I think everyone got a bit of colour despite the Factor 50, the sunglasses, the hat and the buff.

Wearing my crampons, I managed to put a hole in my waterproof trousers again. From the inside they are now 50% duct tape, holding the tears together. As the first piece of duct tape is still there since the last time I was on Elbrus two years ago and the trousers have kept my arse dry in various continents, I’m happy to recommend duct tape as a solution to most of life’s problems (as if it needed any further endorsement.)

Back in the mess hall for lunch, Vlad looked out for me by asking very kindly “You are vegetable?” when I was handed meat free soup. Yes, I am vegetable. We also have someone who doesn’t eat vegetables (and will eat around them quite impressively), someone who doesn’t eat soup (which is served with every meal), and a few people who mostly eat the leftovers from everyone else’s meals, so I’m not the only freak when it comes to mealtimes.

The two ladies in the messhall (Olga and Katya) take very good care of us, although Ivan wasn’t impressed with Katya introducing herself to us as ‘Kate’. He doesn’t like Russian girls named Katya calling themselves Kate. He said it was ‘fashionable’ in the same tone of voice he might have used to describe a bad case of dysentery.

As much as Kate takes care of us, she’s kicked us out of the messhall a few times very quickly after we finish eating. She says it’s because she has other groups coming in, but I think it’s because we’re a really loud and annoying bunch of people. I suspect she doesn’t understand ‘having the craic’. We were also shushed by someone else when playing cards outside. Having too much fun I guess.

In slightly worrying news, so far three of the gang have come down with some sort of stomach upset, the latest just tonight. Thankfully the first two were fully recovered after 24 hours, so hopefully it is the same with the third. A stomach upset is bad enough when the only loo is a hole on the ground in a tin box hanging off the side of a cliff a hundred yards away across a rocky icy path in sub-zero temperatures. The sickness has put everyone a bit on edge when it comes to hygiene and water cleanliness. There isn’t a lot of water available anyway, as it has to be fetched by hand from a glacial lake nearby and then it has to be boiled or treated with iodine tablets. Basically it’s a tad annoying but sure that’s the kind of craic we signed up for. 

Tomorrow we’re up at 6 to head for Lenz rocks on an acclimatisation day. Whoop.

Start Point: Base Camp – Emmanuel Meadows, 2,575m

End Point: Camp 1, 3,730m 

Our group of 14 (11 trekkers, an expedition leader, a doctor and a guide) became 13 today hopefully temporarily. One of the team came down with a stomach bug and was unable to join our heavy wet trek back up to Camp 1, this time with the rest of our stuff. Hopefully they’ll be back up with us tomorrow.

On the other hand, we were joined by Vladimir who’ll be an assistant guide for the next few days. Vladimir is not young, speaks no English and communicates with us entirely in hand gestures. Seems like a decent chap.

I think my grumpiness in yesterday’s post was a bad case of attitude sickness brought on by an inability to get anything dry. I cheered up a little with a good night’s sleep and when the rain stopped and the sun shone for about 7 minutes just before breakfast.

We were in no huge hurry to get started today, as our only task was to get to Camp 1 which is about a 5 hour trek. So we spent the morning thinking and rethinking about what we should actually bring with us. Despite having opportunities in Dublin and Pyatigorsk to leave the unessentials behind, both I and everyone else had a good amount to leave at basecamp after changing out minds several times. We mostly ignored the fact that nearly everything we bring up has to be brought back down again after the summit attempt. 

Once we had rushed to get the unfortunately heavy bags packed and ready to go, we promptly put them back in the tents and sat in the mess hall for two and a half hours hoping the weather would improve. It did. The rain stopped and we started hiking abou 11.35; I think the original plan was 9.

We filled in the waiting time with a series of card games, card tricks and various puzzles. It was a lot of fun. Our expedition leader showed a card trick that looked very impressive and had us all stumped for a while. A clue to how he did it is included in this post. Further details are available to anyone who buys me (or, I’m guessing, him) a pint. Our guide then stumped us with a brain teaser that none of us could figure out and which kept me quiet for the first three hours of hiking – until the altitude hit me maybe, and I joined in a bit of the trekking banter, somewhat subdued by the weight of the bags and the cold wind.

Today was a tough day: wet muddy trails, heavy bags, quite cold and a lot of snow/rain showers blowing into our faces. The extra weight made us walk a lot slower which didn’t help the coldness, but I (at least) was lucky enough to get the layering more or less right so stayed mostly comfortable throughout the day.

Along the trek we could that the snowline had moved about 300m lower down overnight. So the expedition leader and guide tried to warm us up by telling jokes that are too rude to repeat here (my Mum reads this). There was a heated conversation about cyclists versus drivers and cyclists’ reasons for cycling four abreast along narrow roads with a build-up of cars behind them. Towards the top, one of the Wexford lads who was struggling a bit was heard to mutter to himself grumpily ‘Climb Elbrus they said. Be grand they said.’ He’s been keeping a journal and opened it up tonight to see that his last entry from two days ago was ‘all is well.’ He expects to use only curse words to complete it from here on in. As we reached Camp 1 the dog we met yesterday greeted us all happily and we all petted him. When the Wexford lad hit camp, the same dog sat down in the middle of his path, blocking his way. ‘Get the hell out of my way, dog’ might feature in tonight’s journal entry.

One of the most memorable parts of today’s challenge was the two lads I’ve nicknamed Dirty Dub and Smelly Dub serenading us with Bagatelle’s Summer in Dublin and various Bruce Springsteen hits from behind. It’s unclear if they expected the singing to raise our spirits and spur us on; or if they thought the quality of their singing would make us climb faster to get away from them. 

My spirits were raised and I sang along with them, but part of my happiness was due to my hitherto success in the burgeoning back market prune business amongst the team. I collected prunes from various packed lunches when nobody wanted them, but have since started getting people addicted to them. And a bit of dietary regularity is very important on a trek like this.

Our accommodation at Camp 1 is a lot better than I expected but a bit different. Our team is sharing a large circular building with a few other randoms. There’s just one door, a central area with a stove and plugs and then 6 little alcoves with sleeping space for 3 or 4. As I type this, the noise of the large diesel generator which provides electricity for the entire camp is being drowned out by some loud snoring in a Wexford accent.

Start Point: Base Camp – Emmanuel Meadows, 2,575m

High Point: Camp 1, 3,730m

End Point: Base Camp – Emmanuel Meadows, 2,575m

Today was our first real day of hiking. We hiked from basecamp 7km (horizontally) and 1.2km (vertically) up to Camp 1. We did it in our heavy mountain boots, both to get more used to them (essential for the people with new or rental boots) and for the 300m snow field just before camp 1. We carried up some gear we knew we wouldn’t need until later in the trip like our ice axes, crampons, harnesses and some food. We were up at 6am, hiking at 7 and back to basecamp at about 6pm. I’m absolutely feckin wrecked. I think everyone is.

We started off in bright sunshine and the route up was really picturesque. People were more worried about sunscreen and sunglasses than anything else. We started by trekking up the side of a steep rocky river valley and then crossed a wide flat green meadow amd spotted little marmots scurrying out of our way. They’re a cute little rodent that live in mountains and look about 10% squirrel (but without the tail), 10% rabbit (but without the ears) and 80% rat (but without the evil yellow-eyed glare of a creature from hell intent on destroying humanity).

After we’d climbed about 400m or 500m the weather started to change. We realised we were climbing up into a cloud and from that point nothing any of us any of us one had will ever be fully dry again. The rain stopped and started and switched between mist, rain, hail and snow – the sun even came out every now and again, but only for short bursts to trick us into taking off raingear. At times I think the sun is playing us like it’s a evil giant rat in the sky. But I may only be saying that because I’m cold, my gear is wet, I’ve no way to dry it and I need a pee. Basically I’m feeling grumpy.

Despite the effort and planning that we put into packing, I went and forgot the snowbaskets for my walking poles (the round plastic dealios that stop the narrow pole just sliding right down into the deep snow). So I struggled a little getting up the hill. I wasn’t as unlucky as one of the Wexford lads who bent his pole right out of shape on the snow and in trying to fix it, snapped it in two.

Camp 1 is not quite as swish as basecamp though it’s still no bad. The word is they’ve neither WiFi nor a sauna, so things will be tough up there and this is likely the last live blog for about a week. They do however have a dog and two toilets numbered No.1 and No.2, as No.1 has no door.

They also have a little plaque on the wall from Sean O’Mara from Ireland who summited 5 years ago aged 42. Well done Sean.

After dropping our gear, we started back down. One of Dubs tried his “trusty old heel toe technique” to keep moving and promptly pirouetted and fell on his arse.

A good few people (including me) were a little concerned that sore feet today was an indicator of impending blisters but luckily that does not seem to be the case. In one case, an odd clicking in his boots and a loseness in the grip was investigated by our head guide and found to be a case of ‘not having bothered tied his fucking laces’.

Walking down through the mist, somebody looked ahead at what was obviously a trekker walking towards us up the hill and asked “is that a bull?!”. I asked if her eyesight was okay but concluded she must have just looked into his soul to see he was a taurus.

Dinner tonight was greatly enhanced by a mild tomato sauce which was quite tasty and a chilli paste that nearly burned my mouth off.

It’s raining heavily outside now. I’m still cold, damp and exhausted and I still need to pee. Tomorrow we get a lie in and only wake up at 6.30am – I wonder can I wait til then.

Start Point: Hotel (5th floor), Pyatigorsk, 595m

End Point: Base Camp – Emmanuel Meadows, 2,575m

We have made it to basecamp. This is WAY nicer than I was expecting. I thought we’d be carrying our own tents, setting them up in an empty field and huddling around a zippo lighter for warmth. As it happens, the tents are semi-permanent and fit four people. We have a wooden mess hall; WiFi (obviously); running drinking water; two quaint wooden cabin loos (long drops, but still); a shower; a place to buy booze; and a sauna. Not too shabby.

We left Pyatigorsk after packing our gear into three separate bags. A small rucksack to stay in the hotel, a great big (mostly empty) rucksack to carry on our backs on the short trek from the trailhead to basecamp, and a great big full duffel bag, which was to go in a 4×4 all the way to camp over a pass and through a river.

I started taking diamox yesterday both to get used to it and to allow it get into my system before we hit any serious altitude. It was probably a bit premature especially as I spent the entire first two hours in the bus dying for a pee. We stopped at a supermarket to pick up some snacks and asked if we could use the bathroom. The one girl (who had previously made a very moving speech about being treated no differently from the rest of the team) was allowed use the loo; the rest of the team were not.

We eventually stopped to pee at the side of the road in a lovely woodland area just before we hit one of the worst roads I’ve even been on. Driving up into the Caucasus mountains from the North seemed a whole lot more scenic than the long drive up the Terskol valley to reach the start point for the trek from the South side. Wide rolling green meadows with horseback shepherds and flocks of black sheep, followed by high craggy peaks and deep V-shaped river valleys. We stopped three times for pee-breaks. It was spectacular. In one of our final rest spots our guide ordered us coffee and “local delicacies”. The local delicacy was pasties filled with grey minced meat, which Ivan told us was veal. He then told us that the calf’s mother was crying and wailing because we ate the grey mince and that she’d be seeking revenge. Funny guy, Ivan.

We had a short easy trek from the trailhead up to camp, first through a load of tourists bathing in the river, then up onto a narrow trail climbing over the rocky landscape. I stepped in cow shit, so despite the surroundings felt right at home.

Conversations today (and every day) have centred on an ongoing Dubs vs Culchies rivalry. Even the tents have been allocated accordingly, with Dubs in one, Wexford in another and randoms in the last. An otherwise amicable cardgame turned into a major incident after the girl from Limerick claimed victory on behalf of everyone outside the Pale when a lad from Wexford she’d been actively trying to eliminate happened to win. The game (of Uno) eventually finished up 1:1, but will likely be revisited tomorrow night.

Our expedition doctor also adds colour to every meal by explaining how to slaughter various animals. There was some talk about barbecuing a sheep which led to a slightly odd question about whether we should kill it first.

As a vegetarian I’ve so far been getting very well treated foodwise. I even get less dill than the rest of the team, as it’s mixed into a lot of the meat. I also managed to snaffle a couple of wafer biscuits at dinner to keep my strength up.

Talk in the Dublin tent since dinner has centred on what gear to pack for our trek to Camp 1 tomorrow and the difficulties of using the no-seat squatting toilets. One of the lads spent five days in Everest Basecamp eating Nepalese curries and not pooping so he has extolled the virtues of bringing a large supply of laxatives. Another of the lads is concerned about using the loos so the tent has seen a series of demonstrations of squatting techniques and optimal angles for attack. Fierce interesting stuff.

Tomorrow we’re heading for Camp 1 (so named as it’s the second of our two camps) for acclimatisation and then back to basecamp. Should be fun.

In a final fret before bed, my roommate from the hotel was wondering if he needed 8 or 9 pairs of socks for his 5 day stay at Camp 1. Look, I told him, dirty and smelly are two things we just can’t afford to worry about until we get back to the hotel. As the two other lads nodded their approval, I pointed out that ‘dirty’ and ‘smelly’ were the nicknames we’d decided to give them.

Start Point: Hotel, Moscow Airport, 335m

End Point: Hotel (5th floor), Pyatigorsk, 595m

Today was a long day. It’s just gone 11pm and we were up at 4.30am to catch our flight from Moscow. Nobody was particularly sad to leave the hotel rooms with no windows, or the grumpy waiter.

Checking in at Moscow airport with a bag full of sharp metal was less trouble than expected. But two of the lads had extra bags that needed to be paid for, letting them experience first hand a trick for achieving full employment: split the simplest tasks into multiple jobs for multiple people. One person checked us in. If you’re bag was large, you brought it to another person to scan and then handed it to a person standing beside them to put it on a trolley. If you had an extra bag, it must be taken to a separate desk to be paid for, and then returned to the first person for re-check in, delivertly to the scanner person for scanning and finally handed to the trolley pusher to ensure said extra bag was pushed on a trolley. Maximum efficiency.

In Mineralnye Vody airport, we made a show of ourselves posing for photos with our impressive stack of multicoloured North Face duffel bags. A few feet away, a group of German climbers posed with their bags and on the other side of the conveyor belt, a group of climbers from the Lebanon posed with theirs. The Lebanese crew had all their bags wrapped in cellophane. Show-offs.

We met our local guide, Ivan, at the airport. He’s from St Petersburg which is only 2,500km away, so totally local. He had opted to splash out on a flight to come down to meet us rather than take the train. The train takes 36 hours.

Between Mineralnye Vody and Pyatigorsk, we wondered at the abundance of ladas, told lada jokes we’d last heard in the 80s (‘what do you call a lada with a sunroof?’ ‘A skip’), and passed by a lada dealership. 

We stopped by a mountaineering shop on the way for anyone who needed to rent gear. I had all my own stuff so sat on a step outside until a cleaning lady happened along and started to shoo me away. I stood up to go but she took my hand, led me over to a little wall and lay down a piece of cardboard for me to sit on rather than the cold step. But as each of the trekkers came out with their rental boots and axes, they all took up spots on the same cold steps and the cleaning lady had apparently run out of cardboard.

In Pyatigorsk, we had lunch, and wandered around town killing time before dinner. Ivan led the way. He brought us to a look out spot and explained the origins of the town as a mineral baths and health resort of the Czars. He then brought us to a little tourist office where we could sample the famous mineral water straight out of the ground. I was expecting something like Volvic or Vittel, even a Ballygowan would have been acceptable. What we actually drank tasted like farts – like someone had infused water with burnt matches, boiled eggs and a poor state of intestinal health.

We returned to the hotel to sample what Ivan promised would be a surprisingly palatable Russian wine. However the lady in the bar laughed at us and told us they only sold the best wines imported from France and Bulgaria. She recruited a local English professor to further explain that the closest they could offer was the Russian Champagne at 320 Rubles a pop. That’s about 5 Euro a glass we thought, until she corrected us and told us it was 5 Euro a bottle. Immediately the cries went up: “give us two bottles!”, “give us a bottle each!”. When we tasted it, we understood both the price and the scarcity of Russian Champagne on Irish shelves. It tasted like someone had taken the fart water, mixed it with apple juice and a pound of sugar and passed it through a sodastream. Not nice.
At least dinner was good: barbequed dill with a side salad of dill and a dill sauce topped with a garnish of dill. While we ate we were serenaded by one of the staff on a karaoke machine except when her phone rang and she ran around the back of the restaurant so we wouldn’t hear her fighting with her boyfriend*.

At least when we returned to the hotel for bed, we were greeted with rooms that both looked and smelled like they were from the 1970s: musty and creaky with  an aroma which took me back to the cluttered unaired cupboards of various grand-uncles and grand-aunts.

Tomorrow we take a four hour busride for a one hour hike but finally arrive at base camp and get to see the mountain from the North!

*completely unjustified speculation 

Start Point: Stepaside, 120m

End Point: Hotel, Moscow Airport, 335m

Okay, so half the point of keeping this blog is to be honest. I like the idea of having a record of how I actually felt at various points of a mountain trip and not sugar-coat it so it sounds more impressive. In that spirit… I’m a bit pissed.

It’s twenty past midnight in Moscow now. It’s about 19 hours since we all met in Dublin airport. I just watched Germany being knocked out of the Euros by France. The group of 13 on this climb is nearly all guys between 25 and 40 (best guess), which leads to an interesting dynamic for the one girl in the group. While the lads were given a bright blue hoodie, she was given a hot pink one. Because… girls like pink?

From a two minute conversation I found out that our one girl has been up Kili, Aconcagua and got to Camp 2 on Everest, which is far more than the rest of us. If the hot pink hoodie means anything, it means respect.

We had to be at the airport at 4.15 this morning for a 7.15 flight. My taxi driver called at 3.55 to complain I was running late. Turns out a 23kg duffel bag and a 10kg rucksack are a bit of pain to transport on foot, even from an apartment to a cab. He was annoyed. He had another job at 5 and I’d delayed him. On the ride to the airport we managed to bond over the price of a flight  (very high) and my knowledge of the geography of Romania  (very low), so by the time he deducted  €75 from my credit card we were best buds.

I have a huge collection of notes of my last few weeks of preparing for this trip. It includes an aborted attempt to summit the twelve bens in Galway but being hampered by big black slugs named Chuck, camping on top of rivers, following ridges in zero visibility, and haunted civil-war hostels in Connemara warded by three-legged goats.

As it happens I’m in a bed in Moscow, wondering at the snores of my roommate and knowing I have less than 5 hours until we need to get on the next flight, so I’m going to get a bit of sleep.

Tomorrow is another day of travel so there should be enough opportunity to tell you of the ice cream that tastes like chalk and looks like playdough; the time they served pizza on a plane; and of our waiter Alexei, who didn’t smile for three hours and charged us import prices for domestic beers.

Tomorrow’s update should be written from a different Russian hotel room a bit further south.

Cheers 

Derm