‘It’s incredible,’ said Luis, looking at the TV and shaking his head angrily. A news channel headlined a multi-billion dollar bid by the United States government to boost the country’s faltering economy. Luis was incensed — the amounts of money to fund the stimulus package defied comprehension.
‘In Argentina this sort of thing happens every few years and the government does nothing.’
I could understand his anger. An economic crisis was unfolding in the developed world. Reckless lending by banks and other institutions had pushed up property prices for far too long and now the bubble had burst. The response, it seemed, was to spend yet more borrowed money.
Later, Luis appeared with a shoebox.
‘This is all the different Argentine money in my life,’ he said, opening the lid. Inside were lots of different notes of varying denominations. ‘This is the first one. Ten thousand of these became one of these.’ He pulled another note from the box. ‘I think a hundred thousand of these became one of these, but I cannot remember. My grandmother remembered exactly.’
It was a sobering collection that only reinforced what I had known for a long time: to be born in England is a fortunate start in life.
In the company of Andy Parkin I was back in Ushuaia on unfinished business. Thwarted in January 2007 by the absence of ice on the south face of Monte Francés, this time we had returned at the end of the southern winter; it was September and we were hoping the face would now be holding enough snow and ice for us to attempt the climb. We had also been told that the weather at this time was generally more stable and less windy than in the summer months. As usual, Luis and Carolina were being the perfect hosts and had given us the run of their ranchito — a small cabin built in the garden of their family home — while we organised ourselves in the city.
Not for the first time, I had had difficulty finding a yacht to take us to the mountains. The problem was that many of the charter boats and nearly all of the operators left Tierra del Fuego over the winter for warmer places further north. Then just a few weeks earlier I had learned that Luis planned to climb Monte Francés with his friend Wolf Kloss, a German who lived in Ushuaia and who owned two yachts. Wolf was happy to take us along on the Santa Maria Australis to Caleta Olla, however the detail of his itinerary remained unclear. We met over dinner. Wolf was an amiable man with a lively sense of humour, but he was also quite busy readying his boats for the coming summer charter season.
‘I can leave on Friday but I must be back here by the following Friday,’ he said.
‘That gives us four day’s climbing,’ I said, knowing we had to allow for at least four days of sailing.
‘It might be enough,’ Andy commented.
‘We’ll need to be lucky,’ I replied, ‘and we’ll need to see if we can sort some transport out for the rest of the trip.’ Yachts making excursions in the channels from Puerto Williams must return with the full complement of crew they left with; this meant we could not be dropped at Caleta Olla even if we could somehow organise a pick up.
‘You can try in Williams,’ Wolf suggested.
Denis Chevallay was a Swiss living in Puerto Williams and a friend of Wolf’s; he worked as a trekking guide and local historian. Though he moved among the tight-knit yachting community, we had not met before. Williams is such a small place we must have walked past each other on the yacht club pier or in the street on many occasions. Arriving in the port, we called on Denis and over dinner Andy and I told him of our transport dilemmas.
Denis offered to help. Despite not being a climber, or having even spent much time in the Cordillera Darwin, it turned out he was an enthusiast for the range and had amassed an incredible collection of books, magazines and reports about these little-known mountains. For Andy and I it was a great resource to stumble upon, and a place where we would both lose many happy hours on subsequent visits. Denis may, in fact, have the best collection of Cordillera Darwinrelated material in the world.
We sailed from Puerto Williams next morning, still not knowing what would follow the outing to Monte Francés — not that it seemed to matter much as we motored west along the Beagle Channel on a calm and almost cloudless day. Snow lay down to the treeline and the forest, which had been a forbidding dark green in the summer, was now almost black. We reached Caleta Olla in the early evening, anchored the yacht and ran lines to the shore just as it was starting to get dark.
Luis and Wolf were up early and busy sorting gear when I came out from our cabin. They were in a hurry, intent on getting the most from their precious days away from work and families. We organised ourselves more slowly and then took Luis and Wolf ashore.
‘Remember — you need to be back by Wednesday night,’ Wolf said as they set off along the gravel beach towards the mountain.
A little later it was our turn; we followed the familiar track off the shoreline, through the fringing strip of forest and on to the peat bog beyond.
‘It’s frozen,’ I said to Andy after the first few steps, barely able to conceal my delight. In the summer months the bog was very wet and walking over it was slow and laborious. It was a joy to move unhindered over the hard surface, though strange to be following a familiar route under such different conditions. Most of the trees were bare of leaves, but now I could appreciate the evergreen beech; it looked almost identical to its deciduous namesake in summer. The dense undergrowth had died back and even the grasses were burnt brown by the frost. Only the intricate beauty of the place remained.
We soon left the trail the others had made and followed the usual path up past my summer camp to rock slabs by a waterfall that drains a small glacial lake. We were making good progress thanks to the frozen bogs and a covering of firm snow over the tussocky ground. The lake was frozen. What in summer is a time-consuming detour up through dense forest to gain a moraine ridge would not be necessary. We simply walked straight across the ice in a few minutes. Above, the rocky slabs and waterfalls were hidden, banked out in snow. We zigzagged up hard névé to reach the Francés Glacier and gradually approached the South Face. The sight was not encouraging. The coating of rime on the rock we had seen from far below, was just that — a thin veneer — and we needed more.
‘The face isn’t holding any ice,’ I said, as we paused for a rest.
‘I’ve noticed,’ Andy replied wearily. ‘Let’s have a look further along.’
We traversed westwards but there was no improvement.
‘We can’t force a line up this in this condition. We’re going to have to do something different.’
‘But what?’ Andy asked.
‘We could always go and do Italia, I don’t think it’s had a second ascent,’ I pointed west towards a peak first climbed way back in 1937.
‘No. I want to do something harder than that. What about this ridge on Francés?’
I looked up to where the top of the South Face formed a ridge descending westwards. I had never really paid much attention to it before, but it certainly looked interesting and led to some imposing towers near the summit.
‘Yeah, lets give it a go.’ It didn’t require much deliberation; the day was coming to an end and we were on a tight schedule.
We continued traversing, looking for a weakness that would enable us to climb up on to the ridge; eventually as we rounded a shoulder we saw a snow slope leading up to a col.
‘Let’s see if we can dig a snow hole in that bergschrund,’ Andy said, waving at a fracture crossing the slope. The crack line had an overhanging lip below which we soon excavated a small shelf. Light cloud that had drifted by during the day was clearing now and radiant starlight was beginning to pierce the sky. It was dark by the time we slid into our icy shelter.
It was not a good night. The hastily dug chamber was not large enough to sit up in and was also narrow, forcing us to lay end-to-end. Even in such tight working conditions, Andy, as ever, got the stove going and managed to produce drinks and hot food, which he carefully handed to me. The platform sloped down and with little room to manoeuvre I could not get comfortable. I dozed the night away and as the grey light of dawn filtered inside noticed that a fracture line had formed in the floor beside me. The snow and ice platform we had slept on was dropping into the crevasse that lay beneath. It was a sobering start to the day.
Despite the cold, it was a relief to escape the shelter and begin. The slope steepened as we neared the ridge, our crampons biting on hard ice under a thin coating of snow. At the col a huge, wind-sculpted bank of snow formed a wall on its northern side. I led up out of the basin, climbing where steep powder snow met the granite of a pinnacle on the ridge. Suddenly there was sunshine and a horizon. It was a beautiful winter’s day on the ridge, out of the long shadow cast on the south side of the mountain, though the sun lent little warmth. I stopped, belayed and prepared to bring Andy up to join me. He climbed slowly, dragging his left leg through the deeper snow.
‘Does your leg hurt?’ I asked, the somewhat belated thought immediately embarrassing me. He seemed so accepting of his old wounds and handicaps that I never felt the need to probe.
‘No. It’s just stiff.’
I was selfishly relieved that the answer was not ‘yes’, as then I would have felt guilty for not having thought to ask years earlier. Still, it was reassuring to hear he was not in permanent pain.
Andy continued easily above and then I swung up a steep ramp line of rock and ice to reach the crest of the ridge. Above, gentle waves of rime-covered rock led to a frightening looking pillar near the top. The features were sublimely beautiful, but I was in no doubt that there was difficulty ahead.
‘Good lead that,’ Andy said, joining me at the stance and looking happy to be on steeper ground. We weaved our way higher following the line of least resistance through increasingly large rime-encrusted towers. The day was slipping by, and so were the easy options. I belayed beneath a corner splitting a huge tower, glad that it was Andy’s lead. After studying the obstacle ahead, Andy took off his rucksack, clipped it to my belay, carefully racked the climbing gear on his harness and then moved up above me.
The climbing was straightforward for a short way, Andy pausing to put in an ice screw as the ground steepened. Soon after, he was flailing to remove feathery rime and expose the hard ice that lay beneath. As icy debris rained down I cowered beneath my helmet, while trying to snatch glimpses of what was going on.
Andy slowly gained height. I could tell from his body position that the ground had become overhanging. At times his feet slipped from the hard ice and he was left hanging from his axes. I could barely believe what I was seeing: here was a 54-year old man, who would easily qualify for disability benefit and a car sticker if he lived in the UK, wrestling his body up overhanging ice. It was a privilege to guard his ropes and watch.
There were moments when I thought Andy was going to fall; somehow though he hung on, carefully clearing away the rime before moving up. It was a Herculean effort and took a long time. Eventually he disappeared from sight. Now the wind was rising and I was beginning to get cold.
‘Safe,’ came the cry I had been waiting for.
A little later Andy reappeared over the top of the tower.
‘Don’t even try to climb it, just jug it,’ he shouted down. ‘I’ll haul my rucksack.’ Then he moved back out of sight over the crest.
I found the pitch difficult enough jumaring up the rope while freeing Andy’s rucksack. It continually snagged in the trench created where Andy had chopped away the rime. By the time I joined him on the tower, the wind was blowing hard and it was dangerously cold. Next was an undulating section of ridge below a final tower. We moved along to the flattest bit of the ridge and frantically hacked out a shelf for a bivouac. It was in an incredibly exposed position and we quickly added a small snow-block wall to the windward side of the platform before getting into our sleeping bags. After dark the wind increased to a worrying intensity and it began to snow. The stove was not functioning well in the maelstrom and it took tireless coaxing by Andy to produce drinks and a meal. Then we settled down to a long, cold night. At times, I found the wind frightening.
By dawn the wind had dropped some, but we were in cloud and it was spitting snow.
‘What shall we do?’ I asked Andy.
‘It only looks like one hard pitch.’
I felt uncertain. If we could get above the difficulty quickly, going up and over the top might be the best approach; but I knew the higher slopes of Francés were complex and that finding the way down the other side of the mountain in poor visibility would be difficult.
‘I’ll give it a go,’ I said eventually.
We packed up and readied ourselves for the day. I walked down and across a narrow col to the final tower. A narrowing tongue of ice led up the buttress. The ice was good at first but it got thinner, until there was just rime on rock. I searched for cracks, probing tentatively with my axes. Without cracks I could neither get purchase for the axes nor place gear to protect myself against a slip. There was nothing. I was going to have to make a long series of difficult moves up this just-off-vertical ground, hoping it would get better. There was every prospect of a large and nasty fall should I fail. My confidence crumbled.
‘I don’t like the look of it,’ I shouted to Andy. ‘Let’s go down.’
‘Okay,’ he replied sympathetically, without a hint of disappointment.
We made a series of abseils back to the glacier and started the long trudge down.
It was many hours before we reached the lake. Then it was on through the forest. We reached the beach at dusk and shouted to the yacht. Luis came on deck.
‘Did you summit?’ he asked, rowing towards us in the dinghy.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘You?’
‘Yes, yesterday.’
‘Congratulations. The sixth ascent I believe.’
Luis and Wolf spent one night in Puerto Williams before leaving early for Ushuaia. Andy and I settled into a hostel on the seafront and then went to see Denis.
‘I think your best option is to go to Yendegaia,’ he told us. ‘I will call the ferry company in Punta Arenas.’
We scanned Denis’s book collection while he made the call.
‘All done,’ he announced proudly, putting down the phone. ‘It leaves on Saturday at 6.30 in the morning.’ That gave us two lazy days in Williams, trawling through Denis’s Cordillera Darwin library and topping up a few supplies from the supermarket. We agreed that once we got to the estancia we would move up to a camp below the Stoppani Glacier and concentrate our activities on the eastern side of the three Roncagli peaks, only one of which had been climbed.
Early on Saturday morning we relayed our bags down to the jetty. The rusty roll-on, roll-off ferry was similar to ones that hop between Scottish islands. It had even been built in Glasgow. There were three truck trailers of centolla on the boat with their refrigeration units running, a couple of cars and a handful of passengers making the daylong passage to Punta Arenas. We parked ourselves inside and promptly went back to sleep.
By mid-afternoon the ferry was making its way slowly down the Bahia Yendegaia, heading towards the clump of white huts that mark the estancia. The bow was lowered on a rocky bluff to the side of the buildings and we carted our bags ashore. We stood and waved at the departing craft.
‘No!’ Andy suddenly screamed.
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve left my small rucksack in the cabin on the ferry.’
‘Shit!’ Andy’s passport, money and other valuables were now on their way to Punta Arenas. Then I remembered the satellite phone. ‘I’ll call Denis.’ Hopefully our friend would be able to speak to the ferry company and retrieve the bag.
Denis listened carefully.
‘Where is the ferry now? Is it past Dos de Mayo?’
I could see on the other side of the bay the isolated Chilean police post that guards the border with Argentina.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘I’ll call them then. They will be able to radio the ferry and get it dropped off there.’
We watched the ferry stop at Dos de Mayo and then carried our bags over to the estancia. There was no one at home. We sat on the veranda and gazed down the fjord. It was just as beautiful as I remembered.
Later we heard dogs barking as Jose, his girlfriend Annamie and a Dutch couple arrived on horseback. They dismounted at the old shearing shed and we walked over to meet them. It was fantastic to see Jose after so many years and to meet Annamie for the first time. The Dutch couple — Peter and Paula — were staying on a yacht moored nearby.
That evening we ate in Jose’s cabin and shared stories from the past and present. Jose was happy to take us into the mountains and when we told him about Andy’s rucksack he made a radio call to Dos de Mayo and confirmed that the sack had indeed been dropped there. His friend Oscar would bring it on his fishing boat. We pitched our tents overlooking the shore and went to sleep happy, knowing everything was back on track.
The following day we packed our bags and in the afternoon Oscar arrived with the rucksack. Oscar was also known as ‘GPS’ — a tongue-in-cheek name for it was a navigational aid he managed well enough without. He turned out to be quite a character and he and Jose drank the day away.
Jose was subdued in the morning; nonetheless he was up early saddling the horses. Before we left Peter and Paula kindly offered to take us back to Williams and on to Ushuaia on their yacht, Pacific Blue. This neatly solved our transport shortfall for the end of the trip.
It was a long ride to the camp — dubbed Casa Gringo — below the snout of the Stoppani Glacier. At a little grassy clearing marking the boundary between frozen bog and forest we ate lunch with Jose and Annamie then bid farewell. We had eight days before they would return with the horses.
Rain the first night flooded the camp with melt water. In the morning we solemnly moved our tents to higher ground and then sat out a day of more heavy rain. Andy kept himself busy building a small wooden shelter while I read in my tent, only venturing out to fire up the stove to make drinks and meals.
The weather brightened the next day and after a windy, showery morning we decided to carry a load into the mountains. Moraine ridges along the side of the Stoppani Glacier led to its junction with a valley leading westwards to the Dartmoor Glacier. After crossing a large flat area — given the name the Guanaco Flats by a previous expedition — below the moraine ridges at the snout of the glacier, we followed another ridge for a while before dropping into the ablation valley at its side. It was hard work. Dense forest on the moraine ridge crest was difficult to push through and there was deep snow in the ablation valley. We made a stash near some beaver dams and returned to Casa Gringo for nightfall.
The following day we regained our stash by early afternoon and continued up the valley, sometimes in the forest and sometimes walking along the moraine ridge. There was no continuous path. Eventually we reached a small clearing known as Foxes Glade. Beyond this point the ablation valley blanked out, forcing us to descend the moraine on to the glacier. A faint valley on its southern edge led on up to a grassy platform that offered a good spot to camp. Here we spent the remaining daylight examining the faces above and discussed various climbing options into the night.
Out on the glacier the next morning, as we approached the Roncagli peaks, it became increasingly obvious that the most sensible and least dangerous route was up snow slopes and a face on the north side of the east ridge of Roncagli III. The slopes led up to the ridge proper, which we hoped to follow to a col between Monte Ada and Roncagli III, giving access to the peak’s south ridge.
Rapid progress up the initial snow slopes was followed by two pitches of difficult mixed climbing. Then we wallowed up deep, sugary snow lying over rock to reach the ridge. It was demoralising to discover that we could have reached the same spot by using our previous approach line to Monte Ada, followed by a gentle climb up from the Bove Glacier. Luckily, we found a bergschrund that we enlarged into a snow cave. The night passed cold with spindrift blowing in through the entrance. By the morning we were stormbound.
It was a miserable day. We kept warm by enlarging the cave and trying to seal the entrance with blocks of snow. Even so, there was no disguising the fact that we were living inside a refrigerator. The snowfall intensified into our second night, but by morning the storm was blowing itself out.
We dug our way out of the cave and tried to dry our sleeping bags; despite the sunshine it was cold in the breeze. We started to move up the ridge again. Snow conditions were awful. I managed to thrash my way up to a crevasse fracture line, then as I tried to pull over the lip there was a huge boom as it broke, dumping me inside the crevasse. The fall, although short, really spooked me. I climbed out trembling.
‘I’m going down,’ I told Andy, who was moving to my right to try and find another way over the obstacle.
‘We can get up over here,’ he countered.
‘No, I’ve had enough.’
The summit was a long way off and the terrain looked complex, our food was low and I felt that to continue would simply invite an epic. My mind was made up. Silently I walked back down the slope to the bivouac and Andy followed. We abseiled the face we had climbed up two days earlier and walked down to where we had left the tent.
Next morning I walked easily back down the glacier, off its snout and through a river valley that cut down through the moraine ridge to Guanaco Flats immediately below me, cursing at the time we wasted going up and down the ablation valley and moraine ridge at the glacier’s side. I remembered how Carolina had described her and Luis’s first visit here.
‘We did not understand the geography,’ she’d said, laughing at their naivety.
Sometimes everything seems to click and you move efficiently, a complex three-dimensional picture of the landscape forming perfectly in your mind. At other times the skill deserts you. On this occasion, the geography of the place had got the better of us too.
‘It must be difficult for you, not finishing a climb?’ Luis asked, when we were back in Ushuaia.
‘Not really,’ I replied half-heartedly. ‘I think we’ve learnt a lot and we can always come back and try again.’
However, the more I thought about it, the more disappointing it was. The uncertainty around transport had not helped us make clear plans and we had ended up tackling two separate objectives. On previous visits bad weather had cleared at crucial moments and bolstered our confidence to continue. This time the opposite had occurred, although the weather had not developed into the full-blown storm I feared. As is often the case in mountains, the real reasons for failure were more psychological. As life got ever more complicated I was finding it more difficult to compartmentalise, and the satellite phone meant that the world at home now came into the mountains with me. Another large speaking tour was organised for when I returned and my thoughts had drifted towards that, the children and home. I worked best in the mountains when my mind was clear. Then I could concentrate and connect with the terrain; that had not been happening on this occasion.
Whatever the exact cause, I had lacked the focus and drive needed for tackling such committing objectives successfully. It was a focus and drive that never seemed to desert Andy and I could not help but feel I had let him down. I went home, while he stayed, still keen to climb on his own in the mountains behind Ushuaia.
I knew the routine and over time had become comfortable with public speaking. In some ways it was easier talking to bigger audiences in theatres or large auditoriums. They were more impersonal and the people more distant than in intimate venues. The crowds also responded better and it is always heartening to hear people laughing, sighing and gasping at the right moments. Talking was the easy bit. The harder work lay in sorting out the logistics of travel and accommodation, getting together all the books, posters, screen, computer and a whole raft of gadgets and cables, ferrying them from one place to another, then setting everything up only to pack it all away again a few hours later. On top that was the constant driving — a lot of it done late at night. I took a roadie to help. It was nice to have someone to help carry everything, sell books and posters, share the driving, to talk to and, most importantly, drink beer with at the end of each evening. Like mountaineering expeditions, the tours were pleasantly mad.
The world of theatres is one that I landed in by chance and I found it all a bit odd. Theatre managers seemed to think I would want to spend most of my time cowering backstage in a dressing room. I preferred to be out and about meeting people and helping to set-up. I barely used them.
‘Do you want to see your dressing room?’ people would ask.
‘No thanks,’ I’d say. ‘I only have to change my shirt and put on a pair of shoes.’ I could do this at my car, which I usually managed to park at the stage door. At Birmingham City Hall the dressing room was big enough for an entire orchestra and had a white grand piano inside — sadly wasted on me. I did take a shower though, simply because they looked so swish.
One evening in Bedford, returning to our hotel for the night, I found the car park full. It was permit-only parking in the streets nearby — so that was out too. Then I noticed a small area between two cars with yellow hatching on the tarmac, left to provide access to a path leading to the hotel. I managed to squeeze my car into the gap, but it was so tight I had to exit through the boot. When I went back in the morning someone had left a note behind one of my windscreen wipers. ‘You are an arsehole,’ it read. A fair point maybe, but under the circumstances I had little option.
Becca had done a good job organising venues reasonably close together, but there were exceptions that meant insane drives between appearances on consecutive nights. Epsom on the outskirts of London to Stirling in Scotland was brutal, as was Barnstaple in Devon to Norwich. Maidstone in Kent to South Shields was not much fun either. In Swansea we were lost somewhere close to the theatre until we noticed a neon sign on top of the building flashing my name; a heckler in Leamington Spa was forcefully told to shut up by people sitting nearby; and someone ran into the back of my car on a wet evening in Inverness. Then there was a fantastic evening driving back from Arbroath, near Dundee, to stay with a friend in Edinburgh. We decided to go cross-country and went over the Tay Bridge to get on to the Neuk of Fife. Joe Pester clutched his TomTom GPS and like a co-driver in a rally called out the direction and severity of the bends ahead as I drove flat-out through the night. Some places were just plain out-of-the-way: in Lowestoft on England’s east coast the locals joked that the nearest motorway was in Holland. The tour ended in Norwich and a memorable night out before driving wearily back to Cumbria.
Late that year, I managed to attract a group of clients for Monte Francés, but with another block of lecture dates looming the trip needed to begin in early January. The flight left Manchester before breakfast on New Year’s Day. Life has treated me very kindly, but seeing in the New Year in a hotel at Manchester Airport does not rate as one of the highlights.
We had a few drinks and a meal in the surprisingly busy hotel bar and then took the children to bed.
‘This has got to be the saddest New Year ever,’ I told Jane.
I cannot even remember if we stayed up until midnight.
At five in the morning I got up, said my goodbyes to Jane, kissed our sleeping children, then dragged my bags from the room and went to the terminal to catch the first shuttle flight to Heathrow. The entire day would be spent in airports and on planes.
Ushuaia felt very familiar: it was only three months since I’d left. I met up with Luis, gave him some tents I had brought from England, and asked if he had been busy.
‘Yes, I have been to do a rescue in the Dientes.’
Later, Luis showed me some photos he had taken and told me the story. A group of Israelis had gone trekking in the Dientes de Navarino — a range of peaks behind Puerto Williams — and had become lost as cloud and snow enveloped them. They had a satellite phone with them and called for help. Israeli diplomats in Santiago and Buenos Aires moved with remarkable speed. There is normally only a single helicopter on Tierra del Fuego, based in the Argentine part of the island at Rio Grande and used exclusively by an oil company. The Israeli’s somehow secured its use and learned of Luis’s guiding company.
Luis received a telephone call telling him that his services were required and that a helicopter was waiting for him in Puerto Williams. He hastily arranged for another guide to accompany him, got some gear together and chartered a light aircraft to fly across the Beagle Channel.
In Puerto Williams they transferred to the waiting helicopter and flew up into the hills behind the town. They had a GPS location fix from the phone but the helicopter landed short, just below the cloud base. Luis and his colleague walked up the hillside through the mist for 20 minutes and found the ‘lost’ travellers. The trekkers were no more than a few hours walk from the town. They had simply sat in their tent and waited to be rescued.
‘It’s incredible,’ Luis said in disbelief as he finished the story.
I doubted the British government would have been quite so helpful. But why should they be? I had always come to places like Tierra del Fuego expecting to take responsibility for myself and for my companions, and made provision accordingly. A big part of the area’s attraction is its remoteness. There is no system in place for rescuing people from the mountains. I have always operated on the understanding that you have to deal with any incidents yourself. Now it seemed that some people who were not in great danger and had not even tried to help themselves felt they could abdicate all responsibility simply because they had a satellite phone. The device had encouraged a laziness of both thought and action.
Still, it had been a profitable start to the season for Luis.
We climbed Monte Francés within a week of arriving at Caleta Olla, made a rain-thwarted attempt on Monte Italia and dropped in on Jose and Annamie at Yendegaia before heading back to Ushuaia. It was a happy and successful trip and time passed quickly. All too soon I was back at home in the depths of an English winter.
The gigs started again in a snowy Southend. My overriding memory of all the time on the road is of the many towns across England I ended up visiting. I have travelled quite widely around the UK over the years, mostly through climbing but also for work, but these were places I would have otherwise overlooked. I am grateful for having had the chance to visit so many unsung towns and cities. Most were very pleasant; some were not. In Stoke-on-Trent I spoke in a beautifully refurbished theatre adjoining the town hall, but the surrounding area — what should have been the city centre — was simply a wasteland. In the early 1980s a lot of Britain’s manufacturing and heavy industry went to the wall, leaving large areas of dereliction in many cities. Over time much of this has been redeveloped. However, I found it shocking to discover places where this had simply not happened.
Aberdare, in the South Wales valleys, was not derelict but many of the shops and pubs in what once was a thriving mining town were boarded up. As always though, the people were warm and friendly.
‘You’re the only turn that I can remember helping to set-up,’ one of the technical assistants commented.
Nearing the end of the tour I played to a full house in Loughborough. It seemed fitting: Loughborough is the nearest town to Charnwood Forest, an area of hills and small outcrops where I spent many happy days honing my rock-climbing skills while a teenager growing up in a village in south Leicestershire.
The final nights in Dunstable and Broxbourne, north of London, were something of an anti-climax; yet these two Home Counties towns seemed suitably anonymous places for it all to grind to a halt. Theatreland was an odd, and sometimes rewarding, world that I was pleased to have tasted, but it was not a world I was truly part of — just passing through. Now it was time to go home.
‘It’s like pantomime,’ I told Jane after my performance in a theatre on the pier at Worthing on England’s south coast.
And it had been.