the late shift

Things are slow in the world of fun lately but had a cool trip up to London however, I'm sitting in Singapore with the arvo thundery's crackling away whilst i try to stay awake! The trip up to London was a little different to usual with us taking a more southern route to normal, we headed up over Afghanistan as usual but then headed just to the south of the Caucasus' (Azerbaijan, Georgia) and over the black sea. Usually not too interesting but with summer on it's way up there the sun was up early and gave us an awesome sunrise treat as we cruised past the very scenic range which includes Mt Elbrus - highest peak in Europe at 18,500'/5642m. I only had my iphone for pics, I really have to make a habit of taking the dSLR away with me! 

The 'terrain map' shows the Caucasus Range to the right of the green line which is our planned track, the purple stars & letters are airports. The airports starting with "OI__" are in Iran, "UB__" are in Azerbaijan, "UG__" is Georgia, "UR__" is Russian and "LT__" is Turkey. Where it says "TERR" with numbers below, this is the height, in thousands of feet, of the displayed terrain map.

It's hard to spot it but Elbrus is on the display, just below the top, below the '30' line

Still in Azerbaijan 

Pure, morning.

....and we have Elbrus! It's amazing how high it stands out from it's surrounding peaks, it's a volcanic cone amongst regular alpine style mountains.

Up in London we headed out to Camden to check out the markets and general scene, pretty cool place... 

A fun little Photo stitch of the view from the 17th floor in Singapore, the red roof in the foreground is the pre-eminent Raffles Hotel with the approaching storm in the background.  

London Calling!

Every time I launch on a London trip I can't get that song outta my head...

Anyways... it's been a pretty good trip so far and my favourite thing to do in Singapore has definitely been keeping me going!

We gave the satay's a decent nudge at Lau Pa Sat - my fave hawker market - and had a fairly low key time, managed to check out a local climbing gym... pretty ordinary and open air = a very sweaty time! But, it was good to do some climbing to stay in shape.
Then it was off to London! Spent a good deal of time sleeping but managed to hit another climbing gym, again with Adrian... nice gym too, fantastic in fact (as far as gyms go...). Had a nice night out with some friends and cruelly dug Caro out of bed far too early on Saturday for brunch! Great to catch up, even if it was brief! Afterwards, off to Vertical Chill for some indoor ice climbing! Never imagined it even existed but it was great to give it a crack. Pretty small and short but  it was more than enough for me to have a play on and decide that ice climbing is totally dodgy. but fun....

Sorry for the crap pics! It's in a cool room at the back of a gear shop, starts in the basement then you climb up to the first floor - there's a window up there too so there's a heap of people looking at you all the time...

It was hard to get a shot of the ice, the iphone camera wasn't cooperating...

My first thought: "how lame is this!?"
2 meters up my first climb a massive chunk slammed into it... it's definitely worth having it down!

Back to Singas and more food - Fatty's 1 arrival with a Cave transition worked a treat! Had some a murtabak from Mr Prata for lunch and went cable wakeboarding... good fun! Pretty intimidating hitting the jumps though!

Mr Prata!

And now I'm just hanging round to get home! It's getting to be a long trip & I'm looking forward to getting picked up by Maria!