Cosmiques Arrete

No boarding today, but some proper alpine mountaineering. Although, by Chamonix standards the Cosmiques arrete route, up to the Aiguille du Midi, manages a poorly 0.5 (correct, that's zero point five..) out of 10 in terms of difficulty in this part of the world, according to our guide. Did this with my friend Gunilla, who managed to love the whole thing despite (a) being fully upside down during one abseil (not what was meant to happen) and (b) coming within a cm or two of falling off the side of a knife-edge snowy ridge with about 1000m of air between her and the next thing (luckily she was roped up..). It was mainly a kind of technical 'scramble', there just being one 3m section requiring actual finger- and crampon-tip vertical climbing, but mainly it was all about dealing with the huge exposure below us. A great day, and we made the last telecabine down to the valley with, literally, 1 minute to spare (and it wasn't the last punters cabin, which left earlier, it was the last one for the staff!). More pics here.

Health and Safety while working in Tanzania...

So, I'm doing a week and a bits worth of work at a small micro-finance bank in Tanzania (a bit of a change from Chamonix!). I love working in these distinctly non-corporate environments, partly because you get stuff like in this pic. The kettle is a massive 5 litre affair, but the heating element is set so high inside it that a full 1 litre of water is under the element, so when the water level gets down that far, to heat that remaining 1 litre the kettle is tipped backward so the water covers the element (mostly) - and the perfect thing to rest it on is the multi-socket thing it's plugged into... If you look carefully you can see the steam against the dark of the desk...

Lunch at Ciecco's in Courmeyeur!

Each of the last 3 winters I've managed to make it through the tunnel to Courmeyeur (the bus there and skiing is free with the Chamonix season ski pass) for a days skiing er, 4 hour lunch at Ciecco, a fantastic restaurant just off the pistes, right on the mountain. The food is fabulous (fairly pricey, but well worth it), the ambience and setting magnificent, but the main ingredient is Anna, the owner, who takes the orders, but also pretty much gives the orders on who should have what and will take every chance to encourage you to blow your budget ("So Anna, what wine would you recommend for about 20€?", [Anna]"Well, you have left yourself no choice, with your main course choice, this one, it's €35.", "Oh, ok, er, I'll take it."). She's really a fantastic hostess and great character who adds a lot to the experience here. And at the end, while you are sorting out the bill, she'll leave you with bottles of homemade grappa and limoncella to polish off at your leisure. Wonderful stuff. This time I was here with friends from London, Ray and Alex, flatmate Todd, and his friend Deb from Canada.

Marbree Couloir (from La Palud, Courmeyeur)

Take two! This time we had reservations in advance (but ironically there were no queues anyway). It was an astonishingly cold on the walk to the top of the Marbree, in the lee of the Aiguille Marbree, given how hot it was yesterday, but this was an early start, and we were at about 3300m, in the shade... Luckily it was only 10 mins or so before then we came out into the sun and the top of the Marbree. It was decided to climb up a bit higher than the normal entrance, to get to some sunny, steep looking slopes. And it was quite steep, approaching 50 degrees for the first 50m or so where we were going to start the descent. Unfortunately, we didn't really wait long enough for the snow to soften up properly and it was a mix of hard and soft snow, which made things interesting (read: pretty scary). I started down with my ice-axe in my hand, just in case. It's tricky riding with a classic piolet, you have to take care not to stab yourself on each turn! The snow was tricky enough that I had to really gird myself for each jump turn, knowing that a mistake could lead to a long slide, and even though I had the axe I wasn't totally confident in using it while riding (or while falling!). After about 50m it softened to 45 degrees but the snow still made it tricky. The lower we got the softer the snow, of course, but it took a good 500m vertical to really get proper spring snow - party because the clouds came in about halfway down, which stopped the snow heating up properly. Getting near the bottom we started to encounter patches of grass and rock, had to do a couple of walks but after that we skied right down through some nice summer-only villages to Planpincieux where we got the bus back to the bottom of the Palud lift. We all had lunch and then Benoit and I skied back down the Noire side of the Valley Blanche (which had lovely snow and not half as skied as the French side) while Bob drove back. A great day - challenging and a bit scary, but super satisfying. More pics here...

Courmeyeur, North-facing couloir between Mont Nix & Mont Favre (from Col D'arp)

We actually came over to try for the Marbree couloir, but when we got to the Palud lift, the queues were enormous. We made a reservation only then but could only get a 10.30am lift, and being a very hot day starting the descent at about noon felt like it would be way too late. So we gave up on that idea and went over to Courmeyeur proper. Benoit had an idea about a couloir he'd like to do, so we took the top lift to Col d'Arp, skied south down the Vallon di Youla a km or so, hung a right behind Mont Nix and then skinned up that side valley to the west. In the head of the valley we climbed up north to get to a lovely north-facing slope with a nice couloir (perhaps 35-40 degrees) that had not been ridden since the last snow-fall. The snow was cold, not crusty at all, and deep. A lovely short descent, followed by a long run-out and a bit of a walk for me (boo, snowboarder) along the flat Val Veni to the Zerotta cafe and chair. At that point, I called it quits as my knee was a bit sore (lingering tendonitus) and took the chance for some cake and coffee! A good save. We'll try for Marbree again tomorrow with some new reservations we made for 8.45am. More pics here...

Couloir de la Floria - Col de Berard - Le Buet Village (from Flegere)

Bob and I used this route as steep couloir practice, the Couloir de la Floria being a solid 45 degrees. It had snowed heavily on Monday, just 5 days before, and we knew not too many people had skied it since, meaning the couloir should be in good condition. And it was. Soft snow still in the steep parts, giving confidence to the jump-turns and a fast run out at the bottom. A hot day, the skin back up to the col de berard was a sweaty affair, but once there, again the quality of snow down the other side to the village of Buet was surprisingly good (i.e. great!). And Bob found it even better, being much lighter than he should have been, having taken off from the last col without his backpack! (which I had to carry down to him...). The payback was a big Edelweiss beer and coke at the Le Buet pub, where they had a jazzband playing, in the sun - magic. More pics here.

Col du Passon - Col du Midi des Grandes - Couloir Pissoir - Trient (from Grands Montets)

A long tour this one, with Benoit who I met at the CAF, plus a couple of his friends, to a very nice couloir with great ambience - running down beside the Glacier du Trient, and then down to Trient village (Switzerland). We started with the normal Col du Passon (about 700m / 1.5 hrs), then traversed across the whole glacier du tour and up to the Col du Midi des Grandes (another 500+m, 1.75 hrs). From there, down the Couloir du Pissoir. The snow was very hard work going up, quite crusty on top, and my very wide split board skis were about a hand-span wider than the thinner skin track those pesky skiers had left - they need to walk a bit more like John Wayne. So I had a lot of extra drag widening the skin track. At the very top, just as we started descending, on now really nice snow, no rocks around anywhere, I just stopped dead in my tracks and fell over - no clue to the obviously very sharp rock below the surface that just ripped by base out and exposed the wood core! Ouch. I didn't know until we got to the bottom, and therefore still enjoyed the great descent. Until I fell over the 3m frozen waterfall that is... More pics here.

Grande Autannes - Croix de Bron - Trient (from Le Tour)

I joined the CAF (club alpin Francais), which is a super inclusive, very friendly outfit, who arrange tours for members at the weekends. Go along on Friday night, listen to what's planned, put your name down for Saturday or Sunday, or both. The trips are led by experienced locals and they tend to go on interesting variations from the standard fare, both in the valley and sometimes outside it too. Average age perhaps 50? But all very, very fit, so they are fast on the climbs. Going down, they might not be so fast.. perhaps "considered" is a good word to describe the pace. But it's a great way to learn new routes and improve your french, being that they are so friendly, and will even revert to english if needed!
This route took us up the Grande Autannes from Le Tour, then across to a saddle on the Glacier Grande called the "Croix de Bron", from there we skied down the nicely steep Glacier Grande and down along the lower valley to the village of Trient, where a van was waiting to whisk us home. The pic shows the view of the glacier before our descent. More pics here...

Petit Envers - Col Superior du Plan (from Aiguille du Midi)

Back to the Petite Envers (4th time now?), but this time we stopped about half way and climbed up to the west up to the Col Superior du Plan, then skied back down the same way, back onto the Petit Envers again. It was a hot day, a bit cloudy at times (sometimes whiting out, but after short waits it would clear again). The climb up intensely hot and a bit tricky on the super springy snow (slush) and we had to step over a couple of 1 foot wide crevasses as well (though not too deep, perhaps only 8ft, from what I could see). Near the top we had to nip quickly past the hanging glacier / serac above us, then across the bergschrund (a type of crevasse at the point of steep slope where the lower weight of ice pulls it away from the ice anchored to the higher slope). That steep slope we had trouble walking up was great skiing down... More pics here.

Pointe Alphonse Favre (in the Aiguille Rouges)

One I've been wanting to try for a couple of years. Starting at Flegere with on the classic Crochues-Berard traverse, but about halfway around the traverse just turn straight up the big couloir and climb to the top of the Pointe Alphonse Favre. Then there is a big descent, 30 degrees max at the top (so quite gentle), with a bit of it going over the Glacier du Mort (yup, "glacier of death"...it's not so bad). You end up in Le Buet and the train back to Chamonix. A really lovely descent, less travelled than the standard Crochues Berard and longer. And there is a very interesting and steep couloir option (west face) below the Pointe, facing the Col de Berard, that would be worth a look at sometime. Full set of pics here.

Petite Envers (From the Aiguille du Midi)

I actually did this same route three times, over a couple of weeks, with Bob. All in slightly different conditions; no fresh snow, a bit of fresh snow, at -52C below on the Aiguille du Midi arrete (with wind-chill), and once when my binding broke halfway down, though luckily I could still ride it out. This map is an old one, so the glacier formation has changed a lot, but the route we took is roughly marked in purple. What you can see here represents about 4km of skiing. After the picture, there is about another 5k to the end of the glacier (very gentle), then another 4k along a track back to Chamonix itself - so a minimum of 13k in one run...

Couloir 2 at Vormaine (Le Tour)

Couloir 2 (route shown) may not be it's real name but working left to right in this pic it fits. We'd been at Grande Montets all day, rocking the pistes and racing, and thought we'd finish up with a quick run down this at Le Tour, that neither myself nor Bob had ever done. Snow was not great, to be fair, quite hard, but the ambience was nice and it's good to know for a nice cold winter day with fresh snow, when you could really bomb down it, given it has a huge run-out area. Couloir 4, two over, going down a bit left, then hooking right, looks like the daddy though...

Brevent - Aiguillette des Houches, and back

A nice gentle tour for my dodgy knee (just a week into the new winter season, still not sure if it can handle much riding), a lovely figure-eight, taking in great views and nice deep powder.

The steepness of the slopes going down to the lakes from the Brevent top station surprised me, there are some challenging (if shortish) routes down that way. And the views down towards Merlet and Les Houches from the Aiguillete du Brevent and around to the Aiguillette des Houches were especially good (very steep down that way too!). The knee held up well.

Lost and found...

It all started off so well! But somehow it all fell by the wayside - it's time to pick it up again, I feel. But, what happened in the meantime? Far too much to retrospectively do postings for but a quick summary runs like this:

2007: Rwanda finished up work there about September (lived there for 7 months), in Aug I ran the Mt Snowdown fell race with Zak, and also took mum to Lille on the Eurostar 1st class, a lovely experience (and not expensive).

2008: A 5 wk trip around Japan with 2 wks skiing in Sapporo. Also a week skiing Verbier, 6 weeks in Chennai again for work, a wedding in Zurich, Las Vegas with "the gauchos", and odd weeks work here and there like in Tanzania and Zanzibar.

2009: 6 weeks in Denver for work and skiing, a bit of skiing in Chamonix, and 6-week long work trips to each of Malawi, Mozambique & Ghana, Gaucho trip to NYC.

2010: A winter season in Chamonix (minimal work) getting into independent ski mountaineering, followed by 5 weeks work in Haiti just 3 months after the earthquake, a weeks hol in the Dom Rep kitesurfing, more work in Denver, a weeks hol in Devon & Cornwall, a couple of short work trips to Kinshasa (Congo), 5 weeks in Zambia for work (visited the falls), ran a couple of trail races including the "Hell runner down south" (12 miles of mud and chest-deep water), and finally southern Spain for xmas with family.

2011: 2nd winter season in Chamonix - but after a weeks great skiing (in rubbish snow conditions) I fell in a crevasse and busted a knee ligament so spent 3 months recovering there. I did get to ski for about 3 weeks at the end though. Then a fairly quiet work travel life, with 2 separate weeks in Colombia (Bogota) and 3 weeks in Maputo. Xmas in the dales with family.

2012: Now starting a 3rd winter season in Chamonix...

Pics from lake Kivu.

This is the place I stayed, the "Bethanie" guest-house in Kibuye. It was a very pleasant overnight stay, if not that exciting. The lake was gorgeous to swim in, refreshing and no crocs or hippos, or Bilhartzia. I just don't think there is room for any wildlife in this country, too many people!

To the country!

After two weeks in Kigali, I decide to go to Lake Kivu in the west for a swim. I go to the main "bus" station, a chaotic confluence of dozens of Toyota mini-vans - the "buses". 1300 RWF (1 pound 30) buys me a 3 1/2 trip, jammed into a van designed for 16 small people (max!) but carrying 20 average sized ones. It's not so bad, if a bit pungent. Water for washing is scarce here.

The countryside is very pretty, ALL terraced very tidily, right to the tops of hill/mountains.

Not much chat in the bus, though the driver keeps up a 3 hour monologue in Kinya-Rwanda. All I notice is that he uses the word "Mazungu" a lot: 'white person'. First I get a bit paranoid. No-one answers when I ask what he's talking about. Then I guess that actually there must be another common word like Mazunga but which means something else. He just can't be talking about me for 3 hours.

I seem to specialise in turning up at african lakes, in the pitch dark of night in the rain. It is so here. Kibuye is the town I was aiming for but it turns out to be pretty much just a petrol station. I get a moto-taxi to a lodge I've booked on the lake shore and I eat dinner beside the lake, looking at the orange glow from an active volcano over the lake in Congo. Surreal. Early night under a full mosquito net, at 1400m it's low enough to worry about malaria here.

A visit to the genocide exhibition

Sunday March 25th - A very moving experience. There is an exhibition building giving the history of Rwanda since before colonial times to now. It seems that the Hutu/Tutsi names were originally a tribal socio-economic title. Dependant on how much land or cattle you had. The Germans initially, then Belgian colonials took that and made it a psuedo-racial divide. The colonials, the church, the local administration all acted to strengthen the divisions between the two over decades. After independance the divisions were deeply rooted and exploited.

There were several genocides actually, over many years. The biggest and last started on April 6th, 1994. It was meticulously planned, orchestrated and executed, and all manner of people became killers - the most shocking for me being priests and nuns who killed their own congregations. Religion just didn't seem to be factor in preventing it.

Around Kigali, you can see people who are convicted of crimes during this time - they wear pink prisoner overalls and are taken to do work around the place (like in brick factories). Some 80,000 are in jail. 1M were killed. Of course, people are still being exposed and convicted. Bodies are still being found - like 300 who were found in one well just last week.

People do talk about it very openly here. There has been a national facing of the issue which is hugely impressive, and the divisions are being taken down and peoples energies redirected - one example being 'Muganda', 1/2 a day on the last saturday of each month when all people, nationally, get together in their local area to clean, tidy, fix potholes etc. Everyone I've asked seems to really enjoy it too. Non-crucial work and travel is not allowed for those hours. Some people at work still say that some people work better with some than with others (meaning the Hutu/Tutsi divide), perhaps, I am sure that 14 years isn't enough to turn the tide on 150 years of propaganda, though what has been acheived in this time seems very impressive.

How much?

Kigali a is relatively expensive place. A trips into town and back from my place is 7 quid. There goes my per diem. Not expensive by London of course, but I think I need to get a car. There are much cheaper moto-taxis (motorbikes) but my place is too far out to get many passing, and you can't call them.

Food is not that cheap either. At my local mini-market - some fruit, 1 ltr of juice, 1 ltr water, a box of cereal and 4 small yoghurts comes to 11500 Rwandan Francs, or 11 quid.

At restaurants, of which there are a few good ones, a good pizza will cost a fiver, about the same for a good steak it seems. Not so bad really compared to the mini-market. Just that you need a taxi to get to them! Oh for the auto-rickshaws of Chennai, come back, all is forgiven!

I still haven't sussed out the price for Gillete Mach 3 four-pack (razers), which, so far , I've found to be an identical price in pounds in every country I've visited. Will keep you posted.

Going out

Saturday March 24th - After a day walking around town, which I managed to stretch out to 1hr (it's tiny) I decided to head out to dinner and a bar, toute seule, recommended by Lonely Planet. Taxi to "The New Cactus", which is a big roofed terrace overlooking the hills of Kigali. Good french-style food (I had steak) and friendly service. I order a bottle of the local beer - Primus - and a 700ml bottle is plonked down in front of me (one size fits all!).

After that I walk to the bar. This walking along pitch black streets thing is getting easier now. I don't feel any threat. The bar is "Republica", another terrace with a great view. It's fairly busy and I plonk myself at the bar, the barman smiles, comes over and shakes my hand. This guy is a proper barman, recommending the drinks, chatting as he sees I'm alone.

I talk to some locals next to me, with an american, and we all end up going to a nightclub called the "New Cadillac" - a cavernous, very very sweaty-smelling 1970's carpeted space, playing a mix of hiphop, reggae and very old cheesy house music. At least people are dancing fairly normally here, unlike the doggy-style of the Ghanaian place I went to!

The mission

Friday, March 23 - I needed a beer. It was dark (gets dark about 7), no streetlights, and I'm still getting used to this area but thought I'd walk to the local shop about 500m away. It was freaky. All these high fences and security standing outside didn't encourage me. Desparate times though, and I’d been assured that is was safe enough...

By one of the houses a guy standing out front calls to me. We talk, turns out he was cleaner-cum-guard, young, very friendly. We chat in pidgin English/French. His name is Fidel. He actually walks me 100 yards further on, which makes me wonder why he feels the need to do this... At about the darkest part of the walk, down the hill, a guy stops on his motorbike and offers me a ride. I say thanks and no, so he asks for cash. My heart skips a beat but he’s smiling a lot and drives off. Turns out he was a moto-taxi. I make the shop, a welcome pool of light. Oh yes, Amstel beer! More pidgin conversation establishes that the beer is normally 500RF (50p) but since I don’t have a bottle to return it’ll be 1,500RF for a 300ml bottle. Going back is even more scary, darker somehow, but no-one accosts me this time. I get back, quite relieved, not really knowing how dodgy what I’ve just done is. Every single person I’ve met is incredibly friendly, but I guess the history of this place is on my mind. Man that beer was good.

Flood, fire...

Thursday, March 22 - The office is a non-descript 3 storey building on the way to the airport from Town. 3 floors. It does seem to rain most days but today it was really powerful for the 30 mins it lasted. We flooded on the second floor! Not sure how that happened really...but it was close thing as we stopped the tide about 3m from the room with all our servers in!

It didn't stop there. The building has it's own diesel generator, which needs to run frequently as the city power out here often cuts out or has too many voltage fluctations to run things on. But, mid-afternoon, the wiring between the generator and building caught fire. No power. Had to go home.

Pics of the area around my house

This first pic (<--)is the view out one window (mosquito net in the way), showing the incredibly tidy gardens all around here. Every house has a gardener. The background is just another suburb of Kigali.

This next one is from the bottom of my road looking back. Showing the rows of these places. Also the banana plantations at the edge of it. A guy carries 3 water cans and will have to carry them all back from a km away. On the far right horizon you can see the stadium where a handfull of UN troops kept about 10,000 civilians safe during the war.

And this one looks over our surrounding plantations to the city centre of Kigali, which is just on the hill in front of the big hill in the background, just to the right of it's summit and about to get drowned by some heavy rain. The centre is tiny & doesn't look that much bigger close up!

My new place

The bank has rented a guesthouse for us consultants. It's a nice place, but in a weird area. Like a suburban english development of semi-detached places, but with much bigger fences. A bit too isolated from the city, on the top of one of the many hills. But it has spacious rooms and a garden. There is a wee mini-market 500m away, but no public transport. It's where all the higher-ranked civil servants and motley consultants like me live.

We are surrounded by local families who have a very different style of accomodation...We have big water tanks and piped water. They carry jerry-cans 1km to the nearest well (a spring actually, a hole in the ground).

Like everywhere in Kigali, there is an army of people starting work at 6am clipping hedges and keeping things tidy.

The bank has provided a live-in maid who cooks, cleans and washes clothes...Her name is Vestin. This is taking some getting used to, the live-in part.

Why here?

The company I work for (Opportunity International) have teamed up with the biggest micro-finance operation in Rwanda, called Urwego. Urwego means "Ladder" in Kinya-Rwanda. Urwego have 30,000 clients. A big operation in the micro-finance world, but just scratching the surface of the population here that could benefit.

Urwego just did loans. The new OI-Urwego operation will be a full bank, offering loans, savings & current accounts, term deposits etc. With tellers, vaults and lots of branches.

The loans will be as before - the core products will be "trust bank" loans - which are a single loan to a group of people. Here it's 30 people per group, typically. Each member has a proposal for how they will use their share of the money, and the bank helps them develop that idea. The group manage themselves to make sure each member pays back their due amounts. So on the banks books, there is one loan, but it helps 30 families. This is done to reduce the banks overhead - a level of "trust" is given to the group to manage their affairs and pay back the loan.

Typical in the micro finance world, most of the clients are women, since they make the best poverty-fighters; sending their children to school, improving the families nutrition and usually repaying better. They may do dress-making, wholesale (e.g. buying big bags of rice and dividing into smaller sizes), agriculture, food preparation etc.

And a typical group loan here will be for 16 weeks, and between 30-100 quid per group member. Repayment rates are far higher (say 96%) than in for loans in the developed world - there is much more motivation. And the bank gives a lot of support & training on how to build a business and manage money.

So, my work here is to make sure the banking software & systems needed are built, tested and trained out. I'm taking over from some other guys who built most of the system, but there were some differences of opinion about how it was going and they had to leave before completing it. For a project like this, it would typically take a year from start to finish, but I'm just here for the last 3 months of it.

Kigali - first impressions

March 19 - This is a small place. The airport is almost right in town. Emmanual, a driver from work picks me up. The place looks VERY TIDY (it's known as the tidiest city in Africa, apparently). A bit dusty (deep red earth in these parts) but really well tended. Grass verges, no litter, no uncollected rubbish... Kigali is built mainly on the crests and flanks of many low hills ("Les milles collines" or the "thousand hills"). It's warm (but not hot), a wee bit humid (very pleasant, and this is summer – at about 2000m altitude). In town there are street-hawkers peddling the economist (!). Hardly any cars (opposite of the traffic hell that is Nairobi), a parliament building peppered with bullet-holes still (but no sign of damage anywhere else). It's small but spread out, I hear French, English and Kinya-Rwanda (the local language shared in this part of east africa).

Rwanda is a country of almost 9m people, but Kigali has only 600,000. This a very rural place, and yet it's the most crowded country in Africa. Almost every patch of land is given over to agriculture - as I'll see later, from the bottom of valleys to the tops of every hill/mountain, it's a heavily terraced and worked land. And yet 30% of the population don't produce enough food to feed themselves adequatly.

I am dropped off at the office and start work straight away...trying to get to grips with what's been done here so far in the project.