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...