The Shifting Sands

For those of you who follow our blog, you will note that I am always searching for the balanced holiday. Some culture, good food, some sightseeing, activity for the girls which includes shopping for Lucy and some rock climbing for me. Koh Yao Noi met most of the requirements but fell short on the shopping front. Chiang Mai was good but it is steamy during the middle of the year and no one deserves to have me sweat on them while belaying. Picture perfect view back to Rovinj as we rode to the crag. When planning the holiday, Kate and I worked hard to look for a location that met all  the requirements while also having good accommodation at a  reasonable price.  We had always been keen to visit Croatia as everyone we had met raved about the coast, the food and the people.  We started looking around Split but struggled to find accommodation that suited and also had appropriate travel arrangement to the crags.  Eventually we looked at the Istrian Peninsula and Rovinj and we were

Craigieburn Valley car park on a typically busy weekday. Hamilton Peak on the right Remarkable Ridge on the left The photos are from a ski trip in 2009 but I spent a week in the Craigieburn Range in New Zealand every year from 2004 until we moved to Germany in 2010. The Range is one of my favorite places to ski  and the club ski fields that dot the Range make it very special.  Great terrain, cheap, and rope tows that scare off all but the most committed. If you look at Craigieburn Valley Ski Club, it is amazing how much terrain can be accessed with single rope combined with some boot packing and skinning.  Together with the nearby Broken River Ski Club you have amazing slack country with very few skiers and all for NZD $75 per day (although I was shocked when I checked the price for this post as when I last skied there is was closer to $50) You can tour down the Range to near Cheeseman and on to Olympus, a trip I am very keen to do when I move back to the Southe

In planning the Monsoon escape from Mumbai, the location through which to enter Europe was subject to much analysis.  Ljubljana was the favoured location as Kate and I had always wanted to visit the city as it has a reputation of being a beautiful and friendly small European city. Unfortunately, there were issues with a one way hire car out of the EU and the accommodation was relatively expensive.Venice was an option as it has easy ferry links to Rovinj but the ferry added a layer of cost and the times were inconvenient. In the end, we opted for Zagreb and a hire car to Rovinj. We had few expectations of the City.  What we found was a City that was small but had all the amenities, modern but with a beautiful historic centre, green and seemingly very livable. We arrived to a beautifully warm European afternoon and settled into the Esplanade Hotel which was also hosting the Japanese Princess. After a long work telephone conference on the terrace bar, Kate and I set o

Business travel give you a very different perspective than recreational travel.  You stay in different locations, undertake different activities, have different priorities and frequently have little time in any location. Over the past 12 months, I have had the good fortune to travel to Shanghai and Beijing with work.  What makes it more interesting is that Kate spent a significant amount of time in both cities while chaperoning Lucy on a school exchange.  The different purpose certainly seems to have resulted in different perspectives. New Shanghai For some reason, I expected that Shanghai would be the bold, brash, shining, high rise symbol of modern China but devoid of charm and a sense of its history. Old Beijing I expected Beijing to be the reverse, more historic and grounded in the culture and civilization of China.  In hindsight I think this assumption was based on the number of well know historical sites in Beijing such as the Forbidden Palace, th