Climbing Ben Nevis, the UK’s tallest mountain

by Sean McLachlan on


I just turned 41, so it’s time for my annual long-distance hike in order to prove I’m not as old as the numbers say. Last year I spent six days walking the 84-mile Hadrian’s Wall Path. This year I’m in Scotland to tackle the region’s newest trail, the East Highland Way, stretching from Ft. William on the west coast 76 miles inland past lochs, mountains, and castles to Aviemore.

Before heading out into the countryside I want to defeat Ft. William’s greatest challenge–a grueling climb up Ben Nevis, the UK’s tallest mountain at 4,409 ft. (1,344 meters). While there’s a trail all the way up, it’s faint in places and there are sheer drops that have claimed more than a few lives. With the summit usually shrouded in mist and the trail fading to near invisibility at the top, I’ve come prepared with a map and compass as well as wet-weather clothing, a sweater, food, plenty of water, and all the usual emergency gear.

I walk the three miles from my B&B to the trailhead, where a youth hostel and information center are covered in posters warning hikers to be prepared. Ben Nevis and other peaks loom over the valley. It’s sunny at the moment, but I can’t see the summit of Ben Nevis because it’s blocked by its lower slopes. The start of the Pony Trail, the most popular way up, is almost at sea level, so we’re going to earn every one of those 4,409 feet. The first thing I see is a search and rescue helicopter coming down off the summit. Propitious!

The trail is hard right from the beginning. Uneven stone steps lead up a steep slope on long, winding switchbacks. The sun is strong and my t-shirt is soaked in sweat. The whole of western Scotland seems to be at my feet. Ft. William is visible in the distance, on the shores of Loch Linnhe. Several other lochs and rivers makes deep cuts into the surrounding hills. Water and land are a patchwork of blue, green, and gray smudged by shadows from the scattered clouds. Further up I come across a small mountain loch nestled in a little valley and fed by the numerous little streams that trickle down the slopes. I’m tempted to take a drink–I do this all the time in the Sierra de Guadarrama near Madrid–but the piles of sheep dung make me think twice.

There are plenty of others on this trail, either huffing and puffing their way up like me, or staggering their way down with wasted expressions on their faces. As I continue upwards, the short grass gives way to bare rock splotched with green and yellow lichen. The sky darkens and thin wisps of cloud descend over the slope. Soon visibility is down to fifty yards. The crowd thins out too, and at times I am alone in a weird, colorless landscape of pale broken rock and thickening mist. Cairns positioned at regular intervals mark the trail. I can faintly see other cairns on either side. Some of these mark where search and rescue found dead climbers. Others have been built for seemingly no reason, although they could easily mislead the unwary, leading to the creation of more memorials. It’s cold now and I’ve put on my sweater and raincoat. Freezing rain needles my face.

%Gallery-99558%The summit appears as a surprise. One moment I’m walking alone up a gentle grade, the next moment the land flattens out and I see a summit marker and emergency hut with several silhouettes cavorting around it. I’ve made it!

The ruins of a weather observatory built in 1883 sit to one side. Even back then Ben Nevis was a popular climb, and the scientists were often bothered by exhausted hikers begging for food. The observatory posted suggestions about climbing the mountain, advising healthy men to neither rest nor drink water while climbing, but to bring a lemon and some biscuits or sandwiches. They also advised that, “The fair sex, the broken-winded, and the rheumatic must do their own sweet will on Ben Nevis.” While I’m not a woman, broken-winded, or rheumatic, I have to admit that I drank water and rested on my way up, and you should too. I wonder what other bad exercise advice was popular in Victorian times.

While I’ve made it up, coming down is where most climbers get lost, hurt, or killed. I’ve taken compass bearings and the line of cairns is visible enough to confirm my reading. It’s vital not to stray off the path as this surreal terrain all looks the same. In several places funnels of slick grass and rock lead to sheer drops.

A part of me wishes some of my fellow hikers would fall down them. Litter is scattered everywhere. Why would someone take the trouble to slog up the tallest mountain in the British Isles only to leave behind a plastic bottle? I pick some of them up, but I’d need a thirty-man crew with garbage bags to get it all. Ben Nevis is the perfect example of a scenic location that’s become too popular for its own good. I head back down with mixed feelings.

I navigate through the mist with no trouble and as I get on the clearer part of the trail the diaphanous curtain of clouds lifts to reveal the surrounding countryside. It’s only a trick, however, and soon a bitterly cold rain pelts down. More people are struggling up, including one bedraggled guy wearing only a long-sleeved shirt and carrying only a small bottle of water. I’m tempted to tell him to turn back but he’s already proven he won’t listen to reason. The descent is a long. slow slog down innumerable switchbacks that seem to last forever, but eventually I make it to the bottom and spot what should be at the end of every difficult hike–a pub. I go get a pint. I’ve earned it.

Next time: Starting on the East Highland Way!

British man passes through U.S. TSA security checkpoint with bag full of fireworks

by Scott Carmichael on

When 29 year old Paul Jones celebrated the 4th of July in Kansas, he ended up with a large bag of unused fireworks. Instead of discarding them, he kept them in a bag and brought them home back to the United Kingdom. In doing so, he was able to keep them in his carry-on luggage, and even passed the bag of explosives through the Kansas airport x-ray machine, in plain sight of officers.

It wasn’t until he arrived back home that a customs official spotted the fireworks and questioned him. To make matters worse, he was even able to carry a lighter though the checkpoint, which would have obviously aided in setting them off on his flight.

The BBC contacted Continental Airlines, who pointed their fingers at the TSA, who were obviously “not available for comments.” According to Continental Airlines, “We warn customers on our website about hazardous materials which are prohibited on aircraft under federal law, and the list includes fireworks.” Well, I’m sure terrorists will read those warnings and leave their bombs at home next time they fly.

Without hand screening every single bag, the TSA will of course never catch 100% of hazardous materials passing the checkpoint, but to miss a bag filled with 200 firecrackers shows an amazing level of incompetence.

[Image from BBC News]

Torquay on the English Riviera throws birthday bash for Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime

by Lillian Africano on

In September of this year, Agatha Christie fans from all over the world will converge on Torquay to celebrate the 120th anniversary of her birth in a week-long festival of murder, mayhem and mischief.

With two billion books in 50 languages in print, Christie is the most-published novelist in the world; online games based on her mysteries have had 30 million downloads. She was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1971 and her summer house, Greenway, was gifted to Britain’s National Trust in 1999, and opened to the public last year.

(Agatha Christie Bust unveiled by her daughter on September 15th, 1990 to mark Christie’s 100th birthday.)On September 12, Christie’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, will launch the festival with a re-creation of an English country fête of the 1920s and ’30s, with period costumes and a jazz band. A Hercule Poirot lookalike will be on hand to solve any mysteries that might arise. The festival’s 40-odd events will include murder mysteries aboard a train and a vintage bus, treasure hunts, fireworks, productions of Christie’s plays and films, and even a charity swim along the same beach where Christie herself used to bathe. (Dame Agatha was certainly no sissy — the water temperature hovers around 55° F in midsummer.)

Like millions of Christie’s fans, I’ve “traveled” with Agatha — in a beach chair, on trains, on planes, whiling away the hours with the 80 ingenious whodunits that featured her engaging detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. So I’ll be joining the crowds at Torquay to enjoy the celebration and to sample the attractions of the English Riviera.

Dame Agatha herself was an intrepid traveler and explorer. She visited Egypt and the Middle East and met her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, while visiting an excavation. In her imagination, she saw crime everywhere she went. Result: Murder in Mesopotamia, They Came to Baghdad, and Death on the Nile.

Christie rode the famous Venice-Simplon Express to Istanbul, and, like all upper class Britons of the time, stopped at the Pera Palace. She may even have written Murder on the Orient Express here. Her room, 411, is now called the Agatha Christie Room, and the hotel’s new international restaurant will be called the Agatha Restaurant when the Pera Palace reopens on September 1 after an extended renovation. The Pera Palace will also observe its famous guest’s birthday with a party on September 15.

Back in England’s capital, Brown’s Hotel will be offering a special Agatha Christie Afternoon Tea, September 12-19. Brown’s was the inspiration for the too-perfectly-English-to-be-true hotel in At Bertram’s Hotel. While in London, fans can take in The Mousetrap at St. Martin’s Theatre in the West End, where it continues its incredible world-record run of 58 years and counting.

But it was the people and places of her own hometown of Torquay, in the idyllic rural county of Devon, that really fired Christie’s murderous imagination, resulting in no fewer than 15 mysteries, some set in her gracious Georgian home, Greenway.

(Greenway, Christie’s Georgian-style home, and the setting for Dead Man’s Folly)

In Christie’s time, Torquay was a fashionable seaside resort, with stately hotels, sandy beaches and a glorious harbor; the 1948 Olympic sailing events took place here. Britain’s upper classes came for the sea air and a bit of golf or cricket.

Today, the palm-lined promenade and seafront gardens give a nod to the French Riviera; the international marina is a recreational hub of sailing, water-skiing, and diving. Occasionally there’s even a pirate sighting — as when Johnny Depp sailed into Torquay on the Black Pearl (aka HMS Bounty).

(Torquay Harbour and the new harbour bridge)

Stroll along the sea front and you can’t miss the Grand Hotel, an aptly named Victorian-era pile with an Art Deco flourish. Agatha and first husband Archie Christie spent their honeymoon at the Grand in December 1914. During the festival month, the hotel has a special package that starts at £159 (about $246) per room (three-night minimum) and includes a full West Country Breakfast daily, nightly dinner in the AA Rosette Gainsborough Restaurant, one complimentary Devon Cream Tea, and tickets to several Christie attractions.

The Grand Hotel is also the start of the Agatha Christie Mile, which takes in many of the landmarks pertaining to the author’s past and which can be walked with the aid of a leaflet, available from the local Tourist Information Centre.

(Grand Hotel, where Christie and her first husband, Archie, spent their honeymoon.)

In her youth, Agatha roller skated on Princess Pier, attended concerts at the Torquay Pavilion and went to balls at the Imperial Hotel, featured in three of her novels — Peril at End House, The Body in the Library, and Sleeping Murder. Built on the top of a cliff, the hotel commands a sweeping view of the coastline from its well-known Regatta restaurant as well as 77 of its 152 rooms.

High on my sightseeing list are the Torquay Museum, which has an entire gallery dedicated to Christie and the Agatha Christie Potent Plants Garden, which opened last year. Call it a “green” attraction, but fans will instantly recognize the garden as a cornucopia of grow-your-own murder weapon choices: dwarf peaches and nectarines, whose fruit stones produce cyanide, used in Sparkling Cyanide; deadly nightshade, the murder weapon in The Caribbean Mystery; and aconite, which dispatched several characters in 4.50 from Paddington.

If time permits, I’ll visit the prehistoric caves at Kents Cavern. Though Christie never chose the caves as a setting for murder, they are perhaps Torquay’s most mysterious places, pre-dating proper British society by about half a million years and said by some visitors to be haunted by ghosts of Stone Age man.

You can travel to Torquay by train from London’s Paddington Station; it’s an easy three-and-a-half hour ride. A number of hotels and guest houses are offering special festival packages.

Stay tuned for more from Agatha Christie Country.

Travel editor Q&A: Sean O’Neill

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Until last week, Sean O’Neill served as senior editor of Budget Travel magazine online. For over three years he served at the helm of the online publication of the only US travel magazine focused exclusively on budget travel.

As editor of the Budget Travel blog, Sean executed a perfect balance, providing readers with up-to-the-minute news, very helpful travel tips, and timely sorts of planning information, all geared toward a budget-friendly audience. His work on the blog and other endeavors at Budget Travel has always been helpful, thoughtful, and well-targeted.

Sean departs New York for London at the end of August. Gotham’s loss is The Smoke’s gain.

Q: Describe your profession.

A: For more than three years, I was senior editor of Budget Travel magazine’s website.

Q: What excited you about Budget Travel when you came on board?

A: I liked the magazine so much that I would memorize passages from it. My friends thought I was weird. (I was.) But, hey, I really liked the magazine because it was unpretentious and freewheeling. When the editor inaugurated the Road Trip section (a monthly series of first-person tales about U.S. drives) in 2004 with a trip through the desert Southwest, he wrote about a stop he and a friend made to roll down the side of a sand dune. Can you imagine the editors of any of the other travel magazines getting sand on their expensive clothes? I can’t.

Plus, founding editor and genius Arthur Frommer had the savvy to use reader material extensively long before “user-generated content” became a catchphrase. That tradition continues today. The October 2010 issue will be entirely derived from reader opinions, a trick that editors can only pull off when they have thousands of readers interacting with them constantly. Naturally, readers are similarly engaged with budgettravel.com, and it’s fun to interact with them. Our blog has drawn more than 25,000 comments to date, and the blogosphere has made it one of the top ten most linked-to travel blogs according to Technorati. (Gadling is #1, natch.)

Q: Which of your accomplishments at BT are you proudest of?

A: I’m most proud to be part of a team that has wholly transformed the site. A few years ago, the site was essentially a bulletin board in cyberspace for pinning up print articles. The company formed a team that attempted to apply the magazine’s signature brand–realistic vacation advice told in a conversational style–via the Internet. The team has come a long way toward that goal. An upcoming switch to a new content managing system will allow the site to be as smartly designed as the magazine has become in the past year or so.Q: What are some challenges to putting together a successful online publication in conjunction with an established print magazine brand?

A: The simplest problem is that some editors struggle to cope with how readers are in a different mindset when they’re reading a magazine than when they’re reading online. Metaphorically speaking, you tend to read a magazine leaning back, and you tend to read an electronic device leaning forward. In other words, you’re in “daydream mode” when you’re reading an article about, for example, a farmstay on St. Croix. Meanwhile, you’re more likely to be actively socializing (via Facebook or IM) or actively booking a trip while you’re using a laptop or smartphone, as well as multi-tasking, while you scan one of our blog posts. It can take a while for any editor to learn how to mentally jump back-and-forth during a workday between the needs of the various audiences.

Q: Give us a sense of the contours of the future of online travel journalism, as you see them.

A: First, this year will mark the birth of ‘zine culture in travel media. We’re looking at the democratization of travel publishing. Thanks to print-on-demand services like MagCloud and e-readers like the Kindle and the iPad, any small group of dedicated people can deliver content to a global audience without needing to worry about print, postage, or shipping costs. That’s a huge shift. Look at what a group of clever kids at Longshot magazine are doing in the general interest category, producing a print-on-demand magazine in under 48 hours at low cost. Increasingly, text and imagery that you lay out in a print publishing tool like InDesign can be imported intact into an iPad app as well as into a Web content management system based on Drupal’s operating system. What that means is that any tiny team of people can now publish the same material in a consistent aesthetic across multiple formats–all on a start-up cost of $5,000 or so. Despite all of the talk of the “death of print,” paper-magazine culture may undergo a renaissance if a small army of upstart magazines try to appeal to niche segments of travelers.

Now for a more controversial prediction. I believe many Americans will soon start paying for content online the same way they pay for cable TV channels. I am confident that there are underserved audiences of travelers out there who are increasingly starved for high quality travel stories and advice and are willing to fork over, say, $25 or the equivalent of a one-way checked bag fee. I believe a start-up company will eventually be founded to deliver that set of subscription products to those hard-core travelers, and I intend to work for that start-up. (Interested VCs can contact me via Twitter. Haha.)

Q: Where do you love to travel the most?

A: Rome is my favorite city. Next year, I’m making my seventh trip in seven years to Rome.

Q: Tell us about a secret destination, restaurant, neighborhood, bar, or hidden plaza somewhere.

A: Do you define “secret” as a spot that doesn’t show up on Google maps? If so, then I can recommend a cute spot that qualifies in the northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Dupont Circle by S Street NW and 22nd Street. It has a micro version of Rome’s Spanish Steps, large enough only for a handful of people to sit on. It’s a quiet, shady spot that’s frankly excellent for making out.

Q: Where are you off to next and what will you be doing there?

A: I’m off to London, where I’ll be a contributing editor for Budget Travel. I’ll also write for other publications and take advantage of how well London is served by many low-cost airlines.

The cheapest way from London to Paris: Bus service for £15

by Grant Martin on

Backpackers rejoice. Eurolines, a part of UK bus carrier National Express has reduced the fare of their bus service from London to Paris, a hotly competitive route currently served by dozens of air and rail carriers. To date, Eurostar and budget air carriers have fought hard over the route, with fares on either sinking as low as $100 round trip.

Currently, one of the most common inexpensive routes taken is via low cost carrier such as Easyjet, where non-peak flights can often be found for a bargain. Eurostar, conversely, delivers passengers from city-center to city-center without security hassles and sometimes in just as much travel time.

With Eurolines, passengers can pay as little as £15 ($24 as of August 2010) for one way fare between the two cities. Travel time? Seven hours, and there’s even an over night bus that leaves at 11PM. For those without a tight schedule though, that’s a lot of money saved.

Make sure you book your tickets far in advance though, like with most carriers the £15 fares are probably in short supply.

[Via AERBT]