Dolomites 2007

Brief:

These are very tall spikey hills in North Italy and part of the Alps, however in August when we went there was no snow about. 13 people, 15 days in hills.

What a trip. We had sun, icecream, ski lifts, altitude lake bagging, tunnel running, extreme pottering and just pottering, armature carpentry, Italian techno, road trips, leaky tents, epic storms, approx. 500 bread rolls (16x2x15). Oh as well as the daily Via Ferratta climbs, epic multipitches, a bit of scree running, lots of sport climbing and lots of €1 wine and Spluggen!

Guide to the UBES trip:

1. How to get to Cortina?
Dan thought it a great idea to take his rusty banger ‘Green Falcon’. However optimism was crushed when its clutch broke on the M25, about 4hrs into the journey, and got toed back to Cardiff, not a great beginning. The more reliable ‘Red Fox’ left Dover without it, hoping they could fully utilise the Autoban to the following day to catch up (something which Tash took too exceeding well and put in a performance even Jermey Clarkson would be proud of). However the Red Fox team took all the Clarkson points by actually managing to get a speeding ticket in Germany, the land of no speed limits, crazy. After a night in the most swankiest youth hostel in Stuttgart we arrived at Camping Olympia, Cortina,  soon too be greeted by the lot that flew into Venice, Cheats, and you should feel so bad about your carbon footprint.

2. How to survive in Cortina?
Well it’s either sunny or chucking it down in August in the Dolomites. And it was soon found out that the 10man tent leaked when Chris got hypothermia. So we retrofitted the tents, dug drainage channels and levees and made coat stands, benches and a table (we kinda stood out)

3. What to do in Cortina?

Lots of Via Ferratta.
We had 2 groups going out each day (unless it was raining). Via Ferratta is really good fun coz you can make quick time over very steep ground with great exposure beneath you. Basically it’s like climbing and scrambling, but there are wires pinned onto the rock which you clip into, so you don’t need ropes and you don’t have to come down the way you go up, its like walk-climbing. The hills there are 3000m+ so you start the day walking alongside a pretty stream, then head up through a forest, then the trees run out and you get rock, lots of yellowy spiky rock. A lot of it stands up like pillars out of the top of the mountain, pretty spectacular, especially when you are on top of them. We also cheated a fair amount of the time and took ski lifts up to around 2000m and headed off from there.

Sport Climbing.
There is a lot of this in the valleys and was really good to do on rainy days before it rained. Only problem we found was that the gradings were abit random.

Trad Climbing.
This was the specialisation of Dave 6 and Gareth. Who pursued epic multipitches for most of the holiday. Although Gareth also took to abseiling down ladders which seems a bit of a waste of time.

Lake Bagging.
It’s the continent where anything goes so us UBESters were confident to secure many bags, including the highest lake bag in UBES history and a milky coloured lake that was a little disturbing.

Coffee shops.
This was the domain of Andy, as soon as any mention of rain Andy would run into the coffee shop and not emerge for the rest of the day, though why not get Italian coffee while you can.

Cooking.
This was a bit of a struggle, 13 people and 4 small gas stoves, but we cooked up excellent dishes as long as Ali wasn’t adding an entire pot of chilli to it.

Drinking.
Yes we became known as the noisy ones on camp. The windup radio got a lot of use, especially then the Italian techno was on, thankyou M2O www.m2o.it. This was accompanied by wine club (i.e. lots of cheap wine) and lots of Spluggen drinking.

Pottering.
This formed an integral part of the holiday. Potter reading sessions commenced most nights after dinner. Except certain people broke off and read the rest of the book which was well out, coz it wasn’t me and I felt left out.

4. How to get back from Cortina?
The eternal travellers in our group made their way back to Venice or wherever to continue their voyage of discovery. While the well cool car crew decided to take it slow and stopped off at Heidleberg, Germany, and Brugge, Belgium, on the way back which was really really nice. Both lovely old cities. Heildberg has Germany’s oldest university there, and we went to their students union for dinner, great and cheap. And Brugge has loads and loads of chocolate shops, very cute canals and yummy chips.

This time we travelled in convoy which was much fun with the radios, especially playing I spy between cars and guess the sound, yay. The trip mostly finished at the service station on the M20 after 3 weeks when the two cars went their separate ways, very sad.

Dancing