What a climb that was!
November 21, 2004It’s been a week since we hiked Pulag, but my head is still in the clouds, and my heart is still in the mountains. First off, I’m unbelievably proud of my sons. Here’s Aralt (age 5) and Caolan (age 7) on the summit of Pulag, the second highest peak in the Philippines, on a bright glorious day (it had been raining miserably the day before, on our way up to camp).
The sunshine was a big and pleasant surprise! The views were awesome. It was Caolan’s third time up, and the previous two times it was raining horribly.
It was quite an accomplishment for Aralt, who can be really quite fragile. Here he is, scratching his hand on some talahib at 9T feet. Buti lang, kasama ang nanay!
But we made it! And here we are clowning around on our way back to camp:
This was a very well planned operation, and I think several factors contributed to Aralt’s success:
- Those boots that were made for walking! (in knee deep water). Dry feet mean no blisters on long hikes, and these waterproof boots (purchased online from Land’s End) did the job magnificently!
- A huge Eureka Kahuna tent. You don’t realize it, but kids as young as Aralt can quickly get claustrophobic in a small tent. When the weather’s damp, miserable, and freezing, you have no choice but to keep the kids indoors. A huge tent gives them room to clown around and play in, keeping spirits up for the summit hike.
- Good fleece jackets, and good sleeping bags! The equipment sold locally isn’t made for Pulag temperatures. You need winter clothes. Let me repeat that - you NEED winter clothes! The thermostat may not read zero degrees Centigrade, but the wind chill is awesome, and it feels more like 15 degrees Farenheit.
One final note:
Those Sealskinz gore-tex socks were major winners! It kept my feet dry for 8 hours on the first day, but it finally gave in after 3 hours of hiking on the 2nd day (they didn’t dry out overnight as the humidity was too high inside the tent; it rained all night)..
iPod Photo
Apple’s just released their latest incarnation of the wildly successful iPod: it’s called iPod Photo and it lets you view (what else) photos on the iPod’s 2 inch color screen (64k colors). SRP is $499 for a 40G model. Personally, I’m not impressed, but i can tell you what’s probably in store in the next version: iPod Movie! It’s a simple matter to modify iPod Photo (eg - no additional hardware required) to play movies. In fact, i’m surprised that Apple hasn’t done this yet. ) They’ll need to increase the screen size though to at least 3 inches. (2 inches is way too small to enjoy a movie).
Today, I probably watch more movies that are downloaded off the Internet than from DVDs. (For instance, I have all the good table tennis games from the recent Olympics). Since I have far more bandwidth that I can use at the office, we’ve installed MLDonkey, which is one cool cool piece of software for enabling offline downloads. iPod Movie would save me the additional step of burning the movies to DVD (so as to take home to watch). I’d rather keep the movies on my desktop and just sync them to my iPod whenever I’m about to travel or go on a long trip.
Note to Apple: modify iPod Photo so I can plug a USB card reader (eg compact flash, memory stick, SD, MMC) onto iPod, and be able to import Photos from my Digicam while traveling. It’s a pain to have to import first into a Notebook, then sync the Photos into iPod Photo. When I to Europe this summer I noticed that people were starting to bring tiny notebooks around for the sole purpose of importing photos from their digital cameras for viewing. To me, that seems like overkill. Better to just use an iPod.
